The Master of Confessions Page 4

  CHAPTER 5

  PRAK KHAN HAS THE AMIABLE FACE OF A TOUGH AND SELF-ASSURED OLDER MAN, and the thin, delicate lips that so often grace the Khmer people. You can see the muscles of his strong back through his jacket. At fifty-eight, his hair has yet to turn gray. He lost an ear to the war. Like Him Huy and much of the staff at S-21, he was a soldier in the 703 Division of the Khmer Rouge Army. Then he served first as a guard outside the prison—near the canal on Street 360, where Vann Nath was driven before being escorted on foot into the prison proper. Next, possibly toward the end of 1976, Prak Khan became an interrogator. He learned how to interrogate on the job, by watching others and attending the training sessions set up by Duch and run by his deputies, Mam Nai and Pon. Prak Khan learned what “CIA” and “KGB” meant—like most of his victims, he had never heard of them before. In court, he admits that he still wasn’t completely clear who the enemy was, even after the training sessions.

  He learned the procedures, politics, and the use of torture. The goal, he explains, was to know how to inflict pain on a person without killing them. In theory, at least, the interrogations were strictly regulated. Beating someone to death was forbidden. Some of the techniques taught included electrocution, whipping, asphyxiation with a plastic bag, and inserting needles under the victims’ nails. Waterboarding and venomous insects weren’t on the list, says Prak Khan. “We told the prisoners not to make any noise, not to swear, and not to cry out while we tortured them.”

  The objective was to learn the names of the other traitors in a given network. Prak Khan dealt with low-level prisoners, not those that the Party considered important. The interrogators were divided into “cold teams,” “hot teams,” and somewhere in between, “chewing teams.” The “cold” interrogators obtained confessions through questioning alone.

  “The cold method was to understand the person,” explains Duch. “I don’t believe the other interrogators pursued this method to the extent that I did. In principle, according to my training, interrogators had to try to persuade the prisoners first by speaking with them before actually resorting to torture. But often they focused more on the torture.”

  The “hot” interrogators used electrocution and any other cruel methods they found effective. As for the “chewing” team, says Prak Khan, who was a member, their instructions were to “interrogate in-depth.”

  But Chum Mey dismisses all these distinctions: “Torture is always hot. It is never cold or lukewarm, it’s always hot.”

  DUCH FIDDLES WITH A YELLOW PEN. He seems serene. Though the court is in recess, he remains in the courtroom, making notes and underlining passages. He looks up, flashes a sparkling smile, and starts a conversation with the Cambodian assistant to his defense team. After about ten minutes, he slips out. The filmmaker Rithy Panh enters the public gallery and sits in his usual place on the left side of the front row. The trial is being broadcast on the screen nearby. Rithy Panh watches carefully. The film made by the court is of very poor quality and has become an ever-growing source of irritation to him.

  Outside the courtroom, the tribunal’s Public Affairs Section tries to satisfy the media’s appetite and offer it more scintillating distractions. Sometimes this leads to blunders—for instance, the day they put a cousin of Pol Pot’s, who had been bused in to watch the trial, in front of journalists during the lunch recess. The Public Affairs people had promised the media Pol Pot’s brother. But the brother wasn’t there, so they threw this cousin to the lions. She had never even met Pol Pot, a.k.a. “Brother Number One.”

  “I believe this court will do justice to those who perished,” she said meekly.

  Rithy Panh was fuming.

  “What was Pol Pot’s favorite food?” he said bitterly.

  The impromptu press conference quickly degenerated. The relentless pressure from the microphones and cameras pushed this peasant woman to tears. She felt completely lost, she said.

  “This is a disgrace!” thundered Rithy Panh. “You’ve reduced this poor woman to tears, and she didn’t even know Pol Pot! Are you mad? Let her go home!”

  Duch has now returned to the courtroom, his hands in his pockets. He starts talking to his defense team. A judge walks in without his robes, the garment that elevates lawyers to demigods. He summons one of his legal assistants, then leaves the courtroom only to return a moment later wearing his hallowed garment. The trial resumes. The villagers return to the public gallery. The guard on duty today—his shirt the shade of UN blue, intended to reflect the organization’s mercy—wakes two dozing peasant women. They laugh with a reassuring lightness when he gets their attention. The psychologist who examined Duch is sitting among them. She is here to update her assessment. Duch stares at her through the glass wall. His piercing gaze wavers. He snaps out of it and, relaxing his face, brings his attention back to the proceedings.

