Cambodia's Curse (48 page)

A parade of UN and U.S. officials stopped by to see Hun Sen or Sok An, trying to work out a new corruption-reporting system. For the visitors, it remained vitally important that graft victims be able to report to a neutral third party—not a government operative. For the government, however, it remained essential that they maintain full control over this, too. Who knew what some third party would say or do? Meanwhile, the court was running out of money. Some months, the staff got no pay.

The government stood tough. In fact, when the United Nations raised its corruption allegations, officials responded as they always did, as they had when Heather Ryan first brought the issue to public attention in 2007, by attacking the accuser. A spokesman for the Council of Ministers announced that the government was now “monitoring all international staff” at the court because “the international side has corruption, too.” Naturally, he backpedaled when he realized he had offered a tacit admission of government graft and suddenly insisted that corruption on the Cambodian side hadn’t been proved.

 

Attention to the infighting receded as Duch testified in court in the spring and summer of 2009. He electrified the audience. In his opening statement, he said he was sorry for the atrocities he had committed. “I would like to apologize to all surviving victims and their families who were mercilessly killed” at his prison, the former commandant said. “I would like to express my regret and heartfelt sorrow.” He sat behind a luxury-wood dock with armed guards to his left and right, a withered old man with white hair. He was sixty-six, already five or six years past the typical life span for a Cambodian male, facing a panel of judges wearing crimson robes with black and white sashes. Behind him Cambodians and foreigners in the audience watched from behind a large, panoramic picture window. In the front row sat a few monks in saffron
robes who would have been executed had they found their way into Tuol Sleng when Duch was in command.

Duch spoke for almost twenty minutes. “My current plea is that I would like you to please leave an open window for me to seek forgiveness.” He faced the possibility of a life sentence; Cambodia had no death penalty. In the following days, his few surviving victims gave terrible testimony, describing torture and seemingly indiscriminate death. Some told of electric shock or being hung upside down, trying to hold their heads out of a bucket of water. Some said guards ripped out finger- and toenails. “Every night I looked out at the moon,” one of the victims, Bou Meng, sixty-nine, recalled while testifying. “I heard people crying and sighing around the building. I heard people calling out, ‘Mother help me, mother help me!’” During the night, guards trucked the condemned out to a field on the edge of town for execution. Every night, Bou Meng said, he waited for a guard to come get him. “But by midnight or 1 a.m. I realized that I would live another day.”

Cambodia televised the trial, and some people watched it on their car-battery televisions. In many cases, they reacted to the testimony as Bou Meng did—furious that these mass murderers were living comfortably in a cell with air-conditioning and three meals a day, delivered. “I am extremely envious of Duch and the treatment he receives. I don’t understand why the court treats him so well, much better than me.”

One television viewer, Saloth Nhep, eighty-four, had a different reaction. He lived in Prek Sbov village, just outside Kampong Thom, and one afternoon he had just come from a bath and was sitting in a black hammock under his modest house, shirtless and damp. His face was heavily furrowed, his hair white and thin. He was calm, philosophical, and polite as he considered the trial. “I don’t know how to say it,” he said. “I am not educated. But the court is not really Cambodian. It is partly international. The way Duch speaks it sounds like a confession. I remember Duch saying that if he did not do those things, someone would kill him.” Saloth Nhep had never met Duch or any of the other defendants, even though they had been close friends
and compatriots of his older brother, Saloth Sar—Pol Pot. “Brother Number One” had died eleven years earlier, and at that time Saloth Nhep had grieved. “When I heard the news I was very sad, and I felt my heart slow down,” he said then.

Even with a creased face and white hair, Saloth Nhep held a striking resemblance to Pol Pot. Whatever anger he still retained toward his brother related primarily to Saloth Sar’s neglect of his family—not his role in the deaths of 2 million Cambodians. Before joining the Cambodian Communist Party, Saloth Sar studied in France, and after he came back from France, “he came to see us only twice,” Saloth Nhep complained. “He did not care about family. He has never even seen the face of my oldest child.” That was especially painful. As children, the brothers had been best friends, inseparable.

For much of the time the Khmer Rouge held power, “I did not know the name Pol Pot, did not know he was my brother,” Saloth Nhep recalled. Even as the president’s brother, he was swept into the vortex of the Khmer Rouge horror. Unlike his older brother, he was an illiterate rice farmer—just the kind of Cambodian the Khmer Rouge respected. “They treated me like everyone else; they didn’t know he was my brother. I didn’t know Pol Pot. The work was very hard, and there was no freedom.” But then in 1977 he saw a picture of Pol Pot on a poster. He stared, shocked. “What I was thinking was that he should not be leading the country this way and letting people starve to death.” After that he said he did not tell anyone that Pol Pot was his brother. Asked why, he just shrugged. He continued working with little if anything to eat until the Vietnamese invasion in 1979. Neither during the war nor after did he ever see his brother again.

Still, Saloth Nhep was content now. At rest, his expression was serene. Villagers respected him. They knew his history and appreciated that he was a pleasant, respectful neighbor. “The present government is better than the previous regime,” he averred. “There is freedom of travel, and we have security.” Like most Cambodians, that’s all he seemed to expect—except, he said, to see his brother’s former comrades, on trial in
Phnom Penh, convicted and sent to prison. But he did not live to see that. On February 4, 2010, Saloth Nhep passed away.

