The Master of Confessions

by Thierry Cruvellier

  Either there’s a problem with the interpreters or he is particularly muddled, but Kar Savuth’s words come across as mostly incomprehensible. Still, though his reasoning is flawed, his conclusion is crystal-clear: Duch cannot be judged according to national law.

  The old lawyer certainly doesn’t find himself at a loss for words. In the middle of his diatribe, he mentions a few unsettling facts: for example, that three-quarters of the victims of S-21 were themselves servants of the regime and that, consequently, the tribunal ought not to make it its priority to give justice to all these Khmer Rouge cadres with blood on their own hands. But his speech is nothing more than a jumble of vague, incomplete, rehashed, or irrelevant ideas. After having confused the sentencing, the non-retroactivity of the law, and the reality of the state of war with Vietnam, Kar Savuth takes off his spectacles and, while the crowd murmurs, concludes: “Duch has been held for over ten years. Other wardens aren’t in prison. Therefore, I think the time has come for the court to release my client and to allow him to go home.”

  When François Roux stands and straightens his frail body with his characteristic slowness, it’s usually an internalized way of warming up for the coming challenge. This time, it’s more like the movement of the condemned man laboriously carrying his cross up Calvary Hill.

  Lawyers are sometimes called upon to sacrifice themselves. Roux uses all his rhetorical talent one last time in an effort to save Duch’s skin, even though Duch has devoted himself to other saints. With so many adversaries in the courtroom, including in the seat next to him, Roux has the luxury of being able to choose among them. And once again he manages, by some subtle rhetoric, to take his ineffable teammate’s arguments and to make them seem to fit naturally with his own. The man knows his stuff. But the prosecutor won’t be fooled, and he sticks to his agenda:

  The defense has avoided your [the judge’s] question in relation to why [they have entered] this change of plea. On the one hand, we have the defense asking to “mitigate his sentence,” and on the other hand, they’re saying “acquit him.” I think it’s very important to find out why they are running these two defenses at the moment.

  The clock is ticking and Roux must try to beat it. He attempts a death blow:

  I am sorry if counsel for the prosecution failed to listen to us closely enough. The word “acquittal” was never uttered this morning. Both counselors for the defense asked that the defendant’s sentence be reduced, and that he be released as soon as possible, given that he has already served a ten-year term and has fully accepted responsibility for the crimes committed at S-21. Nothing has changed. It is not an acquittal. If this isn’t clear enough for my learned friend, then I am sorry.

  But it isn’t clear enough for Judge Nil Nonn, either. And he wants an answer. Duch finds himself ordered to speak. After having blatantly snubbed the office of the prosecution since the beginning of the week, he now finds himself looking directly at them. He gesticulates a lot, his movements quick and sharp. His Revolutionary French is a little rusty—“democratic centralism” becomes “centralized democracy”—but he holds firm. He reminds the court that he has been cooperating with the law for the past ten years without fail. He emphasizes that he has agreed to acknowledge and discuss the crimes committed at M-13 even though they fall outside the tribunal’s jurisdiction, and that he also agreed to talk about events that happened after 1979, even though the tribunal isn’t mandated to cover that period, either. He repeats that he has accepted a broad and general responsibility as a member of the Communist Party for the totality of the crimes committed under Pol Pot’s regime, and that he made an apology for those also, even though his case and his crime before this court are limited to what happened at S-21. Finally, he repeats his Cambodian lawyer’s argument: he wasn’t one of the regime’s top leaders, and this tribunal was created to judge them and them alone. “I have been detained since May 8, 1999. It has been ten years, six months, and eighteen days already. Therefore I ask the court to release me.”

  The judges deliberate quickly among themselves. Then Nil Nonn asks Duch to stand once again. “The question is: are you asking the chamber to acquit you of all charges, or are you asking the tribunal to reduce your sentence based on your cooperation with the court and the time you have already served?”

  Duch has his back against the wall. But he doesn’t want to make a run for it, at least not alone. He says that his analytical skills are too limited, that he would like to be released but that he prefers to entrust himself to his lawyer. Specifically, his Cambodian lawyer.

