The Master of Confessions (2 page)

Back in court, facing his judges and the public and supported by his calm, steadfast legal team, Duch asks:

T
WO OR THREE MONTHS AFTER KAING GUEK EAV WAS BORN IN NOVEMBER
1942,
a fortune-teller told his parents he was worried about the child's name. It didn't augur well, he said. It made the child vulnerable to illness. So, pressured by this prediction, Kaing Guek Eav's parents changed his name to Yim Cheav. But by the time the child reached his teens, he disliked both his new name and the fortune-teller who was responsible. For him, the name signified being “slow, poor, outdated, a straggler.” At the age of fifteen, he asked two things of his father: first, to allow him to take back his original name; and second, to change his date of birth: he had started his studies late, at the age of nine, and he wanted to seem younger in order to be able to take his exams.

Changing one's name or date of birth is common practice in Cambodia, where no one celebrates birthdays anyway. Time doesn't accrue here, it cycles: if it just goes around in a circle, there's no point keeping count.

Ten or so years later, Kaing Guek Eav again felt compelled to change his identity. This time, he wanted to become a Communist. He wanted to be a
new man
:

Duch, in Khmer, isn't pronounced “dutch.” “Uch” is an arcane phonetic spelling that is supposed to sound like an open “oïk,” as though there's a catch at the end. “Duch,” in other words, is the Khmer way of writing what is pronounced “doïk,” just as you don't say “Khmer” but “kmay.” Linguists have developed a way of writing sounds that is comprehensible only to the initiated. They aren't the only ones trying to protect their knowledge from the common man. Lawyers also have their own phonetics: the law. The legal profession likes to pronounce something just or lawful in terms that make the pronouncement clear only to those in the profession. Insiders—whether in linguistics, law, or politics—are wary of the autonomy of their fellow man.

So we read as “Duch” a name that we pronounce “Doyk.” Paradoxically, however, the linguists have given everyone the freedom to address Duch as they see fit. Thus, the French judge calls him “Dook” while the judge from New Zealand addresses him as “Mr. Kaing Gek Yu,” the correct pronunciation of the phonetic (and therefore misleading) “Kaing Guek Eav.” One prosecutor says “Mr. Kaing” while another lawyer says “Mr. Dook.”

Revolutionaries often have multiple identities. What is uncommon is for one to repent of his crimes. In less than four years in the late 1970s, the Communist Party of Kampuchea annihilated between a quarter and a third of the population of Cambodia. Yet the “brothers” who ran the Party have always insisted that they had nothing to do with the massacre. Duch, who was their direct subordinate, is the only high-ranking Khmer Rouge cadre to have admitted his part in the destruction of his people.

Duch's admission of responsibility is “pretty close to unique among surviving active members of that administration,” historian David Chandler tells the tribunal.

That Duch admits both to the bulk of his crimes at S-21 and to the criminal nature of the ideology he served makes his trial unique; that he stood up in court every day for six months to explain himself and his actions makes it even more so. Not a day passed when the defendant did not address the court, and no question of fact or point of history was examined without being put to him. I have covered several trials for genocide or crimes against humanity in international courts; no other perpetrator has been given such ample opportunity to be heard—not in Arusha, Freetown, or The Hague.

In Phnom Penh, Duch was the only one to behave like this. At the time of his trial, four other Khmer Rouge leaders were to stand before the same tribunal after him. All of them were in their eighties. All of them denied everything. By December 2013, only two of the four accused were still facing trial, as one was declared mentally unfit and another had died.

THE TRIBUNAL TASKED WITH
trying the Nazis was set up, naturally enough, in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. In Arusha, the court deciding the case against the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide chose as its seat the conference center where peace talks had taken place. In The Hague, the tribunal for Lebanon is in a building formerly occupied by the intelligence service, while the International Criminal Court will soon take up residence in what were once military barracks. Each of these tribunals chose as its seat a location that is more or less symbolically apt.

In Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal changed venue at the last minute. The trials were originally supposed to have been held in the historic Chaktomuk Conference Center in the center of town. Built in the early '60s by the master of New Khmer Architecture, this great hall is located on the banks of the Tonle Sap River. Its eight-point serrated roof makes it look like a giant, handheld fan, or perhaps a palm frond, while the spire soaring from the vertex of its triangular shape brings to mind a giant compass. It was here, shortly after the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, that Pol Pot was tried in absentia, in a trial organized under the Vietnamese occupation and subject to the vagaries of the propaganda of the time. It was here, too, that twenty-four years later, the United Nations and the government of Cambodia signed an agreement to create a tribunal to try the handful of surviving high-ranking Khmer Rouge leaders.

Including Duch.

But at the last minute, the government decided that noble Chaktomuk Hall wasn't spacious enough and that holding the trials there would cause traffic problems. So the government generously suggested—or rather decided—to move the tribunal to a military base on the outskirts of town, some forty minutes by car from the city center. In symbolic terms, there's something almost wanton about the turnaround.

However this exile from the city center has done the tribunal no harm in terms of space or attendance. Its public gallery is by far the largest and most comfortable of the seven international courts established in Africa and Europe over the past two decades. In fact, the five-hundred-seat amphitheater is so vast that we observers end up watching much of the proceedings on the flat-screen televisions installed in the gallery, rather than directly. Witnesses in the courtroom have their backs to us when they take the stand, so we only see their faces on the screens. It may seem strange, but we watch on television the trial taking place in the courtroom before us.

