The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  Roux is candid about his own utopian vision for the trial:

  Duch has said, “I’m the one who gave the orders. I assume responsibility.” There aren’t many people in this country who have admitted that they gave the orders. Are we to say nothing about the fact that he also received orders? What took place under his command also took place above it. Do you think it’s easy to come to this courtroom and say publicly: “I acknowledge this. I am ashamed of all I have done?” Do you think it’s so straightforward? Duch has been on a long personal journey for many years. Who could have imagined that the once all-powerful director of S-21 would one day return to face its survivors and guards, flanked by two police officers and two judges? Who could have imagined that? Whatever the tragedy, let us appreciate for a moment that today, this man is confronting his past. It takes a certain amount of courage to do that. What is it that keeps him alive? He is convinced that he still has a role to play in the human race, and that that role is to ask for the victims’ forgiveness. Duch is still a human being. Perhaps he struggles to admit certain things. But then, maybe you also find it difficult to admit certain things on his behalf. Anyone can make a mistake—even a prosecutor. And one can be mistaken in good faith when one stands accused. I dream that, by the end of this trial, the victims as well as the Cambodian public will be able to say that at the very least, now we have some peace of mind. If that happens, then we shall be able to say that justice has been done.

  François Roux likes symbols. All his life, he has dreamed of a better world and has never stopped working toward it, whether this has meant standing alongside the peasants of Larzac fighting for their land in Southern France against the extension of a military zone; or conscientious objectors opposing the military draft; or Kanaks fighting for independence from France in New Caledonia; or just as well defending the rights of those accused of genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda or representing a member of al-Qaeda tried in the U.S. for his role in the September 11, 2001, attacks—in the name of opposing the death penalty. The philosophy of nonviolence made a deep impression on him, and he has always been staunchly on the side of those who rise up against injustice. Yet at the same time, he has always respected the state and its institutions. Roux, who is descended from Huguenots, regularly returns to his rural community, surrounded by high mountain pastures and flocks of sheep, for rejuvenation. He is also an avid traveler, an idealist keenly aware of the great power of doubt but who finds even greater fulfillment pursuing the bright promise of a better world.

  The international justice system is filled with symbols to fire the imaginations of human-rights activists, and Roux has found in it the building blocks of the better world he dreams of, though he knows that most of the time, it will remain just that: a dream. The dream that he carefully and passionately constructed in Duch’s case centers on what he considers the most important event of this particular legal undertaking: the reconstruction that took place at the scene of the crime, one year before the start of the trial proper, when Duch returned to S-21 some thirty years after having left it.

  That day, Duch stood facing the prison’s three still-living survivors—Bou Meng, Vann Nath, and Chum Mey—and read his declaration:

  I am completely overwhelmed to be in this most painful place for my countrymen and for myself. My first thought is for the victims and their families. They suffered innumerable miseries and inhuman tortures and insults before dying. I feel a great and indescribable remorse, which I hope is made manifest by my accepting to stand trial alone for S-21. I am determined to do everything I can to bring justice to my compatriots, to the victims of S-21, and to their families.

  I also feel enormous regret for all the S-21 cadres who were forced to carry out their tasks alongside me. That is to say, to carry out tasks they hated and that their parents hated, tasks to which some of them eventually fell victim. I feel great pain when I remember those events.

  I sincerely regret having accepted the ideas of others, and having agreed to carry out those criminal tasks that were entrusted to me.

  When I think about it, I realize that I am angry first and foremost at the Party’s governing body, which did everything in its power to lead the movement to complete and absolute tragedy. Then I am angry with myself for having accepted the ideas of others, and for having blindly followed their criminal orders.

  Then Duch asked for forgiveness. He became confused, looked around, pursed his lips, opened his mouth, seemed to be on the verge of reading again, before turning and handing the sheet of paper to his Cambodian lawyer. He took the text back from the lawyer, put his spectacles back on, took them off, hesitated.

  “Take a moment, catch your breath,” said Roux quietly.

