The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  Nearby, a young Cambodian lawyer is obliged to give up her seat in the first row to a European colleague; the European is older and more senior, and has just made a very long journey. Still, she’s been sitting there throughout the entire trial. Few lawyers can resist pride—in France, lawyers are called “maître” (master) and meet in the justice “palace.”

  Another person to show up in court for the first time in a long time is the Cambodian co-prosecutor. Like her Canadian counterpart, she didn’t want to expose herself in the public arena, and instead cravenly let junior lawyers—or, for that matter, anyone who wished to—take on the responsibility of prosecuting Duch. Consequently, at least five lawyers have been in charge of the prosecution over the course of the six-month trial. Which means that really, no one’s been in charge. In another time, under different circumstances, lawyers would have considered the position a high point of their career, a professional honor. But in today’s international tribunals, and in Phnom Penh most of all, public prosecutors tend to seek their glory more at international conferences and meetings, which are relatively safe, rather than in the courtroom, which is not. Each generation has its own idea of prestige and panache.

  The dubious honor of giving the first closing statement falls to Mr. Khan. He had left the exhilarating task of reading aloud the long, long list of names of unknown clients and vanished victims to his young Khmer colleague, but now he’s growing impatient. He slips a note to his associate, who tries to do better, or at least read faster, but there are simply too many names on the list, and reading them aloud is taking longer than anyone anticipated. Could we abridge it a little, perhaps? Could we skip the names of a few victims?

  Mr. Khan passes a second slip of paper along to his young deputy. Then he interrupts, again, forgetting that honor once lost never returns. Mr. Khan begins by saying that no one on his side of the bar believes that Duch was without autonomy at S-21, or that he was just a cog in the machine, or that he had no way of reducing the suffering in the prison he ran. Mr. Khan speaks long enough to say that Duch’s actions at S-21 patently heightened the regime’s paranoia, and that they perpetuated a vicious cycle that led to even more people being arrested; Mr. Khan asserts that Duch did what he did not only because he wanted to join the ranks of the powers that be, but because it made his own life easier; Mr. Khan says that the truths to which Duch has admitted during the trial do not add up enough to dismiss the conviction that, when all is said and done, what we have sitting before us in the courtroom is an instance of “blatant denial.”

  A mobile phone rings. The presiding judge declares that Mr. Khan’s time is up. Mr. Khan asks for five or ten more minutes. “You can have three,” says the presiding judge—barely enough time for Mr. Khan to stop talking.

  Some people find being exposed in a prestigious court as burning as acid on limestone. During the first weeks of the trial, Hong Kim Suon occasionally seemed inspired, and distinguished himself on the floor. Then, little by little, he seemed to deteriorate. After his more-virtual-than-real copilot, Mr. Sur, left him to fend for himself for six months of trial, Hong Kim Suon gradually foundered, losing the thread of his argument to the point that it sometimes seemed as though he had lost all sense of reason. On this last day, he is completely at sea. He spends half an hour speaking from the bar without bringing up a single point that the judges might be able to use in their judgment, and manages to tell the stories of only two of his ten clients. Mr. Sur, acutely aware of the limited time he has in which to present his argument, starts tapping his foot impatiently and directing appalled glances toward the corner of the public gallery where his team of handsome lawyers have gathered.

  But Hong Kim Suon is intoxicated with the power of speech. To a lawyer, the time spent sitting and listening without distraction is substantial. A lawyer will spend hours passively waiting for an opportunity to present itself. Then he will spring into action and, preferably with some gumption, put forward an argument that is pertinent, effective, and eloquent. The challenge of finding the right words with which to break the silence is what makes lawyers so hungry for the opportunity to speak, and why they consider such opportunities so precious.

  Hong Kim Suon has the floor and won’t give it up; Mr. Sur can’t take it any longer. The Frenchman gets to his feet and does something that reduces an awkward moment to a clownish incident: he pushes his colleague aside and grabs the microphone.

