Mey was initially impressed by Duch’s apologies. But after months spent listening to the defendant, he has become suspicious. He worries Duch’s public remorse is crafted to win a lighter sentence. “Duch is very cunning,” Mey says, brow knit in concern. “He confesses to the big picture, but then denies what he has done himself.”
Like Mey, I have spent days watching Duch in court, searching for clues. At 67, Duch is tiny and respectable-looking, with neatly groomed salt-and-pepper hair and crisply laundered dress shirts. He responds politely to questions from judges, who peer down at him over their laptop computers. Sometimes he glances through the glass wall that separates the courtroom from the viewing gallery where hundreds of Cambodians sit, along with a smattering of foreign observers. He seems pleased to see us watching.
For the past two years, Duch has been confined to the ECCC’s detention centre, with little to do besides study the documents related to his case. “He knows the files better than anyone else in the courtroom,” a member of the prosecution team admitted to me. “His ability to call up documents from memory is chilling.” Duch clearly takes pleasure from his mastery of the files. If a witness or lawyer makes a mistake, Duch will correct their errors in his dry schoolteacher’s voice. While he takes responsibility for the overall criminality of S-21, he strongly challenges witnesses who allege he tortured prisoners himself or was present at their executions.
“Duch lives in a contradiction,” says Judy Ledgerwood, an anthropologist at Northern Illinois University. “I think he feels some genuine remorse, but he also wants the story to be told in a way that doesn’t make him look so bad. To do that he needs to make some changes.” Ledgerwood once spent six months working in the S-21 archives, where she came to recognize Duch’s handwriting. “He was not a cog in the machine,” she argues. “He stood there and gave the orders—not to have 10 or 15 people killed, but thousands.”
To help make sense of the puzzle that is Duch, judges ordered an assessment by two psychological experts. They diagnosed him as free of psychiatric illness, and instead described an ideologue who put the revolution ahead of individual lives. He was meticulous and hard-working, proud of doing a good job, with no empathy for those who suffered. While he ordered the executions of thousands, he found time to get married, father two children, and receive visits from his parents.
Despite this damning portrait of Duch as commandant of S-21, the psychologists claim Duch today is a changed person. He has more empathy for victims. On several occasions he has wept publicly. The experts described his mental life as a battlefield where different elements, including Khmer Rouge teachings, continue to fight for control. That war isn’t over. Nevertheless, they have concluded Duch could be reintegrated into society.
Any story of Duch’s transformation has to include his conversion to Christianity in 1996, when he was living under a pseudonym in a remote village. (He was discovered in 1999 and put in a military jail.) Duch found in Christianity a powerful religion—it had defeated Communism in countries like Poland—that offered him a new doctrine and a new community. Equally importantly, it offered the possibility of divine forgiveness for his sins. In this deeply Buddhist country, many Cambodians look at his conversion with great skepticism. “In Buddhism you pay the price for what you’ve done,” explains professor Ledgerwood. “According to Buddhism, Duch is stuck. He’s going to languish for an eternity, or at least for many life cycles, in a lower level of hell somewhere.”
The judges at the ECCC aren’t able to hand out that kind of sentence. They can, however, decide whether or not Duch will spend the rest of this life in prison. The prosecution has asked that he get 40 years. The defence seeks lighter punishment, as he has co-operated, pled guilty, and already been in jail for 10 years. It’s still possible that one day Duch could walk free. In deciding whether or not he should, judges face the questions that challenge Cambodians who watch the trial. Can a man like Duch change? And can any amount of penance win a reprieve for someone who showed no mercy to his victims in the past?
Pages: 1 2