  Kar Savuth repeats his argument about the top Khmer Rouge leaders. Judge Lavergne puts his head in his hands. The lawyer tries one last trick: he simply doesn’t answer the question.

  Enough is enough. Someone is going to have to talk. Judge Cartwright takes the reins. “Counsel Kar Savuth, do I infer from your last comments that the accused is seeking an acquittal?”

  Now it’s Kar Savuth who is backed into a corner. Usually when he’s caught in such situations, he beats a wily retreat. The entire courtroom is waiting with bated breath for his answer, on which the trial will end. “That’s what I said. To release means to acquit.”

  Kar Savuth doesn’t retreat. For the second time in two days, François Roux has been backstabbed by the man who has been his brother-in-arms for two years. But Cambodia has never been a merciful place.

  FRANÇOIS ROUX OFTEN LIKES to say that to defend someone is to suffer alongside them. His client may have disavowed him, but Duch hasn’t asked for his resignation or asked him to do anything professionally unethical. Being Duch’s lawyer might not be a vile job, but it can be an incredibly lonely one. François Roux decides to stay in his seat while awaiting the verdict. To him, that’s the best way to stay true to his oath to protect the defendant’s rights—even if it is at his own expense.

  The psychology of a prisoner is not the same as that of a criminal. A prisoner has different impulses and subscribes to different survival strategies than a criminal. Many people think that Duch’s about-face is a sign of the old Khmer Rouge cadre rising from the ashes. But the about-face could just as easily be the consequence of the state of mind in which any prisoner facing a long sentence might find himself. Most prisoners are like Icarus: the mirage of freedom taunts them like a blinding sun. Duch’s choice reveals to us a lot about him even as it confounds us. Some see it as the quintessence of either the master manipulator or the coward. Others speculate about some underhanded political negotiation, with Kar Savuth acting as a go-between. And others still see it as an illustration of the former revolutionary’s inability to live by an ethic of responsibility, despite his aspiration and prior agreement to do so. Those who like certainty can have it. Those who tolerate doubt can keep tolerating it. Duch comes from a background in which survival trumps everything else, and he is showing us that it is the only thing that he strives for.

  Wisely, the judges decide not to attach too much importance to it.

  A month before the verdict is handed down, Duch sends a letter to the court’s administrators, letting them know that he is dismissing François Roux. He never did like meeting face-to-face those he was betraying.

  CHAPTER 40

  DUCH SAYS THAT AS A TEENAGER HE WAS DRAWN TO STOICISM. Traditionally, Cambodian children are taught very young not to complain. To complain is to reveal one’s weaknesses, says one of the psychiatrists acting as an expert witness. In this cultural context, Stoicism, which urges its adherents to control and repress their emotions, finds fertile ground. Staying silent shows that you aren’t a coward and that you don’t give up.

  For generations, every French school student has studied that poetic pearl, Alfred de Vigny’s “Death of the Wolf.” French colonial schoolteachers diligently imported the famous nineteenth-century poem into Cambodia. Its lines made an impression on a young Kaing Guek Eav. He says that when he was head of the M-13 camp, he used to recite to himself the poem’s closing verses:

  Moaning, weeping, prayin
g is equally cowardly.

  Staunchly carry out your long and heavy task

  In the path to which Fate saw fit to call you,

  Then, later, as I do, suffer and die in silence.*

  Duch says the poem helped strengthen his resolve to carry out the cold and heavy task which the Party saw fit to give him. What can be more disturbing than a torturer reciting a great and noble poem?

  “Sometimes,” says Duch, “we must do a job we don’t like.”

  Roux sets the stage well that day. After Duch recites his four lines of verse in French, the lawyer allows a heavy silence to fill the room. Then, amplifying it, he sits down without a word.

