By Thierry Cruvellier, 2011

In my five trips to Asia, I have found the crowding and the humid heat of the places I have visited hard to bear. Had my younger son not chosen to live and work in Asia, I would probably never have gone there.

It was while touring Angor Wat in Cambodia in 2012 that I picked up pirated copies of First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung and The Pol Pot Regime by Ben Kiernan.  I was so affected by being in this ravaged country that I had to start learning more on the spot (while balancing out my reading about horror with British fashion magazines I got in the airport).  Years earlier I had read a library copy of the 2006 book The Lost Executioner by Nic Dunlop, the Irish photographer who tracked down Comrade Duch, whose trial for crimes against humanity is the subject of this book.

Thierry Cruvellier is a French journalist who previously wrote about the Rwandan and Balkan war crimes trials.  A reader needs a strong stomach to take in the details or even the broad outlines of the horrors Cruvellier has spent his working life recounting.

Comrade Duch spent the years of the Khmer Rouge regime as head of a prison of which the only survivors were seven prisoners whose professional skills were deemed essential. Like many totalitarians, Duch kept meticulous records of interrogation and torture, records which included individual photographs.  This record keeping was made more challenging by the fact that most of the regime’s best workers were illiterate.  A hatred of education, even of basic literacy, was at the heart of the regime, with even the wearing of spectacles being suspect. A competent and caring teacher in his previous life, Duch proved his orthodoxy by the zeal with which he threw himself into the work of extracting confessions. In a comment about another intellectual who zealously supported the Khmer Rouge, but that applies equally to Duch and to many Soviet revolutionaries, Cruvellier says, “Nothing is more chilling than a Communist intellectual.  Because an intellectual is, by definition, a member of the bourgeoisie, he must persuade others of his proletarian transformation.” He must, in essence, show his hatred of his own class and thus of himself.

At his trial Duch admits that no more than 10 or 20 per cent of any confession was actually true (make enough wild accusations, one or two of them may be true), but that was enough.  He shows something like regret only in the case of a respected professor, part of Cambodia’s small educated elite, who left the safety of Paris to discover the fate of his wife and seven children back home.

The Vietnamese invasion happened so suddenly and unexpectedly in January of 1979  that the prison was abandoned along with all its documentary evidence. Duch disappeared under an assumed name and went back to teaching.  When discovered by Nic Dunlop, Duch had  converted to Christianity after two weeks of instruction by an American evangelist and had himself  become a proselytizer. Cruvellier posits that Duch converted to spare himself the ordeal of the endless reincarnations his crimes would have warranted in Buddhism. Karma would not have been kind to one who had committed such terrible crimes. He would have been lucky to be reborn as a louse in the hair of one of his victims.

With the exception of the professor, Duch exhibits little empathy for the people he killed or for their survivors. He is the epitome of the separating off of different aspects of the personality. His expressions of regret seem to be nothing but words, and his conversion too convenient to be true.  As a Christian, although not a  conventional one, I reject the notion that in a moment the most terrible sins can be forgiven.  I am sorry if I forget my friend’s birthday, I am sorry if I step on a stranger’s foot on the bus, sorry if I say or do anything unkind. Sorry does not begin to atone for the crimes of Duch. Sorry means nothing if it does not include empathy.

Like the Nazis, Duch used the defense that he was just following orders.  He was part of a whole system based on obedience and unquestioning acceptance of authority. Many of those who died were devout pretty much illiterate communists; their zealousness did not save them but Duch somehow believed his zeal was going to save him and his wife and children.

I try very hard to distance myself from the crimes of Duch, to see them as beyond the pale of anything I or anyone I know personally could commit. In considering the actions of Duch, we have to look inside ourselves and seriously consider what we could be capable of, given the worst possible circumstances.  Writing of the historian David Chandler’s book on the history of Duch’s prison, Cruvellier says: “In order to find the root of evil that was implemented every day at S-21, we should not look any further than ourselves.”

There is no punishment that would fit such horrible crimes. The main purpose of war crimes and genocide trials is to establish the facts and to give the survivors a place to be heard.  The testimony of the daughter of the murdered professor Phung Ton is particularly heart-rending. Duch says he had no idea the man he respected so much “ . . . was incarcerated in his prison. The face-to-face between the torturer and the victim’s daughter ends in stalemate.  With cold reserve, she looks into his eyes, then turns her back on him forever.”

My parents raised me to believe I have a human duty to be informed about what goes on in the world.  The Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia is one of those preventable tragedies that everyone should know about. When I began reading the books I bought at Angor Wat, I beat myself up for being only vaguely aware of the events of 1975 to 1979 while they were happening.  Western intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky were apologists for the regime, and they were aided in their denials by the sheer unlikelihood of a government starving its own people to death and of killing millions by hitting them on the back of the head with a shovel and then slitting their throats.  And the country was so cut off that even Cambodians abroad could get no news of their families.

During these years I had just embarked on my career in libraries, and for two of these years was in library school.  If family members of the victims were in the dark, how could I, a university student and library worker in Edmonton, Alberta, in her twenties, have known more?

The best I can do is to know more now.