  Duch was flushed, sweating, his glasses slipping down his nose. He started reading again, a quiver in his voice. Vann Nath sat facing him, with his head lowered and his arms crossed. His eyelids fluttered. Chum Mey sat less than two meters away, watching Duch. When Duch asked for forgiveness, Chum Mey nodded. “I know that my remorse, as painful as it is, is but a drop in the vast ocean of agonizing wretchedness felt by the victims and their families.”

  Vann Nath looked at his feet, hiked up his trousers, crossed his arms, kept his eyes fixed on the ground. Duch ended his solemn statement with a series of sampeahs, his hands pressed together in front of his face. Vann Nath sat up, his lips pursed, his arms still crossed over his chest, his gaze still turned downward. Chum Mey gave his torturer no more than a brief nod. Duch took off his spectacles, acknowledging his pain without hiding it. Chum Mey asked to speak. He rose and stood a meter or two in front of Duch. “What I want is freedom, and freedom is what I have now. I thank Duch for having agreed to come here, for testifying, and for recognizing his responsibility.”

  Duch pressed his hands together in gratitude. He gulped as he breathed, as though his breath were hanging by a thread.

  “I have no rancor toward him,” continued Chum Mey. “What I want is justice and peace for our country and for the million citizens who were killed. The only issue now is that he must speak the truth in court.”

  The former executioner’s apology appeared to be coming to an end. Then Bou Meng stood up, his hands pressed together in front of his face. “I have heard Duch’s declaration and I am 100 percent satisfied. I ask the judges to judge Duch according to national and international standards.”

  He sat down again.

  Vann Nath didn’t move.

  THIS UNSETTLING MOMENT, which occurred during the trial’s secretive investigative phase, was many things: extraordinary yet incomplete, moving yet affected, spontaneous yet staged. Most of all, it was the moment when Roux hoped a redemptive reconciliation would emerge from the horror.

  But justice, like a revolution, is a graveyard of broken dreams. Two and a half months into the trial, François Roux realizes that there can be no entente cordiale with the prosecution. Something has been irreparably damaged in the trial the way he had imagined it, and when it draws to a close a few months later, Roux will be openly at war with the prosecutor. The portrait that the prosecutor paints of the defendant irritates Roux to the highest degree. With icy bitterness, he reminds the court of what the prosecutor said in his opening argument: the only logical conclusion that could be drawn from the facts was that “rather than someone acting against his will, practically unaware of the atrocities his subordinates were committing all around him while he remained holed up in his office keeping meticulous records, Duch, in fact, enjoyed the complete confidence of his superiors and was therefore responsible for carrying out at S-21, with great devotion and no pity, the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s policy of persecution against the people of Cambodia.” If—and only if—Duch admitted to this, declared the prosecutor, then he could claim to have confessed to his crimes and thus benefit from any concessions that such a confession might entail. His voice white-hot with anger, Roux addresses his client: “Duch, our arguments are drawing to an end. I have only one question for you: do you admit th
at, in reality, you enjoyed the complete confidence of your superiors, and that therefore you were responsible for carrying out at S-21, with great devotion and no pity, the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s policy of persecution against the people of Cambodia? Do you admit that, yes or no?”

  “Yes, I admit it completely.”

  “You went back to Choeung Ek and S-21. My question to you, Duch, and I’m speaking to the man now, is this: what did you feel when you arrived there on that morning in February 2008? Please, tell us what you felt in your heart. Talk to us, Duch!”

  Duch can’t hide his tension. He takes loud breaths between sentences and explains, in a voice devoid of emotion, how he was determined to go to these places to reflect, to apologize, and to ask for forgiveness from the souls of the dead. The silence in the courtroom could not be thicker. But Duch remains deep within his steel armor. He says no more. He doesn’t break down. The carapace of control over his emotions proves more powerful than his lawyer’s appeal for the emotional truth.