  “Did you see Duch torture a female prisoner?” a judge asks Prak Khan.

  “I didn’t see it clearly. I don’t think he did. He just interrogated her. Others tortured her. Dek Bou beat her and electrocuted her. He suffocated her until she passed out.”

  Without taking his eyes off the witness, Duch leans forward and pours himself a glass of water. He is fully present now; he has recovered his usual intensity.

  “Sometimes Duch would come by to ask if the prisoner had confessed yet,” says Prak Khan.

  An interrogator would never draft an incomplete confession, explains the former interrogator. A confession was deemed suitable only when the interrogator had clearly identified a network of traitors. Once he had his list of people, he gave his report to his superior, who checked it, then passed it on to Duch, who, like the schoolteacher that he is, made notes in the margins in red ink. Once the confession was deemed complete, the prisoner was taken from the brick-walled isolation cell back to one of the group cells, where he would remain until his execution. According to Prak Khan, more than half the prisoners were never interrogated. They went straight to the killing fields.

  When Prak Khan says that he could read a little French at the time but that he has forgotten it since, a smile creeps across Duch’s face. He smiles often during his former subordinate’s time on the stand, his expression turning into a muted leer of condescension whenever Prak Khan displays his limited education. And when the witness’s story veers into implausibility, Duch looks up at the ceiling and smirks in disbelief. Whenever he lets down his guard, Duch finds it difficult to control his laughter. As the next recess is called, Duch stares at Prak Khan awhile, obviously resisting the urge to laugh, before getting up and leaving the courtroom.

  Along with Him Huy, Prak Khan is one of the greatest threats to Duch’s case. Duch’s response is to eyeball them both in the courtroom, to carry out a silent campaign as fierce in its intent as their testimony against him is devastating. Waiting for the judges to return at the end of recess, Duch stares at the former interrogator, a wry smile on his face. Prak Khan doesn’t dare meet the gaze he surely feels against the back of his neck like a cold blade. Duch lets his eyes wander away, and looks over the vast and packed public gallery.

  Prak Khan and Him Huy have been telling their stories for years. To this day, they agree to virtually every interview request, which means that for three decades, their memories have been spurred and goaded to the point that they almost certainly generate many speculative and spurious claims alongside the verifiable ones. One of the law’s most common—and most mutable—tasks is to separate facts from fictions that inhabit our memories. The conflicted and incriminating memories of torturers and executioners are trickier still.

  A case in point: prior to Duch’s trial, Prak Khan said that he had seen Duch personally administer electric shocks to prisoners, which is the only such evidence against the defendant. But Prak Khan won’t repeat it in court. Instead, he either shifts the blame onto another interrogator or else claims he can’t remember. And indeed, by the trial’s close, the resolution of the most serious allegations leveled directly at Duch—including Him H
uy’s testimony about what took place in the killing fields of Choeung Ek and Prak Khan’s claims of what went on in the interrogation rooms of S-21—appears to depend more on personal conviction (I believe / I don’t believe) than on the legal burden of proof (it happened / it didn’t happen).

  Him Huy and Prak Khan risk nothing: they won’t face trial. But, like Duch, they’re trying to untangle their memories.

  “I didn’t participate in torture, but I saw other prisoners tortured until they passed out,” says Prak Khan.

  It’s always somebody else; somebody who’s now dead.

  The trouble is that Prak Khan has previously admitted that “chewing” included torture. He has also admitted, though not in court, that he himself tortured prisoners by electrocution, by beatings, and with animal traps. A judge reminds him of this: “Do you wish to comment, or do you choose the right to remain silent?”

  “I do not want to add anything. It reflects the truth.”

