François Roux has been cut loose by the prosecutor, betrayed by his own cocounsel, and has helplessly watched his client withdraw into himself, all in a single twenty-four-hour period. The job to which he has devoted himself for the past two years now lies in ruins. Roux was Duch’s best chance, yet Duch ditched him. He was the best ally the civil parties had, yet it’s at his feet that they have laid all their anger and bitterness. He was the tribunal’s best asset, since he promised it a dignified, unobstructed trial, yet he now stands humiliated before it. A good many people—even among those who consider Roux’s a “vile job”—recognize that he has carried this trial, that he has stamped it with high standards, credibility, dignity, and competence. Yet two days before its end, he suddenly finds himself its biggest loser. He had wished for this trial to be transcendent; instead, he has fallen into the abyss. How can Roux fight the prosecutor when his own client and cocounsel behave as if they are on the prosecution’s side?
Kar Savuth’s coup de théâtre adds more drama to a trial that already has plenty; the latest one centers on a lawyer with a broken dream, who realizes that nobody else in the courtroom wants what he wants, a fact driven home during the trial’s Shakespearean final act: a dagger in the back.
The victims’ families, meanwhile, close ranks. For thirty years they’ve been trampled upon; now, finally, they have found strength in numbers, and they sit together in three long rows, persuaded that the drama unfolding before their eyes is proof of what they have long claimed: that Duch is a master manipulator, that his confessions are nothing more than a smokescreen, and that now, at last, the torturer is showing his true face. The Cambodian lawyer’s outrage becomes their bitter triumph. It validates their desire to see Duch severely punished. How can they support François Roux when both his client and his cocounsel are fighting him?
CHAPTER 38
I’VE COME TO SEE LE MAÎTRE,”—THE MASTER—a visiting American lawyer says, referring to Maître Roux, taking her seat in a packed courtroom the following morning. The man she has come to see enters the courtroom like a Roman warrior sacrificed to a naumachia.
François Roux might well say, “Ave, populus, morituri te salutant” (“Hail, people, those who are about to die salute you”). He is about to make the last closing argument of his prolific career. He finds himself in the most indefensible position imaginable, caught between surrender and humiliation, two sentiments he cannot stand. Yet even dethroned, even beaten and humiliated, “the master” still stands lustrous atop some invisible pedestal. Even in the hour of his defeat, he is still the one most admired by the public.
The master stands to speak, very slowly straightening his body. His hand reaches for the microphone as though in slow motion; he leans forward halfway at a right angle, as though his seat has remained stuck to him, and then stays in that position, his torso barely moving. His movements are so drawn out that once he completes them, you’re not quite sure whether he’s standing entirely straight or not. Then his confident and patient voice booms through the courtroom: “To stand up and speak in someone’s defense, that is what makes our job noble. To stand beside the accused, beside the person here accused of one of the most serious crimes imaginable—a crime against humanity. Imagine that: a crime against humanity.”
Roux speaks in a natural tone that makes him seem close; his timbre is clear, his words carefully chosen. With just a few sentences, this intellectual tightrope walker succeeds in establishing a calm solemnity in the courtroom. Now he brushes aside yesterday’s insult by turning it into a challenge for himself:
I have explained at length to the team that these are two contradictory things: we cannot, on the one hand, ask for the acquittal of the accused, which would mean that he is not guilty, as well as enter a guilty plea. It has now been publicly expressed that the accused will plead not guilty. I therefore withdraw the guilty plea.
Once he has brushed his own team’s betrayal under the carpet, he can continue to plead, despite everyone, on behalf of the Duch he has defended for the past two years, the one who repented, the one who broke down when confronted with the reconstruction of the crime at S-21 or at the mention of Phung Ton’s name. “Who can dispute those moments that we have all lived through? Who is in a position to contest this? Didn’t we all experience those same moments of utmost sincerity? Weren’t we all utterly moved?”
