The Master of Confessions (36 page)

“We submit that infliction of pain was not something he hated,” the prosecutor continues.

THE PROSECUTION'S ARGUMENT,
based on documentary evidence, is irrefutable and convincing. In view of the notes Duch and others made at the time, it would require a huge mental leap, together with a degree of schizophrenia, to give serious consideration to the portrait painted by the defense. But the overwhelming truth contained in the S-21 archives isn't enough for the prosecutor. He asserts, but cannot prove, that the defendant regularly visited the main part of the prison, and specifically they interrogation rooms, even though most of them were in fact outside the prison itself. He claims that Duch participated directly in torture. As proof, he invokes Bizot's account, as described in his book, of Duch hitting prisoners “until he was out of breath,” even though everyone, including the writer himself, has admitted that creative license doesn't amount to evidence.

In the end, people in the court begin to feel as though what happens during the trial doesn't matter; it's not important whether the case has been convincingly made or not. It seems the six months of legal arguments are irrelevant, since all sides are sticking to the positions they held at the outset, come hell or high water. It is against this background of indifference to detail that the prosecutor paints Duch's portrait, a portrait that is and must be harsh and brutal, but which nonetheless raises an uncomfortable question: does this urge to blacken a picture already darker than ink merely manifest our own irresistible yearning to distinguish ourselves from the monster at any cost?

In the fifteen years since international courts were first set up in The Hague, Arusha, Freetown, and Sarajevo, no prosecutor has given so condemnatory a closing statement against a defendant who has not only acknowledged the bulk of his crimes but also collaborated with the judicial authorities and provided damning testimony against other defendants. The international prosecutor is conscious of the special treatment he's giving Duch. He argues that this case is different from the rest. “Let us remember that, each time he has been backed into a corner concerning his own level of involvement, the defendant has been systemically unresponsive and, in our view, dishonest.”

So Duch, unlike all other repentant perpetrators of crimes against humanity, is dishonest. That justifies the special treatment he receives, the logic goes. But the sad truth is, I don't know of a single “honest” confession any prosecutor has received in an international court. A confession is always the result of some compromise, some agreement, some deal; and in some cases such deals have been sufficiently opaque to mask a degree of dishonesty shared by all of the parties involved. Yet prosecutors from The Hague to Arusha have, without exception, proudly and assertively defended these “guilty pleas.”

There is no such thing as an honest or dishonest confession. Whether it's obtained by the threat of a guilty verdict in a legal system that respects the rights of the accused or extorted by electric shock, a confession is always the result of an expedient settlement made between someone in a weakened mental state and mundane interests of the other side.

While the prosecutor pleads his case, Duch shows what he thinks of him. He gazes at the ceiling or away from the prosecution. His eyes are open and his features tired; his mouth is fixed in a grimace of either bitterness or irritation. The master of confessions has lost the game; the investigating judges have already spent a long time questioning him; he has given plenty of testimony against himself and against the four remaining Khmer Rouge leaders who are to be tried after him. The prosecutor has all the evidence he needs from Duch, at least on paper. Duch appears to have given away for free what few trump cards he had, without obtaining any guarantees in return. For someone so well-versed in power dynamics, it's a surprising mistake.

Duch looks right, then behind him to his left, then glances briefly at the prosecutor. Then he turns his back on him once again.

The Australian deputy prosecutor asks for a sentence of forty years. Usually a straightforward, affable, and accommodating man, he suddenly exudes an uncompromising authority wholly absent from his more good-natured side and embodies it with ease and foul-mouthed eloquence. The hesitancy and weakness he displayed during the cross-examination have gone. Given the opportunity to sum up his arguments unchallenged, he comes into his own.

A recess is called. Everybody stands. Duch stares at his accuser. Then he walks over to the glass separating the court from the public gallery and waves at a young man. He smiles and faces the crowd streaming past the platform at his feet. Nic Dunlop, the man who had “compromised everything” when he identified Duch in 1999, walks by. He blushes slightly. Duch watches his back as he walks away. The defendant disappears through a side door only to reappear a moment later. He begins pacing around his side of the courtroom with his hands in his pockets. He walks up to the glass again and contemplates the empty gallery. Two members of the civil parties take offense at his presence; one leads the other out of the room. Duch chats with a guard, returns to his seat, smiles. Then he stands again and goes up to his Cambodian lawyer, Kar Savuth, who is having his usual rest. Phung Ton's daughter and widow are leaning against the wall at the top of the public gallery. They never take their eyes off Duch. They never let him have the place to himself. François Roux comes into the gallery and sits with his family for a few moments. People start filing back into the room. Phung Ton's daughter and widow return to their seats, which are directly in front of Duch and Kar Savuth. Duch is smiling. He appears relaxed.