Every day, dozens of flashlights, plastic water bottles, pots of Tiger Balm, cigarette lighters, and various other provisions accumulate on the shelves next to the metal detector at the entrance to the public gallery. Hundreds of villagers are bused in by the tribunal's Public Affairs Section or by local associations. One of the first things that these villagers learn when coming face to face with international justice is that international justice considers dangerous or discourteous items that are practical or essential for villagers: water, ointment, and newspapers are not allowed.

Three flags hang above the judges' heads: that of the Kingdom of Cambodia, with its restrictive motto “Nation, Religion, King”; that of the United Nations, with its fragile olive branches of peace; and that of the tribunal itself, with its cumbersome name—the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia—on which the UN olive branches curl around a Khmer prince from Angkor times sitting cross-legged and holding a sword in his right hand, tip pointed to the sky. The judges, three Cambodians and two Westerners, thus find themselves under allegiance to three discrete entities: to their country (or host country), to the United Nations, and to themselves. Some say that holding multiple allegiances keeps a person from making extremist choices. This precarious triple fealty, however, hovers over the judges like damnation over the heads of churchgoers.

To enter the gallery, spectators must pass through two metal detectors. Once inside, a massive, soundproofed, plate-glass window separates them from the courtroom. Five guards stand sentry inside the vast public gallery.

If repression can be ranked by degrees, then the tribunal's security detail is certainly at the lower, more benign end of the scale. The sentries in Phnom Penh are nothing like those at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, who, elsewhere and in other circumstances, wouldn't seem out of place in the darkest of militias. As for those guarding the tribunals of the Third World, a cheerful nonchalance often belies their uniforms and regulations. A Dutch guard is much ruder and infinitely more hostile than a Khmer, Sierra Leonean, or Tanzanian one. Wherever they're from, though, they're all exposed to the same crushing boredom.

There is little chance of any trouble arising at the tribunal, and none at all of an attack. But if there's no threat of trouble, then it must be prevented with even greater zeal. The tedium is as great for the public as it is for the tribunal staff, and one way to break it is to ban something new. One nuisance specific to Phnom Penh is the ban on Tiger Balm, an ointment as precious to those who work in Khmer fields as lipstick is to Parisian women. Yet a guard at the last checkpoint before the courtroom quickly ferrets out the aromatic rub.

Inside, some guards work just as zealously to impose a proper sense of decorum on the public. Shutting your eyes is forbidden, as is raising a knee above the back of the seat in front. Letting your eyelids droop was also banned at Nuremberg in 1945, as was crossing your legs if you were sitting in the front row. Yet despite the intense security during the Nazi trials, the journalist Rebecca West described how one of her female colleagues once smuggled into the courtroom a loaded pistol in her jacket sleeve. Nothing so sensational happened in Phnom Penh. But the occasional buzz of a vibrating cell phone, or whiff of menthol, or magazine sticking out from beneath a notebook reminds us, with reassuring regularity, of how one can always make a mockery of law and order.

Most of the people in the public gallery have skin the color of mahogany, of burnt umber or old leather—colors that give them away as country folk.

Their presence alone is a blithe challenge to the endless crush of rules and regulations. The only thing that equals the surprise a Khmer peasant feels when his Tiger Balm is confiscated is his bewilderment on being scolded for napping. One day a woman falls asleep on her neighbor's shoulder. She can't help it: she had to leave her village at one in the morning to make the session. The guard tries to shake her awake. He fails and, flummoxed, gives up. Old farming women, as supple as they are slight, curl up on their chairs in that position so natural to Khmers but so awkward for everyone else: with their legs folded back, in parallel and off to one side so as not to offend Buddha. And not even the most zealous guard dares prevent people from kicking off their sandals. In Asia, even the rich go barefoot.

For those bused in from the nation's rice paddies, no courtroom rule stays sacred for very long. With a blissful lack of awareness, they ignore the rule about not standing until after the president of the tribunal has stood, just as they ignore the diktat that no one should leave until the last judge has exited the court. From the first recess on the first day of the trial, the guards are spectacularly overwhelmed, and there's a cheerful, gratifying buzz when, much to the guards' consternation, everybody gets up at once. It's a metaphorical victory of the people over the mighty and a refreshing sight, like a revolution without the dogma, or a massive jailbreak. Throughout the rest of the trial, the guards never once succeed in calming the ruckus kicked up by these common folk. Watching the guards, arms dangling by their sides, stumped by their inability to corral the cheerful flood of people, is a daily and secret pleasure; one that lets you believe, even for a fleeting moment, in freedom.

One day, while Duch is giving a painstaking analysis of the Party's propaganda machine in the courtroom, an eye-catching group of observers swarms into the public gallery. All of them are wearing the same T-shirt emblazoned with the name of the tribunal, and their presence makes the gallery feel like a more cheerful rendition of a Communist party meeting. Scores of baseball caps, T-shirts, and notebooks bearing the court's name had just been manufactured and distributed. Present-day Cambodia is run by former Communists, including some notorious erstwhile Khmer Rouge, and certain habits, such as producing propaganda for the masses, die hard. The four hundred people brought in every day from different parts of the country or from the schools and universities of Phnom Penh sometimes seem like a perfect example of mass political mobilization.

Still, despite all its quirks, Duch's trial will give thirty thousand Cambodians the chance to spend at least a day inside this court, unique in their country. No other international trial has had an audience as vast and wide-ranging as this one.

THE CRIMES COMMITTED BY
the Khmer Rouge are thirty-five years old, and the trial draws members of at least three generations. First, there are those who came of age in the 1970s, when the Communist guerrillas seized power. For the Cambodians among them, this was their greatest misfortune. For many Western Communist sympathizers of that generation, the rise of the Khmer Maoists in the midst of the Cold War became a focal point of their political activism—until it transformed their utopia into a killing field.