The Master of Confessions (3 page)

Then there are those who came of age in the 1980s and for whom Pol Pot, deposed but still a threat, stood alongside Stalin and Hitler to complete the twentieth century's blood-soaked totalitarian triumvirate.

Finally, there are those born while international Communism was dying its ugly death and who learned about Marxism-Leninism the way you might learn about steam engines, with their old-fashioned jargon. For them, the most interesting thing about the twentieth century's blood-stained ideological experiment is the case studies it now provides, where we can see international justice at work.

All these disparate elements converge around Duch's case. I was born the year Duch swore allegiance to the Communist Party. I was twelve years old when the Vietnamese Communists put an end to his crimes, twenty-two when the Berlin Wall fell, and thirty-one when Pol Pot died and Cambodia's civil war, then as old as me, ended. Many in the gallery had personal reasons to be here. I had none other than having turned twenty years old during the Cold War.

This trial brings us all together. Sometimes we connect, sometimes we avoid each other—but all of us are in it together.

B
OU MENG WAS TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD IN
1970,
the year he answered Prince Norodom Sihanouk's rallying cry against the forces that had just deposed him. The following year, Bou Meng went into the
maquis
, bands of guerrilla fighters, by then controlled by the enigmatic Khmer Rouge. The fledgling revolutionary movement was quick to make use of his artistic talents, and he soon found himself painting portraits of Marx and Lenin, mimeographs of which were distributed to Khmer Rouge combat units so that their fighters could recognize the founding fathers of Communism. Four years later, on April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. Bou Meng cheered the victory, but his cheers turned to dismay when the movement forced the capital's entire population to evacuate. The following year, his superiors were arrested, and Bou Meng started losing confidence in this revolution that rewarded its soldiers so poorly.

“I wore the black shirt, but my spirit wasn't in it,” he tells the court.

In the land of the Khmer Rouge, when a commander was arrested, his men soon followed. It was known as a “line.” A few months after the fall of his commander, Bou Meng and his wife were transferred to what he dubs a “hot reeducation” cooperative: in effect, a forced labor camp run with ruthless discipline. Like hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, Bou Meng became a prisoner. He dug canals and built dykes until he was on the verge of collapse. Then he had the good fortune to be transferred first to carpentry, then to the vegetable garden. He grew cabbages and eggplants for the collective. In May of 1977 (or maybe it was June, he doesn't remember exactly) he was slaving away in a vegetable patch when a group of black-shirted men jumped out of a jeep like a murder of crows. They told Bou Meng and his wife to pack their things; they were going to become teachers at the School of Fine Arts. Bou Meng was thrilled—he was a painter, not a gardener. He and his wife cheerfully got into the vehicle. The vehicle drove away from the camp, then stopped. They were ordered to get out, to sit down, and to put their hands behind their backs. They were tied up and blindfolded. Bou Meng's wife began to cry. He sank to the depths of despair.

In the courtroom, Bou Meng pauses in his story. He brings a hand to his forehead, as though the ghosts of the past are pounding too hard, as though he's about to lose consciousness. Duch is in the dock, sitting upright and perfectly still.

Unlike Bou Meng, Vann Nath—also a painter—didn't serve in the army. He was just nineteen when the Khmer Rouge won the war. But on December 30, 1977, like Bou Meng, he was arrested by men in black by order of the Angkar—“The Organization,” in Khmer—the secretive, all-knowing, and all-powerful body that controlled everything in the new “Democratic Kampuchea.”

Vann Nath is just sixty-three when he takes the witness stand, but he looks feeble and tired. He's a tall man and he wears a billowing, pale yellow shirt. He greets the judges, the prosecutors, and the defense. Duch doesn't move. The painter's hair is cut very short and has gone gray. His eyebrows, slightly disheveled at their outer edges but still black near his nose, are the predominant feature of his face, the roundness of which is emphasized by his full cheeks that have only just begun to sag with age. His deep voice contrasts with the presiding judge's high-pitched one. Vann Nath speaks with his eyes almost closed and glued to the ground. He continually massages his stomach. Even though he has told it countless times over the past thirty years, emotion overcomes Vann Nath almost as soon as he begins to tell his story. Like Bou Meng, he raises his hand to his forehead, grabs a handkerchief, and pulls himself together before continuing.

Vann Nath spent his first night of detention bound in leg irons in a pagoda-turned-prison. Then he was taken away on a motorcycle. Upon reaching his destination, he was interrogated for the first time. “You're a traitor,” they told him. How many secret meetings had he held? “You'd better remember. The Angkar never makes mistakes.” To help convince him, his interrogators pulled out electrical wires. Vann Nath saw bloodstains and plastic bags hanging on the wall. So, how many meetings? They gave him his first shock. He passed out. Someone threw water in his face. He came to. Then a second shock. He passed out again. Then another, and another after that. Afterward, he couldn't remember what answers he had given his torturers. He was ordered to get into a truck, where he was bound to six other men. There were eighteen prisoners in total. At around midnight, the truck pulled up somewhere. (They were on Street 360 in Phnom Penh, but Vann Nath didn't know that.) The prisoners were weak and exhausted. They couldn't stand. They were made to sit on the ground in two rows. Then they were roped together by their necks, blindfolded, and, despite their exhaustion, ordered to march single-file. Voices taunted them as they walked blindly, each man with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front. A question barreled around Vann Nath's head: what had he done wrong?

It was January 7, 1978. He had just entered S-21.

IN THE CAMBODIAN CAPITAL
, emptied of its inhabitants, the secret police established a security perimeter around S-21 that extended far beyond the prison's single building. The prison itself constituted a small section of a much larger zone. A whole neighborhood was sealed off, with no one allowed in or out. Those who worked at S-21 lived, ate, and worked in the zone without ever leaving. Vehicles delivering prisoners didn't go straight to the gates of the detention center itself. They usually stopped somewhere in the vicinity in order to protect the absolute secrecy of its location.