The regime’s leaders didn’t need Duch to become paranoid, he says, quoting the much-respected historian David Chandler. “Yes, the paranoia began in the center of the Party, not at S-21. The paranoia began in the center and spread to the ranks. If the most dangerous enemy was the invisible one, then there could be no end to the terror, because the enemy could not be seen.”
Roux must also nullify the damning portrait of Duch painted by the prosecution, of a man who committed his crimes with particular enthusiasm. The master refers to Article 5 of the Party statutes, which each member had to scrupulously obey:
I quote: “One has to exercise initiative as well as autonomous creativity, a dynamic work ethic and consistent, intensive work methods.” That means that it was incumbent upon each and every Party member to display enthusiasm, the very same enthusiasm which the prosecutors now hold against Duch. Come on! You have seen, as I have seen, the propaganda films showing all the people building dams! Have you seen them crying or have you seen them singing? And you want to blame Duch for doing something that was demanded of everyone?
Duch said what needed to be said, argues Roux, even if he didn’t say everything.
Ms. Studzinsky tried to learn more. We were unable to do so. Is it that this trial has turned into one of evasion? I guess so. When we spoke of Phung Ton, you saw the emotions it triggered in Mam Nai as well as in Duch. What’s at stake here? I don’t know any more than you do. I am only describing what I see. So, yes, there’s no doubt that gray areas remain. No doubt there remain things that are hard to admit. But so it is.
IN HIS GRIPPING PLAY INCENDIES, one of Wajdi Mouawad’s characters hides his criminal past from his family. The playwright gives his character this line of terrible, simple veracity: “Why didn’t I tell you? Some truths can only be revealed provided they have been discovered.”
At this stage, François Roux appears to be succeeding in his effort to make the court forget about Kar Savuth. A good lawyer knows how to spin a story without appearing to; he knows how to weave, from scattered, flimsy scraps of information, a thread that appears as strong as one of those climbing ropes with which you can confidently rappel down a cliff. The master deftly and boldly strings together documents and quotes to forge a harmoniously structured argument, rich in substance.
Duch never takes his eyes off him. He removes his interpreter’s headset, leans forward, and listens closely in that language spoken by so many Party intellectuals: French. The lawyer raises his voice to show his indignation at the proposition that Duch had access to the secrets kept by the Party’s highest-ranked leaders; his voice is strident when he defies anyone to claim that one could disobey the Big Brothers; then, as he explains that there was no loophole, no way out of the endless cycle of death decreed from on high, his tone drops to one of great weariness.
The master mentions his own broken dreams. He tells of his dashed hope that the office of the prosecution would pursue a dialogue with the only major Khmer Rouge cadre to have accepted responsibility for his crime. Roux had dreamed of a prosecutor who would rather outdo himself than give in to public opinion. He denounces the “conventional, traditional argument whose underlying philosophy is ‘This man is a monster.’”
Members of the prosecution, yesterday you vehemently spoke out against a man who was on his knees begging for forgiveness. I do not like this. I do not like the tone of your statements or of your arguments. A scapegoat is one on whose head all the evils, all the sufferings of a society are loaded. Among the Hebrews, the goat was sent into the desert so that society could redeem itself by saying, “This goat bears all our wrongdoings.” That is a sc
apegoat. Duch does not have to bear all the horrors of the Cambodian tragedy. No, Duch is not the person described to you by the prosecutors.
During a pause in proceedings, Nic Dunlop turns to me with a mischievous look in his eye and says, “I’ve never heard such an eloquent ‘fuck you’ before.”
The master continues his argument. He talks about the crime of obedience, and its twin, the crime of submission. Roux had naively hoped that he and the prosecution would steer the trial toward the same destination, the one that François Bizot set forth during the opening of the trial and which David Chandler defined in the conclusion of his work: namely, that to understand S-21, we needn’t look further than ourselves.