  International courts have always been vulnerable to the incongruities, fantasies, and vagaries of post-colonialism. There’s always the risk that the West—or the UN bureaucracy that its dominance sustains—will create situations in which the strongest, the richest, the most educated, and the most powerful will judge the weakest, the least educated, the most destitute, and the outcast. Many of those who work in international courts manage to conceal the awkwardness they feel by tempering their behavior and downplaying their own cultures.

  Mr. Sur knows no such precautions. He is no more aware of the thunderous laughter taking place in the media room at his expense than of the vast chasm separating him from his Khmer audience. Mr. Sur’s overcooked intonation, his feigned silences, his rehearsed pauses, the sheer, affected theatricality of his lawyerly posturing, and his inability to resist scattering a little stardust around [“I am Ingrid Betancourt’s lawyer”] might come across as graceful in a Parisian court. But here in Cambodia, they just reinforce his bad reputation. And when Mr. Sur confuses Son Sen, Duch’s boss at S-21, with Vorn Vet, who was executed there, or when he goes off on a tangent about the “thousands of photographs” that Duch supposedly had taken of himself at his home, he comes across as an amateur. What interest he still held as someone new and exotic evaporates. A sense of shame fills the courtroom.

  Mr. Khan, meanwhile, nods off, wakes up, then nods off again. The cause is not the performance by his colleague, but rather jet lag. In a trial like this you can’t get away with absenteeism and sloppiness, and everyone has been waiting for Mr. Khan and Mr. Sur to return from their truancy. Now that they’re here, they’re regarded with the sarcastic, contemptuous eye usually reserved for impostors.

  CHAPTER 36

  IN HIS THICK TROUSERS AND TIGHT-FITTING, PALE YELLOW TURTLENECK, Duch is dressed for winter. It’s the first morning of the closing statements, and he makes a point of not looking in the direction of the lawyers representing the civil parties. He is meticulously annotating a document. Two months earlier, the hearings ended with a definitive separation between Duch and the victims. Now, while a Cambodian lawyer evokes the unfathomable pain, the crippling anxiety, the gut-wrenching cramps, the sleepless nights of the victims’ families, Duch reads his document.

  Perhaps it’s the play of the light or the reflection of the glass pane, but Duch’s face looks wan and sickly, like that of some half-human comic book character. By the afternoon, he finally deigns to look at his opponents, and even appears to be listening. Perhaps that’s because the speaker is the only person on that side of the courtroom to have left the door open to Duch, if ever so slightly. “You have shed tears, that’s the beginning of repentance; you have apologized, that is the beginning of understanding and of taking responsibility,” says the lawyer representing the victims. “Now look at them, Duch! Look at these men and women you wanted to smash!”

  Duch looks at the lawyer, who continues:

  You can’t smash human beings, because one day they will rise up and come after you to settle scores. Maybe, just maybe, the victims will forgive you. But you cannot imagine how desperately these people are searching for answers. They want to know how one man, no worse than any other, can have behaved so barbarically. They want to know how one ordinary person can be both respectable and terrifying at the same time. François Bizot taught us that it would be a mistake to think of you as nothing more than a coldhearted monster. We know things are not that simple. But these people, these civil parties—whether humble, poor, and uneducated, or cultured and well-off—are all fighting the same battle. To be here.
To tirelessly represent the rule of law, just to keep going.