 

Around the country tens of thousands were unable to watch the trial. They didn’t have a television, or an antenna able to pick up the station. Asked about that, generally they shrugged. They didn’t really care. Still, Youk Chhang, head of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, took it on as his mission to bring the trial to the people. One morning in the town of Kampong Speu, west of Phnom Penh, residents started arriving before eight o’clock, middle-aged men and women, poor rice farmers mostly—damaged survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime. Youk Chhang and his staff had brought a video projector and set it up in a monk’s pagoda near the center of town. They showed a DVD featuring highlights of Duch’s trial testimony. “I want to contribute to engaging the victims in the court process,” Youk Chhang explained. “Some Cambodians have moved on, but there are others who still suffer, and these are the ones we are targeting.” And that’s just who he got. For an hour about seventy-five people watched transfixed as Duch described his crimes and told how he supervised as his soldiers executed victims by whacking them on the back of the head. In the video Duch looked directly at the judges with a calm and confident gaze, seeming to be the commandant still, as he confessed to his terrible crimes, apologized, and asked for forgiveness. “I was given a directive to use a plastic bag to suffocate prisoners,” he acknowledged.

When the video excerpts ended, the room sat silent—stunned, it seemed. One of Youk Chhang’s aides asked audience members to talk about what they had seen. The DVD was paused on a scene in which Duch seemed to be staring directly at the crowd with a stern, almost threatening, gaze. The first woman who raised her hand took the microphone and promptly broke into tears. “Forgiveness is not acceptable,” she declared, wiping her eyes. “They killed my father and two older brothers.” Next a middle-aged man told of how six of his relatives died, and as he spoke his large brown eyes grew red and filled
with tears. Still another man was choking up so that his words were hard to understand. “I was a child, and I was starving,” he stammered. “They gave us no food, and sometimes I would fall down and pass out and then wake up again.” And so it went.

The problem, of course, was that almost half the adult population of Cambodia, those over thirty-five or forty years of age, showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. And for them, psychiatrists said, watching a video like the one those people saw was like poking a stick in a hornet’s nest. It triggered all of the symptoms: pain, rage—even violence.

Daryn Reicherter, the psychiatrist at Stanford University, served as a consultant to Youk Chhang’s Documentation Center a few months earlier and came back angry. “Those people at the documentation center have no background or knowledge of anxiety or the risks associated with trauma. But it turns out they are dealing with this stuff every day. There needs to be some medical follow-up with these people” after the show has ended, “but they aren’t getting it.”

By the summer of 2009 the Documentation Center had trucked more than 10,000 villagers to Phnom Penh to see the trial—or brought DVD excerpts to show in their own villages. Reicherter described taking part in one of these “outreach” trips.

Reicherter grimaced and shook his head. “I told him, ‘You’re kidding!’ He wasn’t.”

Youk Chhang said he understood the doctor’s concerns but pointed out that he is a researcher, not a treatment specialist. The government, he insisted, should provide any needed psychiatric services. Of course, he knew the government could not, would not, do that in any case. Cambodia had only about twenty-six psychiatrists in the entire nation. Most of them worked in hospitals, handing out pills “because that pays more,” said Muny Sothara, a psychiatrist with the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization. He was one of only three or four clinical psychiatrists in the country. He grew agitated when he discussed Youk Chhang and his outreach program:

Sophearith Choung worked for Youk Chhang for several years but quit, he said, in part because he could not bring himself to participate in the outreach project any longer. “How many people died, and we didn’t know anything about it? I have a big concern about that project. I feel guilty. The problem is, with mental health there’s a delay in dying. I saw in some cases they were very emotional as they left. I want to understand how physical problems and mental health are related. This was an activity I could not accept.”

At the Kampong Speu event, Yim Choy, a forty-four-year-old farmer, shouted at the crowd, saying that he had been conscripted to a childlabor
team. “I cannot forgive Duch!” he declared, his voice hard, his tone bitter. “How can I when I saw him throw little boys against a tree?” Afterward, he said that, even now, he cannot talk about those times without growing angry. Yet he had a hard time keeping the thoughts out of his mind. He even dreamed of the horrors almost every night—a hallmark of PTSD. “I see myself with my hands tied behind me.” All of that made him angrier still. He clenched his fists; veins pulsed in his neck.

Youk Chhang was a bright man, college educated in the United States. But in this case he strove to show that he did not understand the consequences of his actions. It was also plain that he felt marginalized. The Documentation Center had been the sole source for information about the Khmer Rouge. But the tribunal usurped that role, even though much of its evidence had come from the center’s files. And now psychiatrists from the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization, often known as the TPO, were sniping at him. “Fifteen years ago, who wanted to talk about the Khmer Rouge tribunal?” he said with a curled lip. “Not the TPO. They stayed away from this” until it got popular. “And now they are just doing it for fund-raising. That’s all. But we are here to assist victims—not to victimize victims. We are sensitive to this problem to the best of our abilities. We have had a long association with them. They trust us. And Cambodians are good followers. They will follow people who lead them, particularly people they trust.”

There lay the crux of the problem. It was not unique to Youk Chhang’s victims. Youk Chhang was bright, educated, well-off. His victims, raised in a culture that respected class hierarchy, followed him—right over the cliff. He may truly not have understood how much damage he was doing.

After his presentation in the Kampong Speu pagoda, sobbing former victims staggered home. Meantime, Youk Chhang led his volunteers—fresh-faced young women from the United States, mostly, who looked up to him as a teacher and mentor—on a short tour of the surroundings. They stopped at a clearing where townspeople had built a twostory glass shrine and filled it with skulls of Khmer Rouge victims. Youk Chhang reflected on the event in the pagoda, and then he cheerily
invited all of them to lunch at a nearby restaurant, “where they make the best roast chicken in a special Khmer way.” Then they all climbed into a van and drove off.