  For the non-Stoic, the feeling it produces is spectacular. For the victims, it is excruciating. For the brother of Chum Narith and Chum Sinareth, that his brothers’ executioner should invoke a poem or indulge in any other spiritual refinement is unacceptable: “After the defendant was finished, his lawyer let two or three minutes of silence pass,” he angrily tells the court.

  You couldn’t even hear a mosquito buzzing, and you felt sorry for the accused. It was a clever technique. But if the defendant is comparing himself to the wolf, then he’s an impostor! What bravery are we talking about? He knew that the professor was being tortured and dehumanized. What courage is there in that?

  Everyone wanted to hold the poem close, like some precious fabric found by heirs among a late relative’s belongings. People fought over the death of the wolf.

  “Do you realize that you have retained the most dangerous, the most lethal elements of the poem that leave no room for man?” says an affronted lawyer for the victims.

  You have taken only those parts that fit your view of life, that is to say, that man is a wolf to other men. Do you realize that your response to being tried for crimes against humanity is to recite romantic poems? We are not here, sir, for cultural edification! This is not a literary salon! I am talking about twelve thousand dead at S-21! Some say sixteen thousand! What is romantic about that? We believe that you have become a wolf to men. Yet we do not wish for the death of the wolf.

  “I AM NINETY-ONE YEARS and six months old.”

  People in the twilight of their lives share with those at the dawn of theirs the habit of measuring their age exactly. For both groups, months matter. The very young and the very old keenly feel the value of every season. Each month is a palpable measure of how little they have lived or what little life remains to them. When the old man cheerfully and precisely gives his age to the court, a loud murmur spreads through the public gallery. He is the trial’s final witness. People are asking themselves what he’s doing there. What can this former French Resistance fighter, who was deported to Nazi concentration camps and who later became a diplomat and a fervent and unfailingly courteous defender of multiple humanist causes, possibly have to say in this place and on this matter?

  It’s an irrelevant question that doesn’t occur to the Cambodians gathered in the public gallery. They respect their elders here. Simply being old is enough to generate respect. This venerable old man is testifying from Paris. The satellite link is mediocre at best, but his voice is sparkling and melodious. Those who have experienced mankind’s folly as well as his genius can become either misanthropes withdrawn from the world, go dance with the real wolves, or aspire to acquire the wisdom of worthier souls. At ninety-one years and six months, Stéphane Hessel* has entered that curious kingdom from where so few of his peers can speak their minds. He seems able to express and understand everything with objective clarity. The patriarch is firm yet careful never to hurt anyone. He gets straight to the point without omitting anyone, particularly the weak and downtrodden. He knows that, despite our desire for easy conclusions, the world isn’t black-and-white, governed by good and evil, or divided between torturers and victims. And he manages, without seeming to, to encourage others to think things through a little more deeply.

  “Can this trial reach a conclusion that isn’t unilateral?” he asks with a subtle and cryptic use of rhetorical questions and negations that cancel each other out. Hessel speaks a rich and lucid language rarely heard these days, one that rejects the excessive and superfluous. The exact opposite, in other words, to the language spoken by certain lawyers. His clear, wide eyes and generous smile lend his kindness a quality that the foolhardy might mistake for naiveté. But Hessel is as immune to vanity as he is to the self-serving appeals of policymakers. He limits himself to making few statements and making them cautiously. But those he does make carry the moral weight of a man who, in the words of another poet and Resistance member, René Char, passes in front of the “snake-men” without crushing them.

  Stéphane Hessel repeated poems to himself while being tortured by the Gestapo; Duch recited them to himself while torturing others. Roux knows that the venerable survivor can recite many verses from memory, and that poetry helped him to survive the death camps. He also knows that Hessel included Alfred de Vigny’s poem in an anthology he published. The time has come for us to ask him how we, snake-men, should understand the poem.

  The lawyer begins to read: “Alas! I thought, in spite of that great name of Men . . .”

  Just then, we hear the satellite-borne voice of the old poetry-lover resonate from the far side of the world:

  . . . How ashamed I am of us, weak ones that we are!

  How one must leave life and all its woes,

  You are the ones who know it, sublime animals!