When the proceedings resume, it's Duch's turn to speak. It will be his final major statement. He talks ad nauseam about the endless killing perpetrated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea. He's convinced that he owes his survival, he says, to three things: never ordering an arrest himself or overriding his superiors' authority; never profiting materially from the war or the victory; and never conducting himself immorally with women. Obedient, selfless, and proper—he knew how to control his emotions. Duch meanders through a story of bloodshed and terror that is, by turns, absurd and tedious. He lingers on certain anecdotes and repeats, for the umpteenth time, theories or explanations that he has already given in court. His statement is muddled, meaningless, repetitive, and speculative; it involves a tale about the regime's top leaders killing each other off over an invisible and silent river overflowing with corpses. He finally concludes that the “Khmer Rouge regime wanted to use the killing to establish its dynasty in Cambodia and satisfy its ambition.” As a Party member, Duch acknowledges his own responsibility for the last time. The way he puts it, however, has a deeper significance: “I clearly understand that any theory or ideology which mentions love for the people in a class-based concept and class struggle is definitely driving us into endless tragedy and misery.”

This is no longer the story of a road paved with good intentions. Now Duch is saying that the worm was there right from the start, in the original philosophy. No doubt there are many former Communists and members of the Old Guard still clinging to the Revolution—including some who work for the tribunal and even for the office of the prosecution—who would struggle to articulate this criticism of the ideology they once served as lucidly as Duch does.

Sometimes, we get a glimpse of the old revolutionary Duch; sometimes, all the excitement of that era comes back to him, rising from the pit of his stomach and overwhelming him, if only briefly. These feverish outbreaks are striking. For a few seconds, the old Khmer Rouge soldier resurfaces, his faith apparently undiminished. The tremor that these reminiscences produce in court is proof enough, for some, that the apparatchik remains as committed to his cause as ever. Once a Khmer Rouge, always a Khmer Rouge, it seems. But behind the mask called Duch, Kaing Guek Eav is trying desperately, and despite everything, to exist.

For Duch, the intimate is still too perilous a field in which to tread. In the end, it's Duch the bureaucrat who prevails. He begins reading the thirty-four footnotes attached to his statement. Duch is now at the peak of his weirdness; incapable of expressing emotion and presenting a final statement which is the perfect illustration of his need to intellectualize everything, including his remorse and request for forgiveness. It should be a dramatic moment, yet it's quite banal. When Duch starts reading his footnotes, what little electricity there is in the courtroom immediately flickers out. We're left with Duch the archivist, deep in his papers.

“It's disconcerting,” says one of the lawyers for the victims.

When he's finished reading, Duch carefully tidies up his papers and slides them into a plastic folder, which he then hands to the court clerk. It's lunchtime. Tioulong Raingsy's sister leaves the court with tears in her eyes because the prosecutor didn't ask for life imprisonment. After the recess, her nerves still on edge, she wonders with trembling anxiety, “If the forty years are served in full”—she repeats the words,
served in full
—“then it's okay. But will they be?” Others seem to accept the prosecutor's decision to ask for forty years in prison. A phalanx of journalists bristling with cameras and microphones swarms after the survivor Chum Mey. Over the course of the trial, the former mechanic has turned into the victims' unofficial spokesperson. He has become astonishingly media-savvy, and it's both comforting and worrying to see his newfound skills exposed to all sorts of media, some maybe less well-intentioned than others.

K
AR SAVUTH, WHO CLAIMS TO BE SEVENTY-SIX,
has a surprisingly young physique and takes good care of himself. He is nimble and blessed with a survival instinct forged by the several authoritarian regimes that have ruled modern Cambodia. He has the charisma and guile of one who is no longer afraid of anything, and a deft sense of theater. Though spry for his age, he has only so much energy, but he knows how to make the most of it. He lost family members under the Khmer Rouge, including two brothers, but he has been Duch's lawyer ever since Duch was arrested in 1999. Kar Savuth is also one of Prime Minister Hun Sen's legal advisors.

During an initial hearing before the international tribunal, a year and a half before the start of the trial, Kar Savuth sidestepped an uncomfortable question by flatly declaring that Duch had been tortured and badly beaten while being held in detention by Cambodia's military police between 1999 and 2007. It was a new and serious allegation, but when a judge asked him for clarification the following day, Kar Savuth quickly retracted it in a smug tone: “I didn't actually say that he was beaten up before the military tribunal.”