Are we just going to rehash the same old arguments before this court? “He committed crimes, so therefore he must be convicted and society will be better for it.” Or even worse: “This will not happen again.” Well, let me tell you: it will happen again, as long as we avoid looking with clear eyes at the phenomenon that turns a normal man into a torturer and executioner. This phenomenon, this crime of obedience, is exactly the subject that Chandler so courageously tackled.
For thirty-five years, I have been hearing about this experiment, this terrible experiment where they took ordinary American citizens just like you and me, put them in a room, and said, “You see, behind the glass pane, the person sitting there in that chair? He’s lying. He has electrodes on him and you have a button. Each time you ask him a question and he lies, send him a jolt.” There’s an instructor wearing a white coat next to you, telling you, “It’s okay, go ahead.” Sixty percent of the people—people just like you and me—obeyed the person in the white coat and kept pressing the button until they reached the lethal dose. The person on the other side of the glass pane was only an actor playing the role of the victim. What a terrifying experiment. I have heard people here in this room tell the court, “I can’t answer that, I have to go and check with my superior.” Yes indeed, that is how we all function.
THE END OF A TRIAL is like the end of captivity. What has taken months—years, even—all those depositions, testimonies, facts, documents, experts, and pleas—evaporates and is forgotten behind the one and only thing that everyone will remember, and which erases everything else: the verdict.
“So, we come to the sentence,” says the master quietly, in a silence so intense that when he rustles the page in front of him, it sounds like a judas hole being slammed shut.
Previously, Ouk Ket’s widow had suggested, with bitter sarcasm, that Duch should be condemned to working as a groundskeeper on the killing fields of Choeung Ek, which, she indignantly pointed out, were haphazardly maintained at best. The master, a little carried away, now allows himself to make a similarly coarse statement. Like a climber carefully testing where he places his foot, he suggests that Duch ought to be condemned to giving guided tours of the scenes of his crimes, to show “younger generations what should not be done.” To plead in court means to sometimes risk going too far.
It is time to reach a conclusion.
It’s always a difficult moment for a lawyer because he knows he can say no more after this, so he asks himself, “Have I said everything that needed to be said? Have I done enough?” Duch, all your victims were your brothers and sisters in humanity. You said that you were a coward and that you did not go to see them while they were in detention. In the eyes of humanity, you will never be absolved of these crimes, and the gazes of those you did not wish to meet will follow you forever. But what about us, Your Honors? Are we prepared to look Duch in the eye and see him as our fellow human? And will you, by your decision, bring Duch back to humanity? For quite some time now, lawyers across the world have argued that one of the goals of sentencing is to rehabilitate the guilty party. But is rehabilitation forbidden in the context of a crime against humanity?
A final word: Duch is dead. Today, his name is Kaing Guek Eav.
And with that, Roux takes his seat as slowly as he stood a few hours earlier before the curious crowd; he moves as though he were in the twilight years of life.
CHAPTER 39
ELOQUENCE IS LIKE A BUTTERFLY—ITS LIFE SPAN IS EPHEMERAL. Now that Roux is back in his seat, the lawyers for the victims and the prosecutors are determined not to let things stand as they are. For the past twenty-four hours, they’ve watched, goggle-eyed, as the defense team imploded. Now it’s time to sound the horn for the final assault. Mr. Sur has already returned to France, but Mr. Khan seizes the moment to salvage his reputation. He is the first to pounce on the opportunity presented by the unbelievable discord among his opponents:
The defense is putting forward two completely different positions. This is wrong. It is unfair to the people of Cambodia, it is unfair to the victims, and it is unfair to Your Honors’ search for the truth. Instead of responding to the views, the concerns, the pain, and the plight of the civil parties, the accused embarked upon what I call a carefully constructed, paragraph-by-paragraph, footnote-by-footnote statement. Thirty years after the events, our civil parties want the truth, they want their lives back, they want some kind of closure, and it is simply unacceptable that we are left in this chaotic state of affairs where we do not know actually what has been said. Mr. Roux states that the accused is not pleading guilty but he is accepting contrition. His Cambodian lawyer says, “Release him, he’s absolutely not guilty.” This is a unique case that can be described by many adjectives, but I’ll simply say [that it is] highly unacceptable and absolutely avoidable.