  Roux is reduced to showing the video footage of that day in February 2008, during the famous reconstruction at the site of the crime. In the video, we see the Duch that Roux wants to show, who is real, not a sham, but it is only one aspect of Duch. The prosecutor opposes the viewing. The film contains a Duch he has decided never to see. In any other international court, a defendant who pleads guilty would get the prosecutor’s support. No one questions the penitent’s “sincerity” when he expresses his remorse, an act which is particularly valued to convince the judges. But this isn’t the case in Phnom Penh, even though Duch alone has admitted to the bulk of his crimes.

  Unlike at other international tribunals, the inquiry falls outside the prosecutor’s control in Phnom Penh. Here, it is in the hands of the investigating judges. Consequently, there can be no direct negotiation between a cooperative defendant and the prosecution. The prosecutor’s office has never really tried to understand this legal system, with which its top members are not familiar. Frustrated by it, they arrogantly dismiss it out of hand. As a result, the prosecutor sees his job in the narrowest terms possible—that is, prosecution and punishment and nothing more. So the Duch he sets about attacking in court is the powerful Khmer Rouge commander who ordered death with faith and zeal, who relished his role as a torturer, and who was proud of what he did on behalf of the Revolution. This Duch is no illusion, of course. But nor is it all there is to Duch.

  François Roux tries one more time, against all odds, to guide the trial toward the conclusion he would have preferred. “Do you authorize me to say to the victims that, if they should so wish, they may visit you in your cell and that you will open both your door and your heart to them? The road doesn’t end here today. It can continue between them and you, if they wish it.”

  “I would be very happy to receive any victim who wishes to meet me. I will open the door to them emotionally, and I would like the victims to finally acknowledge that I have accepted my responsibility and my guilt. So whoever you are, my door will always be open to you.”

  But a trial is not a dream, and good intentions carry little weight in court. A trial is a physical, violent act that elicits vehement reactions from its participants and observers. A trial drains souls, frays nerves, makes the pain worse. On September 17, 2009, on the eve of Pchum Ben, the Cambodian festival of the dead, Duch’s trial ends. The parties must come together one last time at the end of November to make their closing statements. At this stage, all the frustration, pain, and anger cluster around the defense, because it was the defense that dominated the trial. After six months of intense and sometimes dramatic arguments, François Roux finds himself being virulently challenged, particularly by the victims’ families. He feels a deep sense of failure: nobody accepts the Duch whom he defended. And the worst of it still lies ahead. Sometimes broken dreams are like revolutions: they turn into nightmares.

  CHAPTER 35

  EVERY YEAR IN NOVEMBER, PHNOM PENH IS INVADED BY PEOPLE from the countryside. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge emptied the capital of its inhabitants, forcing the people of the city out into the country so that they would learn from the people of the fields what the New Man looked like. Pol Pot’s partisans were not the first to come up with the idea of banishing city dwellers to the country. The verb “rusticate” used to mean to work in the fields or live in the country. But in the eighteenth century, Britons started using it to mean to forcibly send someone into the country—wayward students, for example, or people suffering from certain illnesses. In Revolutionary Cambodia, people were systematically rusticated en masse, until the end of their lives. The city was deemed a cancer of corruption and money, bad in itself and bad for all. Now, once a year, the peasants take their revenge. Thirty-five years after the people of the city invaded their lands, the people of the fields invade Phnom Penh and make it their own. For three days in November, the city puts on the huge street party that is the Water Festival. In other words, the peasants de-rusticate themselves.