  THE TRUTH IS A HARD THING to articulate, let alone take responsibility for. Though we have good reason to decry the torturers’ failure to speak the truth, the temptation to omit and obfuscate the unpalatable preys on us all. Who among us has not been tricked by his own memory or perception? In court, not even the victims speak “nothing but the truth.” No one ever speaks “nothing but the truth.”

  A courtroom is a place of high drama and strong emotion, where truths emerge and stories reach their dramatic climaxes. But it can also be a terribly sterile place and the source of great disappointment. With Prak Khan, it’s the latter. In Rithy Panh’s famous 2003 film, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, we see Prak Khan talking about drawing blood from prisoners; we hear him describe how he considered the detainees to be nothing more than animals; we hear how he disassociated himself from his actions. Compared to what he said to the camera, the testimony he gives in court is dismayingly benign. The terrible allegations he made on film are stifled in court, hidden behind his right to remain silent. In a canny move, Duch’s defense team has threatened legal action against former S-21 personnel. That they could pursue such a course is highly unlikely, but the threat alone is deterrent enough. Which truth, then, should we believe—the legal truth or the filmed one? Some of Prak Khan’s and Him Huy’s “memories,” either imagined or based on hearsay, vanish the moment they take an oath to speak the truth.

  Duch denies Prak Khan’s assertion that he regularly attended interrogations. He reminds us that everyone adhered to the strict hierarchy he had instituted at S-21. The clerk Suor Thi was very much at the prison’s nerve center, for example, yet he had no personal contact with Duch, its head. To get a message to Duch, he had to pass through Hor, the second-in-command at S-21. Suor Thi never received a direct order from Duch—whom he called “Brother East” because Duch was situated on the east side of the prison. Suor Thi feared Hor, “Brother West,” but he also knew that Brother West was afraid of Brother East. What he didn’t know was who Brother East, a.k.a. Duch, was frightened of.

  “That was beyond what I could know,” he says.

  Like the prison’s other officers, Suor Thi regularly saw his colleagues get arrested and disappear. Fear was omnipresent. Everyone was terrified. More than 150 S-21 officers were victims of purges at their own prison.

  Prak Khan’s lower rank prevented him from reporting directly to Duch, explains Duch. He had to go through an intermediary.

  Duch says evenly:

  He couldn’t go over his supervisor’s head to talk to me. If I had discussed the slightest thing with Prak Khan without going through my deputies, what was the point of having them? I didn’t have the time to give instructions to each individual interrogator, including Prak Khan. I had never met [him] or even heard his name until January 7, 1979. He was a low-level member of staff. I spent some time trying to understand his life story.

  Duch stands when addressing the court. His face is gaunt and he looks old and tired. He summons his energy, then says in a conciliatory tone:

  I believe Prak Khan’s testimony, wherever it leads. There’s a lot in it that’s false, but I think this is the result of fear. Back then, you were afraid that I would have you arrested. Now, like me, you are afraid of having to face the tribunal. But I neither wish for nor need my subordinates to appear by my side before this court. I am responsible for what happened at S-21.

  At this moment, an old revolutionary habit catches Duch off guard: he raises his hand in a military salute. He goes on to list the errors and extrapolations in Prak Khan’s testimony, before admonishing: “Never say anything without material proof! You are making subjective claims without any supporting documentation.”

  Presiding judge Nil Nonn calls Duch to order. Judge Cartwright pulls out a document. It’s dated February 1976 and comprises the minutes of a meeting of Phnom Penh’s defense force, when Duch’s job was to teach Party doctrine. The document quotes him as saying, “Forget the idea that beating a prisoner is cruel. There’s no place for kindness in such cases. You must beat them for national, international, and class reasons.”

  Duch counters with another set of minutes, written five days earlier and in which this damning statement doesn’t appear. Even with supporting documents, the torturers’ truth is slippery to the point of being exasperating. When the court asks Suor Thi to explain a document in the archives for which he was responsible, he says that the page isn’t formatted the way it was back then, or the number of columns is wrong, or it was written on a different typewriter, or the annotations aren’t correct.

