When the Khmer Rouge forces were routed from Phnom Penh in January 1979, they left behind a ruined and vacant city. Following the odour of decomposing bodies, Cambodian and Vietnamese liberators discovered a high school surrounded by barbed wire fences. Inside they found 14 prisoners whose throats had been cut. Other rooms contained grisly evidence of torture: whips, lengths of chain, thousands of written confessions, photographs of beaten and terrified men and women. Scrawled across documents were orders from the prison’s commandant. On one interrogation record, he wrote, “beat until he tells everything.” Beside a list of names: “kill every last one.”
This was S-21 prison, and last week that commandant made a final appearance in court before a panel of crimson-robed judges, who will issue their verdict in early 2010. Kaing Guek Eav, known by his revolutionary name, “Duch,” is the first defendant at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a United Nations-backed tribunal. His trial has captivated Cambodians. Broadcast live on television, it’s debated at dinner tables and on radio programs. Each day, hundreds of Cambodians travel to Phnom Penh to attend in person, many leaving their villages in the middle of the night for the long bus ride. “I want to go to the trial to see what an evil person looks like,” an elderly woman told me on the eve of her journey. “I want to see his real face.”
Since the trial began in March, Cambodians have heard chilling testimony about torture techniques and bizarre medical experiments. But they have also been profoundly challenged by Duch’s defence. Duch was not an evil man, his lawyers argue, but a flawed one. Experts have testified he is now capable of compassion and ready to be reintegrated into society. Duch himself has suggested something many Cambodians would have considered preposterous: that they forgive him. He set the tone of the trial from his first statement. “I am responsible for the crimes committed at S-21, especially the tortures and execution of the people there,” he declared on March 31. He apologized to the victims and their families, and to all survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime, before concluding, “I would like you to please leave an open window for me to seek forgiveness.”
That’s not the tack taken by the four other Khmer Rouge leaders now detained at the ECCC. Their trials likely won’t begin for more than a year, but in public statements they have denied or downplayed their culpability. Nuon Chea, second-in-command to Pol Pot, told Maclean’s in 2007 that in court he would challenge accusations against him. He suggested he would try to rehabilitate his regime’s image—despite estimates that up to two million Cambodians died during Khmer Rouge rule between 1975 and 1979.
Duch held a lower position in the government than the others, but he is the most senior Khmer Rouge official to admit guilt. He has also provided information to victims’ families and co-operated with the ECCC’s investigators. François Roux, Duch’s defence counsel, believes his client’s conduct will help Cambodians achieve truth and national reconciliation. “It has not been easy,” says Roux, “but from the beginning, he has expressed remorse and accepted responsibility.”
Duch’s guilty plea has shifted the emphasis of the trial. The most difficult questions are not about what happened inside the prison walls, but what was going on in the mind of the defendant. Why did he do what he did? Was it because of a moral or psychological fault? Or could other “normal” Cambodians have done the same?
These questions could shed light on one of the most troubling aspects of the Khmer Rouge era. The leaders instituted disastrous policies, but they did not murder one quarter of the population with their own hands. Thousands of Cambodians separated children from their families, withheld medical treatment from the ill, and tortured people who were innocent of any crime. Is Duch any different from them? And if there are many Duchs alive in Cambodia today, can they, too, be reformed and reintegrated into society?
Since the trial began, Chum Mey has studied Duch from across the courtroom. Mey, 79, is one of a dozen survivors of S-21, where perhaps 15,000 others died. Interrogators ripped off his toenails and applied electric shocks to his eardrums. Like other inmates, he was forced to confess to being a spy. I spoke with him on the grounds of S-21, which has become the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. We walked through the cinder-block cubicles where he was once shackled. Mey is amiable and chatty, but insistent that people hear his story. He lost his wife and son during Khmer Rouge rule, and he recounts his ordeals with an air of perpetual bewilderment. How could this have happened?
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