  Seeing what one was on earth and what one leaves,

  Alone silence is great; all the rest is weakness.

  Ah! I understood you well, wild voyager,

  And your last glance went straight to my heart!

  It said: if you can, have your soul arrive,

  By dint of remaining studious and thoughtful,

  All the way to that high degree of Stoic pride

  To which, born in the forests, I immediately rose.

  Moaning, weeping, praying is equally cowardly.

  Staunchly carry out your long and heavy task

  In the path to which Fate saw fit to call you,

  Then, later, as I do, suffer and die in silence.*

  “These are the verses recited by the man who would become a torturer and executioner,” says Roux. “What is this poem about Stoicism trying to tell us?”

  “Naturally, I am always moved by a beautiful poem, but a poem merely reflects the position that the poet thinks men of honor ought to adopt toward even the most cruel vagaries of life,” says Hessel.

  If the defendant agrees with the text, he will have to endure his eventual sentence with the same strength, the same courage as the wolf that, a few stanzas earlier, “seized, in his burning maw/ the quivering throat of the boldest dog/ and did not release his iron jaws.” I don’t remember the lines exactly, but you see my point. If the defendant were to be absolved of the responsibilities he has taken upon himself, it would be counter to the choice he has made.

  “Is it possible for a man to redeem himself? Do you believe that redemption is possible?”

  That is a difficult question and an embarrassing one when we think about the suffering of the victims, whose imaginations will forever be haunted by the memories of the terrible things done by the defendant. I have no doubt that the defendant will draw some benefit from everything that was discovered and said about him by those around him. That being said, I’m not sure that a truly honorable man could wish for anything other than fair retribution for the crimes of which he knows he is guilty.

  In just a few words, Hessel has settled the quarrel about the poem and restored poetry to mankind. Duch has risen from his seat to salute a witness only twice: once for Phung Ton’s widow and once for his pastor. When the presiding judge indicates that the old man’s testimony is over, Duch rises for the third time and does the sampeah, pressing his hands together in front of his face, slightly higher than Christians do when praying. Hessel watches him through the satellite link. Quite naturally and without a moment’s hesitat
ion, he puts his own hands together in front of his face and reciprocates the defendant’s gesture of respect. There is no one that he would not acknowledge.

  On July 26, 2010, Duch was sentenced to thirty years in prison. He immediately appealed his sentence. On February 3, 2012, the chamber of appeals gave him a life sentence. Poetry, alas, enlightens only free men.

  HISTORICAL MILESTONES

  1953–1970: THE SIHANOUK ERA

  On November 9, 1953, Cambodia gained its independence after ninety years of French colonial rule. In 1955, Norodom Sihanouk, crowned king of Cambodia in 1941 at age eighteen, abdicated the throne to his father in order to found his own political party. Prince Sihanouk won the elections and became prime minister. Five years later, he claimed the title “head of state.” In 1964, he coined the expression “Khmer Rouge” to designate Cambodia’s Communists, whose party, created in 1960, operated underground. The Khmer Rouge undertook their first armed operation in January 1968.

  1970–1975: LON NOL’S REGIME AND THE CIVIL WAR

  On March 18, 1970, Sihanouk was deposed by General Lon Nol, army chief of staff. Exiled to Beijing, Sihanouk put out a call for support, invited the Communists into his government-in-exile, and created the National United Front of Kampuchea. The National Front included the Khmer Rouge, whose guerrillas rapidly gained control on the ground. Lon Nol benefited from support of the United States, which in 1969 began massive secret air raids that increased in intensity until they were stopped in 1973.

  1975–1979: THE RISE OF DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA

  On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. The Communist Party ruled over the new nation of Democratic Kampuchea, led by its secret prime minister, Pol Pot, and the country became isolated from the rest of the world. On December 31, 1977, after two years of increasingly rancorous border incidents, the Communist regimes in Cambodia and Vietnam broke off diplomatic relations with each other. Cambodia was supported by China, while Vietnam was backed by the Soviet Union.