  Some people will tell you that the Water Festival celebrates a great naval victory that took place in the twelfth century, during the Angkorian golden age, but that’s not what all the excitement is about. The festival takes place at a time of year when the Tonle Sap, the river on which Phnom Penh lies, reverses its flow. The Tonle Sap flows into the Mekong, and every rainy season when the Mekong floods, the Tonle Sap backs up. Then, when the flood subsides, there’s a brief moment of slack water before the river resumes its natural flow downstream. The festival takes place under a full moon, when the current has just switched direction. During the Water Festival, Cambodians give thanks to the majestic Mekong and to the mythical serpents for making the soil so fertile and the fish so abundant. The main event is the boat races, when traditional pirogues, with their very long, narrow, and unstable hulls, carrying up to eighty rowers each, line up in pairs to race along the river. Hundreds of thousands of mostly poor but always cheerful villagers converge on the riverbanks around the Royal Palace. It’s at this time of year that a certain type of Phnom Penher likes to declare—preferably with a degree of trepidation—that the only thing to do is to get out of town before it’s invaded by the army of beggars and rogues. So there’s a two-way migration: the people of the city rusticate themselves and willingly abandon their metropolis to the people of the fields. The Tonle Sap, meanwhile, quietly hesitates over which direction to flow. At nightfall, when the crowd has thinned out and the remaining festival-goers idle along the promenade, a simple, jovial, and familial atmosphere takes hold of the capital, liberating it of the self-importance and hurry of the urbanites.

  In 2009, the festival occurs early in November. By the time the closing statements begin, reuniting various members of the trial’s broken family after a long separation, the Tonle Sap has finally switched direction and is now flowing toward its natural endpoint: the open sea. The monsoon is over. It’s the start of the few short weeks of what passes for winter in these hot and wet latitudes. Cambodians begin to complain about the cold and pull out their sweaters and beanies, while the few thousand Westerners who live in the country quiver with excitement at the prospect of a short respite from the heat. And although winter in Cambodia feels like little more than a warm late spring in the northern hemisphere, it’s endearing to see all the expats tantalized by the prospect of wearing jeans without feeling as though they’re melting under the weight of a wetsuit, or the way they nonchalantly throw lightweight sweaters over their shoulders, each trying to appear more casually stylish than the next. Where they come from, their senses awaken as they shed layers in spring; here, they revel in being able to cover up for “winter,” one which Cambodians actually feel. The light shimmers in winter, soft and sharp, a light washed by recent rains but not yet bleached bone-white by the heat to come. The sky is filled with velvety, electric blues and reds, colors that occur nowhere else in the world except, I’m told, in the Arctic north. Those popular paintings of the Far East, done in colors that once seemed so kitschy and artificial, no
w seem almost realistic to me.

  In court, there’s a sense of the magnitude of the occasion, and with it an indefinable atmosphere of anticipation, of emotion and of artifice. The players in the legal drama return to the stage one by one. Ouk Ket’s wife and daughter have come from France, as has Ou Windy’s brother. Tioulong Raingsy’s sister is here. Professor Phung Ton’s widow and daughter are present. There are unexpected people, too, such as a judge from the newly formed Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the most recent of the world’s international tribunals. I’m told he has no fewer than seven bodyguards to travel around Phnom Penh. I remember that in Beirut, next to the mausoleum of the former Prime Minister Hariri, are the tombs of his bodyguards. Not one of their seven bodies was sufficient to shield him from the bomb that was destined for him.

  Compared to their Lebanese colleague, the judges on the tribunal for the Khmer Rouge can be grateful for their lot. The danger he faces isn’t one that hangs over them. Under the authoritarian, occasionally vulgar, and always shameless rule of Prime Minister Hun Sen, Cambodia can be a dangerous place for anyone trying to make it more democratic, or who would like to see its wealth distributed more equitably. But the country once ruled by Pol Pot is a haven of safety for this tribunal’s judges; they have no need for the endless and futile hassle of the security detail. The world of international law can be both fearful and self-aggrandizing, and many of its top judges and prosecutors measure their own importance by the number of bodyguards attached to their persons. With one exception, those of the Phnom Penh court enjoy moving freely around the city on their own.

  IT’S TIME FOR THE CLOSING STATEMENTS. For some people, it’s also time to put in an appearance. Mr. Sur is such a person. When the curtain is lifted and the courtroom revealed, he is standing proudly in the middle, in front of the benches reserved for the civil parties, facing a public that perhaps he thinks is on his side. The French lawyer, who said that he would come only to the first and to the last days of this trial, has proven true to his word. His British colleague, Mr. Khan, stands beside him; we haven’t seen him since the opening arguments, either. Mr. Sur and Mr. Khan greet one another like two cuckoos in another bird’s nest.