  For the first time that day, Duch is giving his full attention. The lawyer ends by reading the promise-filled preamble of Cambodia’s Constitution, which was adopted a decade after the catastrophe ended:

  We, the Khmer people, accustomed to having a grand civilization, a prosperous nation, a very large territory, a prestige glittering like a diamond;

  Having fallen into a terrifying decay for the two last decades, when we have been undergoing unspeakable, demeaning sufferings and disasters of the most regrettable way;

  In a burst of consciousness, rising up with a resolute determination in order to . . . guarantee human rights, to ensure the respect of law . . . we inscribe . . .*

  In the front row of the public gallery, next to monks clad in ochre and saffron, sits a group of Buddhist nuns wearing white robes. With their cropped gray hair and thick, Coke-bottle glasses with the dark-brown plastic frames that were once so popular, they look positively ancient. All these women lived through the revolutionary period of Democratic Kampuchea, when Buddhism and “reactionary religions” were abolished and pagodas turned into prisons. Duch is no longer a Buddhist like his ancestors were, nor atheist like his former Communist idols, yet when he comes into the courtroom he duly acknowledges the monks and nuns, provoking sneers and ridicule among the civil parties.

  If the victims of S-21 were still alive, says the Cambodian chief prosecutor, they would fill this amphitheater twenty-four times over.

  “The regime was known as Democratic Kampuchea but there was nothing remotely ‘democratic’ about the three years, eight months, and twenty days in which the country was torn apart and more than 1.7 million of its citizens massacred,” she says.

  This trial, continues the prosecutor, isn’t about the brutal, forced evacuation of the cities, that horrific rustication that alone left eighty thousand dead; nor is it about the forced labor camps, the so-called cooperatives; nor is it about the families torn apart, or the thousands who died of hunger, illness, and exhaustion. “Rather, this trial has focused on just one aspect of the regime: the enforcement of radical ideology that involved ruthless political violence.”

  The Cambodian prosecutor doesn’t hesitate to link S-21 to Stalin’s NKVD and Hitler’s Gestapo. She links Communism to National Socialism, not dwelling on it but not abashed about it, either.

  Next, it’s the Australian prosecutor’s turn to give a final statement. He is keen to make sure that Duch’s role and the extent of his power at S-21 are clearly defined.

  Do you believe him when he says he was both a hostage and a prisoner of the regime from 1971 until the mid-1990s? A prisoner and a hostage forced to kill and torture human beings on a daily basis against his will and under the threat of death, with no choice and no chance of escape? Was the author of these crimes in reality a victim of the system? We have stated that the accused was neither a prisoner nor a hostage nor a victim. The evidence proves [it]. It clearly demonstrates that he was an idealist, a CPK revolutionary, a crusader who was prepared to sacrifice everything for his cause; prepared to torture and kill willingly for the good of the Revolution, no matter how grotesquely misguided it was.

  The prosecutor’s fire soon fades and gives way to a colorless, professional, lawyerly tone. Yet even during the most monotonous moments, Duch never appears tired. Not once throughout the trial has his physical strength failed him. He still decides when to pay attention and to whom. He gave the last lawyers for the civil parties his full attention; but as soon as the prosecutor appears, Duch directs his attention elsewhere. He stares at the CCTV screen on his desk and slumps back in his chair, his whole posture one of disrespect. A moment later, he turns his gaze away from the speaker. It’s the first time he’s shown such glaring contempt. He’s no longer the least bit interested in the prosecutor, and he shows it.

  Of course, what the prosecutor has to say about Duch must be hard for him to take. The prosecutor makes it clear he doesn’t believe a single word uttered by this master of confessions. He paints a portrait of a man completely devoted to Communism and more than willing to eliminate its enemies; a man who developed close personal relationships with the Party’s most powerful leaders and who continued to work for them for some fifteen years after the fall of the regime; he describes a chief of police who helped the regime identify and destroy its enemies and who fueled the leadership’s paranoia in the process. What’s more, only Duch had the power to execute his own staff, and killing them was his decision. When it came to his own staff, Duch had options, says the prosecutor. He chose not to exercise them.

  We’ve all seen firsthand during this trial that the defendant is a meticulous man, a logical man bordering on the obsessive, a master of detail with a brilliant, albeit selective, memory. There is no doubt that under his authority, rules were always obeyed and order was always maintained. This is remarkable, given that the staff under his control at S-21 numbered more than two thousand.