Silke Studzinsky sees the defense team’s implosion as a slap in the face to the victims:
After the accused and his defense tried to convince the civil parties that his partial admission amounts to a truthful, sincere, and genuine confession, the civil parties now became even more convinced beyond any doubt that the accused was and is playing a game, and that at the very least the time has come to shed the sheep’s clothing. The civil parties who are seeking justice and truth are further alienated and more offended as the credibility of the accused is once again more corroded. His wish and demand to return to Cambodian society must be rejected.
The lawyer Hong Kim Suon, another of the victims’ lawyers, begins by saying that he’s deeply saddened by the defendant’s about-face. Within a few seconds, however, he’s in tears, quite overwhelmed by the pressure of the event. Throughout the trial, Duch had accorded this lawyer a special, almost fraternal, form of respect. Now he gives him no more attention than he does the others. At this point, Duch has started breaking away from the society to which he had hoped to be reinstated. In one of the interviews he gave to filmmaker Rithy Panh a few months prior to the start of the trial, he had a terrible intuition: “The day I am forgiven, I will prostrate myself in gratitude. If I am not forgiven, well then, let’s leave it at that and wait for life to end.” As his trial reaches its conclusion, Duch realizes that he is not going to get the forgiveness he had hoped for, and so withdraws into himself. He turns away from others. The previous evening, after Kar Savuth’s bombshell, Roux had naturally asked to see the defendant. But Duch sent word through the prison warden that he was too tired. Just as he once avoided visiting his friends about to be killed at S-21, Duch now avoids a meeting that would bring him face-to-face with yet another betrayal.
THOSE ON THE OFFENSIVE are always more brazen than those in retreat. The prosecutor doesn’t miss this undreamed-of occasion to rip into an opponent who has dominated him from start to finish over the course of the trial. He also uses the opportunity to justify his own intransigence.
“What has happened in this trial is that the prosecution, the civil parties have been grossly misled by the defense,” proclaims the Australian prosecutor.
They have been saying throughout this case that certainly they would not be asking for an acquittal; and that’s what they’ve done yesterday. That’s loud and clear. Now, if that’s the case, he should get no—no—mitigating factors in relation to his sentence, none at all, because that’s not cooperation at all. So that’s
the assumption that we make, but I have a feeling that that’s not the case. I have a feeling that counsel have acted without instructions and I think this needs to be resolved before we leave the courtroom. It’s very, very unclear what the defense are, in fact, doing, but one thing that is clear is that from that defense yesterday, they asked for an acquittal of this accused, and I strongly suggest to Your Honors that you speak directly to the accused and find out whether they were acting on [his] instructions or not.
Duch leans over his desk to confer with Kar Savuth. The reply to the prosecutor’s challenge seems to get the Cambodian lawyer revved up. He nods his head very firmly several times, and slices through the air above his desk with both hands.
The defense’s disintegration becomes blatant during the recess. Duch confers with Kar Savuth while the team’s four international lawyers deliberate among themselves. Then Kar Savuth leaves the room and Duch sits alone. When Kar Savuth returns, Duch exits the room, as do Roux and his team; Kar Savuth remains alone in the courtroom. When Duch returns, he greets several former students through the glass pane and then returns to his box. François Roux reappears, puts his robe back on, and comes over to talk to Duch. Behind him, Kar Savuth rehearses, with much gesticulation, the answer he’s about to give. A minute before the proceedings resume, the two lawyers exchange a few strong words. Kar Savuth quickly discusses something with Duch. The judges return to the courtroom. Presiding Judge Nil Nonn remarks that the statements made by the defense lawyers have been particularly incoherent. He then lets the Cambodian lawyer speak.
The Master of Confessions Page 29