Him Huy, a member of the guard unit, escorted newcomers from the arrival point to the prison itself, where he handed them over to Suor Thi, whose job it was to note down their “biography” and to register them in the system.

In the courtroom, Suor Thi looks like a bank teller. He sits straight, his face expressionless and smooth, his demeanor mechanical without being cold, as though he's put his smile away in a box labeled
POINTLESS AND DAMAGING EXPRESSIONS
. He sits with his arms crossed and his eyes lowered, perfectly still, showing no emotion. Only his constantly blinking eyelids break his otherwise statue-like stillness, though he does sometimes glance at the judge interrogating him:

In the English interpretation, Suor Thi uses the word “rooms” to denote the shared cells. The prison clerk describes his workday in the same neutral, even tones that someone managing a large hotel might use to describe the number of short- and longer-term guests currently checked in. Once a photograph of a new prisoner had been taken, Suor Thi attached it to the short “biography” he had written. He was twenty-four years old, and his job was to keep the list of detainees at S-21 up to date, to record the names of the incoming and outgoing prisoners. In other words, he was the registrar of death.

Suor Thi didn't deal directly with the important prisoners, who were received separately. He was given their names for the register only later by Hor, the number two at the prison and the person in charge of its daily administration. Nor did foreign prisoners pass through Suor Thi's office. There was a different procedure when the personnel of S-21 themselves were arrested and thrown into irons in the very place where, the day before, they had been carrying out their tasks. They were led in with their faces covered so that their colleagues wouldn't recognize them. As for the children who ended up in S-21, there was no point writing down their biographies or taking snapshots of them, says Suor Thi: “I paid no attention to the children because I had to pay such close attention to the prisoners. None of the children would survive. All of them would be killed.”

Suor Thi reminds the court that he was alone in his task and that sometimes his workload was considerable. He had to be available to the prison at all times, without exception. On a normal day, he would process between one and twenty people. But he remembers that in 1978, prisoners flooded in by the hundreds. It was during this period that some prisoners were photographed inside the cells themselves, an anomaly that was against the center's strict regulations. At the time, the engine of death was at full throttle, overheating even. In all the hustle and bustle, a new arrival might inadvertently be taken to their cell without having been photographed first. So they tried to work through the backlog by taking the photos inside the cells, explains the former registrar.

While Suor Thi is describing the registration and record-keeping processes, Duch is nodding. Leaning forward with his chest over the table and wearing an elegant white shirt, he shows no sign of scorn. There's a look of concentration on his face, of concern, a look he reserves for those he respects or deems legitimate. During the court's recess, he seems very relaxed, laughing with his Cambodian lawyer Kar Savuth, under the curious eyes of one of the two policemen guarding him.

SUOR THI IS WEARING
a gray suit jacket that looks uncannily like the one worn by several witnesses over the past few days. The jacket looks well-made, but Suor Thi is drowning in it, just as those who testified before him were. A few days earlier, the tribunal employees in charge of preparing the witnesses needed a jacket. Pressed for time, they found the one Suor Thi is now wearing, forgotten by a prosecutor. They were happy with the result: not only did the jacket protect witnesses from the chill of the air-conditioning, but they looked nicer in it, too.

Like their compatriots in the public gallery, many of the witnesses are from the countryside. Their poorly made and badly cut shirts, the breast pockets misshapen by the objects they carry in them, give them away. Their shirts are sometimes so oversize you could fit two people in them, and their wrinkled collars fall limply. Through these shapeless clothes, you can make out undershirts clinging to their dry bodies.

At first, these simply dressed farmers brightened the sterile atmosphere that prevailed in the court. Then, midway through the trial, the court started making them wear the jacket, and the atmosphere lapsed back into that gray gloom where everyone looks the same, like detainees.

When a prisoner arrived at S-21 and had his photo taken, a number would be hung around his neck. Bou Meng's wife, Ma Yoeun, wore number 331, indicating that she was the 331st person to enter the prison that month. In her photo, Ma Yoeun wears her hair in the only style available to women in Democratic Kampuchea: a bob reaching halfway down her neck and parted square in the middle—though a few coquettish rebels pushed the part slightly to one side. In the photo, Ma Yoeun is a pretty twenty-five-year-old with a slightly frightened look in her eyes—a normal reaction in someone who has been arrested and just had her blindfold removed. The photo taken at S-21 is the only trace Bou Meng has left of his wife, and though it was taken by those who killed her, he never parts from it. She never leaves his wallet. Bou Meng has remarried, and his devoted second wife is twenty years his junior. But his memory is unfailing in its devotion to his first love.

After being photographed, Vann Nath and his fellow prisoners had their compulsory black clothes taken from them. The prisoners were left wearing nothing but their underpants. They were no longer worthy of the Glorious Revolution, and their clothes would be redistributed. This also prevented them from hanging themselves with the clothing.

Once the detainees had been identified, registered, photographed, and relieved of their revolutionary attire, Suor Thi handed them over to a guard, who took them to their cells. Sometimes he went to the cells himself to check prisoners off his list. But when he did, he says, he paid little attention to the conditions in which the men were incarcerated:

T
HE S-21 PRISON WAS SET UP IN A FORMER HIGH SCHOOL.
It is made up of five buildings shaped like a giant E. Buildings A, B, C, and D, which form the perimeter, rise over three floors, each with wide balconies running alongside the classrooms-turned-jail-cells. In the middle of the structure, the fifth block is a big, single-story house with a covered inner courtyard that divides the space into two distinct areas.