  Throughout the course of the trial, the prosecution has often tried and failed to prove that Duch had the authority to order arrests. Now the prosecutor says that it doesn’t matter if the evidence doesn’t stack up. The important thing is that through the interrogation and torture he oversaw at S-21, the defendant caused hundreds and even thousands of people to be arrested—those famous traitors’ networks. Duch was merciless, even with his own former teachers and friends. When his role became essentially to kill members of the Khmer Rouge, he was relentless. Duch’s first revolutionary mentor and former teacher, Ke Kim Huot, was tortured, degraded, and executed at S-21, as was his wife. He was beaten, given electric shocks, and forced to eat spoonfuls of feces. She was raped with a stick.

  “We submit that infliction of pain was not something he hated,” the prosecutor continues.

  It was something he found both necessary and perversely gratifying. You have seen the evidence of the documents containing the accused’s direct written orders to kill. They are chilling in their unemotional, unapologetic, ruthless efficiency. On a list of seventeen prisoners, including nine children, he simply wrote, “Uncle Peng, kill them all.” On another he wrote, “Interrogate four; kill the rest.” Sometimes he simply ticked off names with the annotation “Smash.” Your Honors, when you review the evidence of the accused’s efficiency, initiative, dedication, drive, enthusiasm, and zeal, there is absolutely no doubt that as misguided as he was, he was a fully willing participant in these crimes. The defense would like you to believe that the accused carried out his work while hating every moment and only acted in fear. All of the evidence in this case clearly disproves that hypothesis. The accused must accept reality: that unless he faces up to the truth and admits that he committed his crimes as a devoted follower, with the enthusiasm and zeal of an ardent revolutionary, he has not accepted full responsibility for his crimes before this court. We recognize that he’s admitted the majority of the underlying crimes at S-21 and his responsibility as its director, and yet you must view his alleged remorse in the context of his continued refusal to admit his active and enthusiastic participation in these crimes. He accepts responsibility only on his own terms, wherein he attempts to paint a picture of himself as an unwilling participant caught up in a machine he could not escape, trapped by secrecy and terror. You must not allow him to hide behind these false claims. You must recognize that he was not a victim of the system but rather its loyal and dedicated agent.

  THE PROSECUTION’S ARGUMENT, based on documentary evidence, is irrefutable and convincing. In view of the notes Duch and others made at the time, it would require a huge mental leap, together with a degree of schizophrenia, to give serious consideration to the portrait painted by the defense. But the overwhelming truth contained in the S-21 archives isn’t enough for the prosecutor. He asserts, but cannot prove, that the defendant regularly visited the main part of the prison, and specifically they interrogation rooms, even though most of them were in fact outside the prison itself. He claims that Duch part
icipated directly in torture. As proof, he invokes Bizot’s account, as described in his book, of Duch hitting prisoners “until he was out of breath,” even though everyone, including the writer himself, has admitted that creative license doesn’t amount to evidence.

  In the end, people in the court begin to feel as though what happens during the trial doesn’t matter; it’s not important whether the case has been convincingly made or not. It seems the six months of legal arguments are irrelevant, since all sides are sticking to the positions they held at the outset, come hell or high water. It is against this background of indifference to detail that the prosecutor paints Duch’s portrait, a portrait that is and must be harsh and brutal, but which nonetheless raises an uncomfortable question: does this urge to blacken a picture already darker than ink merely manifest our own irresistible yearning to distinguish ourselves from the monster at any cost?

  In the fifteen years since international courts were first set up in The Hague, Arusha, Freetown, and Sarajevo, no prosecutor has given so condemnatory a closing statement against a defendant who has not only acknowledged the bulk of his crimes but also collaborated with the judicial authorities and provided damning testimony against other defendants. The international prosecutor is conscious of the special treatment he’s giving Duch. He argues that this case is different from the rest. “Let us remember that, each time he has been backed into a corner concerning his own level of involvement, the defendant has been systemically unresponsive and, in our view, dishonest.”