  HIM HUY, A STILL-SPRIGHTLY OLD MAN with laughing eyes and thick black hair, appears in court wearing an apple-green shirt over a yellow T-shirt, his spectacles tucked into his breast pocket. The former guard has a face shaped like a mango and long, beautiful, pointed lips. He suffers from a nervous tic that makes him sniff and blink continually. Him Huy is typical of the indoctrinated youth who worked at S-21—the young peasants recruited as henchmen by the teachers who ran the complex. He was an illiterate seventeen-year-old when the Party enlisted him. He soon found himself under the command of one of Duch’s two deputies, the number three of this little archipelago of death, who ran the “reeducation” center S-24.

  Conscripting children into war or revolution is nothing new. Duch recruited teenagers because they were

  like blank pages on which you can easily write or paint. . . . We took in many young people and trained them to be cruel. We used Communist jargon to normalize extreme situations—that played a big part in turning innocent people into brutes. Their characters changed. Their kindness gave way to cruelty. They became motivated by class rage.

  When Him Huy relates how his fellow officers were arrested, Duch smiles, puckers his lips, and raises an eyebrow, as if to say that the story strikes him as not quite true. Duch is so relaxed he comes across as almost arrogant. He exudes a quiet pressure in the courtroom, and makes his presence felt. Him Huy sniffs. He describes how the purges at S-21 threatened the most senior officers, including Duch’s two deputies. He explains that, from 1976 on, he was promoted after each purge until eventually he was a head guard. When Nath, Duch’s predecessor as the head of S-21, was crushed by his own machine toward the end of 1978, followed shortly thereafter by one of Duch’s deputies, Him Huy worried that he would be next, that he was about to be swept away along with the rest of one of those “lines” that the Angkar traced between people before wiping them out. He sniffs again: “Honestly, when I see him now, it reminds me of when I worked for him and was frightened of him. He still frightens me. If we hadn’t been liberated on January 7, 1979, I don’t think I would be around today.”

  Him Huy slumps into his seat and pulls out a big yellow handkerchief. “I would’ve been killed because Duch said so. He said everyone would be killed in the end.”

  Suor Thi describes his terror at the end of 1978, when the leaders started wiping one another out. All his hard work had amounted to nothing, he tells the court. “All I got in return was fear.”

&
nbsp; “Did you like your work?”

  “Not for a second. I hated it, but I had to do it.”

  “Why didn’t you leave?”

  “Where could I have gone, under the regime? If I was five minutes late, someone noticed. I had no choice but to force myself to do my job. There was nowhere to escape to. The personnel at S-21 didn’t like the regime, and that’s the truth.”

  Before stepping down from the stand, the S-21 survivor Chum Mey has some questions he wants to ask Duch. When he was accused of being in the CIA, were all the agency’s agents eliminated or did a few remain? What exactly was the Angkar? And was Pol Pot the same thing as the Khmer Rouge? All these questions are still on his mind, he says. He would like to have clear answers for the schoolchildren to whom he speaks from time to time.

  Head Judge Nil Nonn looks amused by the old survivor’s naive questions. Duch smiles. There’s nothing he likes more than wearing his teacher’s hat.

  “I want to make it clear that the term ‘CIA’ referred to those people who opposed the Communist Party of Kampuchea,” says Duch. “The real CIA and the Party’s CIA were two different things.”

  As for the Angkar, he says, it was basically the Party’s permanent committee. But the concept, by its very essence, had to remain mysterious.

  For Chum Mey, the memory of all those he denounced in his confession is a painful one. He loses his temper. Again and again, he goes over the accusation of treason that had been leveled against him, an accusation he had never understood, that had never made any sense to him and yet had cost him so much. Behind all of his questions to the executioner lies the enormous, unyielding stupefaction of a sane man vainly seeking to understand the inexplicable.

  CHAPTER 6

  DUCH STANDS AND GREETS THE COURT. He begins by saying that his people’s suffering started with Prince Sihanouk’s repressive government in the mid-1960s and continued after the far right–wing coup of March 18, 1970, when “all the parties competed to kill Cambodians until April 1975.” He holds a sheet of paper in one hand and leans on the edge of the table with the other. It takes just seconds for the room to fall silent. Though the trial started the previous day, not until now has it been imbued with that solemn atmosphere so specific to important moments in courtrooms. Duch is asking for forgiveness: