The Master of Confessions (15 page)

At that instant, I almost feel a connection between the two men. But this turns out to be just another one of those dreams that the trial abruptly shatters.

I
T WAS SUOR THI'S JOB TO CHECK OFF THE NAME OF EACH PERSON
leaving through the prison gate. The prison clerk knew that if he made a mistake, he would be considered an enemy, and he was in a better position than most to know what became of the regime's enemies. The gate opened just enough that no more than one prisoner at a time could pass through. Suor Thi ticked off each name on the list. The prisoners' hands were bound, their eyes blindfolded. One by one, they were led aboard a truck parked in front of the gate. They used a chair that someone had put next to the back of the truck as a step. The truck was large enough to hold sixty people and there was a Land Rover available if more room was needed. The convoy left around six in the evening. The trip to the killing fields at Choeung Ek took about half an hour.

No one kept a list of the children sent to their deaths. The regime liked to recruit the young to do its drudgework, because they were “blank pages”: when they were sacrificed, their “pages” stayed blank. According to Him Huy, the guard in charge of transporting prisoners from S-21 to the killing fields, the children were killed closer to the prison, in the center of town. But this wasn't his responsibility, he clarifies. Maybe so. Or maybe he finds it too difficult to confess to their executions. Peng and Phal, the other executioners held responsible for the children's murder, are both dead. The “others” are always dead.

Important prisoners—that is, high-ranking cadres purged from the regime—also received special treatment. They were executed near S-21 and buried near the intersection of Street 163 and Mao Tse-tung Boulevard, says Duch, short of breath, with his mouth hanging open.

These special prisoners were hit in the back of the head and then had their throats cut, like everyone else. But, unlike everyone else, they were sometimes disemboweled and photographed. This was to reassure the Standing Committee that their former colleagues were dead. The only other victims who were photographed postmortem were those who died in the prison, prematurely, from torture. Prison staff photographed their bodies to prove to the director that the prisoners hadn't escaped.

Once they arrived at Choeung Ek, the prisoners were led to a wooden shack, one at a time. The generator was turned on so that there was light and, some say, to drown out the sounds. The executioners gathered around pits similar to shell holes, dug into the field around the house. They carried torches and the tools they needed. Him Huy would then go through the list of that night's victims, checking each name with each prisoner. He had to make sure that he had correctly checked off the names on the list he took back to the prison. An executioner would lead one prisoner at a time from the shack to an execution pit. The executioners would tell the victim that they were taking him or her to another house. The executioners tried to put the victims at ease, to make sure they died in silence.

“We told them to kneel by the pit. We hit them on the back of the neck with an iron bar. We cut their throats. Then we took off their handcuffs and clothes,” says Him Huy.

The men in black killed by night. The executions began around nine p.m. and could last until dawn, depending on the number of people they had to kill. At seven the next morning, Suor Thi had to provide his superiors with the “list of destruction” containing the names and jobs of those who had been executed, as well as the date on which they had been destroyed by the Revolution.

“I DIDN'T PAY MUCH ATTENTION
to the smashing. It was a practical issue,” says Duch.

Yesterday, Duch broke down while listening to testimonies describing how things worked inside S-21. Today, the descriptions of the executions—quick, simple, almost mechanical acts that took place well away from the prison—help him recover. He goes back to speaking in that measured way that gives him self-control.

Duch can describe how to make sure a victim is dead by cutting his throat. When he does, he lowers his voice. But just as he insists that he followed the interrogations and torture only from a distance, Duch also wants us to believe that he was in no way responsible for the executions. It was Duch's decision to create the killing fields at Choeung Ek, some fifteen kilometers outside Phnom Penh, because, he says, he was worried about an epidemic breaking out in town. It was one of his responsibilities as the head of the prison. But he saw no need and felt no desire to attend the executions. Just as his boss, Son Sen, only visited S-21 once, “on principle,” Duch visited Choeung Ek twice, under orders. He claims to have only once seen executions with his own eyes, at five in the morning after a long, long night of killing at Choeung Ek.

Even within the death mill that was S-21, the actual task of killing prisoners was considered a lowly one. None of Duch's friends from the
maquis
nor any of his other protégés (such as the teenagers he recruited from Kampong Cham) were assigned to the execution detail. In court, Duch has a few compassionate words for those who, like Him Huy, had to carry out the loathsome chore. “I don't believe they acted without conscience or remorse. I believe they had such feelings. I'm conscious of this; I understand it. I think everyone felt ashamed and remorseful about it.”

HIM HUY'S “BIOGRAPHY,”
found in the S-21 archives, reveals what a twenty-two-year-old revolutionary's self-criticism looked like at the time. First, he wrote:

He then admitted that he still had a way to go:

Such was the ideology of the time. Like his boss, Him Huy has since disavowed it. “My biography, like many others, isn't truthful. We had to put what was expected of us in our biographies. I just followed the same template as everyone else.”

Him Huy says that Duch's deputy, Hor, taught execution techniques. He also says that he twice saw Duch at Choeung Ek, in 1977. It's the most incriminating claim he makes against his former boss. Unfortunately, he gives several conflicting versions of what he saw. The testimony he gave during the trial's investigation phase was damning. He told investigators, “Duch accompanied people. There was one prisoner left, and Duch asked me: ‘Are you determined or not?' I told him I was. He ordered me to kill him.” But his testimony in court is much weaker: “Yes, I remember my statement. It was clearly my leader, Duch, but I had to rush to finish my job. At that time, I could not clearly say who was who.”

“Did the accused order you to execute someone on several occasions?”

“I am not really sure now whether at that time it was Duch or Hor, because it was almost dawn and we were in a rush to finish the job.”

The judge asks the defendant to stand.

“Was he the person who asked you to execute a prisoner?”

“As I just stated, we were in a rush. So I was not sure if it was Duch or not at the time. It was either him or Hor, because he was also present at the time, along with Hor.”

Duch knows Him Huy well, and shows him a degree of respect that he denies Prak Khan, for instance. Nevertheless, he counterattacks by deploring the “shortcomings” of Him Huy's deposition. He keeps his eyes fixed on Him Huy, who leans forward like a penitent. The former prison boss lists all the elements of the former guard's testimony that he deems correct, and contests all the elements that incriminate him directly. Him Huy should not have said what he said about Hor and himself, says Duch, because “he does not know.”

Him Huy cannot bring himself to look in Duch's direction. He limits himself to repeating: “When about a hundred prisoners were killed in one single night, Hor and Duch were there. They left before us. We were in such a hurry and worried that the work wouldn't be finished before dawn. I stand by my testimony.”

Roux has no intention of letting such a threat hang over his client's head. He reads the following statement from the minutes of the on-site reconstitution of the crime: “The witness Him Huy has made conflicting statements about the number of times Duch visited [Choeung Ek].” The investigating judges noted that he said that Duch visited “from time to time,” then “once or twice,” then that he didn't know whether it was more than once. During the hearing, Him Huy says that he saw Duch twice. The first time, “the situation was chaotic; it was almost dawn, there was a man by the edge of the pit. The executioners were rushing to finish their job. That's why I'm no longer sure if it was him.” The second time, “I didn't pay much attention, because he was still in his car.” Yet another version of events, quite different from what he initially told the investigators.

“We'll leave it there for the chamber to assess,” concludes the lawyer.

But the chamber chooses to assess nothing whatsoever. If the judges have any opinions about Duch's alleged visits to the killing fields, they keep them to themselves. Prudent in the extreme, they decide that there's enough doubt that they do not have to decide.

ON THE SECOND AND THIRD OF JANUARY 1979,
the selection process for those to be transported to Choeung Ek was drastically expedited. The Khmer Rouge's leaders knew that the Vietnamese troops' rapid advance might force them out of the capital in the coming days. Brother Number Two, Nuon Chea, ordered Duch to kill all the prisoners. Duch says that he asked him to spare four ex–Khmer Rouge soldiers for interrogation. The four had been arrested following the recent murder of a Western journalist who had been on an official visit to Democratic Kampuchea. Brother Number Two granted Duch's request. Over the next two days, every other prisoner was executed. “I still couldn't believe that the Vietnamese were approaching. I thought that the prisoners were being killed in order to make room for new ones, like before. But I was wrong. Then I thought it was going to be my turn. I was exhausted. I couldn't work. I slept all the time.”

Duch is an arduous worker, so when things go wrong for him he claims he is “ruminating,” which is to say he is overtaken by a paralyzing self-doubt. He has twice experienced such episodes, he says: once during the final weeks of S-21, and again two years later, when he was living a precarious life in the
maquis
at the Thai border. According to the psychologists before the court, such episodes are symptoms of depression:

Like Duch, Him Huy says that he didn't like his job, but that he had no choice. Contrary to Duch, he was quick to leave the Revolution behind after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. In 1983, he was accused of being the director of S-21 and thrown into jail, as was Suor Thi. A few months later, Him Huy was sent to work in the rice paddies along the Vietnamese border. He suffered no ill treatment and, ten months later, was sent home.

At the end of his testimony at the international tribunal, Him Huy is asked what he expects to come from it.

“It's like being born again—that's how we feel. We are among the lucky ones who survived. We only want justice to be done.”

Roux reacts immediately: “You have passed yourself off as a victim seeking justice. While I admit that the situation wasn't one of your choosing, the fact is that the criminal machine only worked because leaders like you carried out criminal acts, or ordered them to be carried out, at every step.”

“I'm not sure I understand,” says Him Huy.

“Along the chain of command, each person played a role, and each person participated in a criminal system by obeying his superiors' orders.”

“We had to obey orders or else we would be killed.”

“Is that why you think of yourself as a victim?”

“Yes. We were all victims.”

T
HE REALITY OF THE TOTALITARIAN EXPERIENCE IS OFTEN GRAY.
The woman on the witness stand today has come to honor the man the Khmer Rouge decided she should marry. A revolutionary soldier, he was killed at S-21 in 1977. She describes how she joined the Communist guerrillas in 1971 “because I was very angry about what we were suffering at the hands of the American capitalists and imperialists.” She went into the
maquis
“to liberate the country from those people,” and ended up with the rank of company commander in Democratic Kampuchea's victorious army. When the Angkar arranged her marriage, she and her husband were one of three couples married simultaneously. Conveniently for a woman who found it difficult to celebrate being married to a man not of her own choosing, the Angkar had a remedy: there would be no celebration. Festivities were considered bourgeois.