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"They All Had to Be Eliminated"
By Valerio Pellizzari
The Independent UK
Monday 11 February 2008
Kang Khek Ieu was known as "Cambodia's
Himmler", a torturer who oversaw the deaths of 17,000 people. As he prepares
to go on trial, he gives a chilling insight into the Khmer Rouge - the most
detailed account yet from a top henchman.
Phnom Penh - He was Pol Pot's trusted henchman, the brilliant mathematician who calmly fashioned an efficient apparatus of torture and death out of a Phnom Penh high school and who oversaw, during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror, the interrogation and cudgelling to death of some 17,000 Cambodians.
In the West he has been called "Cambodia's Heinrich Himmler";
since Pol Pot himself and his lieutenant Ta Mok cheated justice by dying, he
is the most vivid symbol of the Khmer Rouge left alive. His name is Kang Khek
Ieu, but he is better known by his nom de guerre, Duch (pronounced "Doik").
This spring, 28 years after fleeing Cambodia ahead of the Vietnamese army, his
trial for mass murder may finally get under way.
Now, in the first interview he has given since his capture more than eight-and-a-half
years ago, he talks freely about how and why he sent 17,000 Cambodians to their
deaths in the killing fields.
And even as he waits to confront the proof of his crimes, it is clear that,
for him, there was never any choice: anybody who was thought to pose a threat
to the revolution had to be tortured and killed. Asked whether he had any moments
of uncertainty, any doubts or feelings of rebellion while he set about wiping
out his country's entire intellectual class, he answered: "There was a
widespread and tacit understanding.
"I and everyone else who worked in that place knew that anyone who entered
had to be psychologically demolished, eliminated by steady work, given no way
out. No answer could avoid death. Nobody who came to us had any chance of saving
himself."
The command had come from above, he said. "All the prisoners had to be
eliminated. We saw enemies, enemies, enemies everywhere." He could not
have rebelled or fled, he insisted. "If I had tried to flee, they were
holding my family hostage, and my family would have suffered the same fate as
the other prisoners in Tuol Sleng. If I had fled or rebelled it would not have
helped anyone."
Between 1975 and the beginning of 1979, under Pol Pot, two million men and
women, almost a third of the Cambodian population, were brutally eliminated
by the Khmer Rouge - an extreme Marxist movement that aimed to take Cambodia
back to "Year Zero", cutting it off from the outside world and imposing
their leaders' vision of an "agrarian utopia".
Of its two million victims, more than 17,000 - party officials, diplomats,
Buddhist monks, engineers, doctors, teachers, students, musicians and dancers,
were brought to a former school in the heart of Phnom Penh that had been converted
into a torture centre. Only six came out of it alive.
Codenamed S-21, the centre was run by Duch, a former maths teacher who had
become the head of the regime's secret police. In the former classrooms, over
a period of 40 months, Duch oversaw the extermination of the entire Cambodian
intellectual class with mathematical rigour.
Confessions were extracted by primitive torture: prisoners were strapped to
iron beds, suspended upside down from ropes, threatened with drowning, tormented
with knives and pincers, locked in tiny cells. Then, at night, they were taken
by lorry to the outskirts of Phnom Penh and killed in the rice fields. The Khmer
Rouge were obsessed with killing by night.
Now at last, after years of argument between the Cambodian government and the
United Nations, the surviving members of the Khmer Rouge hierarchy are finally
being brought to justice. They will be tried under a hybrid UN-Cambodian tribunal
known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia; the pre-trial
hearings began in November and are still going on. Pol Pot, of course, is long
dead, having died under house arrest before he could be tried in 1998. The bloodiest
of his comrades, Ta Mok, died in 1996. But five senior leaders including Khieu
Sampan, the Khmer Rouge president, await trial.
Duch made his first appearance in court in November when his lawyer asked for
him to be let out on bail because his "human rights had been violated,
even if he was not beaten or tortured". A ripple of ironic laughter ran
round the courtroom. The request was rejected.
My quest to interview Duch had begun nearly three years ago. I first visited
S-21, soon after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Since his arrest more than eight
years ago, nobody from the outside had even clapped eyes on him. Now, finally,
I was looking at this frail, 66-year-old man with his protruding, irregular
teeth, bug eyes and washed-out grey clothes. I was confronting the mystery of
the banality and the innocence of evil.
Throughout our interview, his voice was low, respectful like a mantra, a Buddhist
prayer, rather than what it really was; the soundtrack of a nightmare still
freighted with questions. His mild-mannered almost frail appearance in no way
suggested the role of a mass murderer.
For the interview, the rules were strict: no tape recorder, no camera, no talking
to him directly in French or English but only through a Cambodian interpreter.
General Neang Phat, Cambodia's Secretary of State, and other generals were sitting
in the same room, listening to and scrutinising this indefinable and unfathomable
man. Some of them, too, have evil memories of the Khmer Rouge years. But Duch
was the exact picture of the banality and innocence of evil.
Duch, the nickname he assumed when he was young and joined the guerrillas,
told me that the torture centre at Tuol Sleng was set up in August 1975, four
months after the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, and began work two months later.
"I was given the task of creating it and starting it up, although I never
found out why they chose me. Before 1975, when the Khmer Rouge lived in hiding,
in the jungle, or in the liberated zones, I was the head of Office 13, I was
the chief of police in the special zone bordering on Phnom Penh."
He described a routine of bureaucratic monotony. "Every day I had to read
and check the confessions. I read from seven in the morning until midnight.
And every day, towards three in the afternoon, Professor Son Sen, the minister
of defence, summoned me. I had known him since my time as a high school teacher.
It was he who had asked me to join the guerrillas.
"He would ask me how my work was going. Then a messenger would arrive,
an envoy, who collected the confessions that were ready and took them to Son
Sen. These messengers were the only links between one office and another."
I wanted to know if Duch had any moments of uncertainty, doubts, feelings of
rebellion while he was wiping out his country's entire intellectual class.
He admitted the idea had crossed his mind. "When the work started at Tuol
Sleng, I asked my bosses now and then, 'Do we really have to use all this violence?'
Son Sen never answered. Nuon Chea, the No 2 Brother in the power structure,
who was above him, told me: 'Don't think about these things.'
"I personally had no answer. Then with the passing of time, I understood.
It was Ta Mok who had ordered all the prisoners to be eliminated. We saw enemies,
enemies, enemies everywhere.
"I was cornered, like everyone in that machine, I had no alternative.
Pol Pot, the No 1 Brother, said you always had to be suspicious, to fear something.
And thus the usual request came: interrogate them again, interrogate them better."
Sometimes Duch was tempted to be merciful, he claimed - and his superiors
began to mistrust him. He recalled the time a cousin was brought to S-21.
"I knew him well, we had formed sincere family ties but I had to eliminate
him anyway. I knew he was a good person but I had to pretend to believe that
confession extorted with violence. So in order to protect him I didn't analyse
those statements too rigorously. And on that occasion my superiors began to
lose full trust in me. At the same time I didn't feel safe any more."
But the moment of official doubt passed. The interrogations and executions
continued, remorselessly until the end.
"You kept your post until the end," I said. "Did you always
carry out your orders thoroughly?"
Duch answered: "I obeyed. The work carried on until 7 January 1979, when
the Cambodian liberation forces, supported by the Vietnamese, conquered Phnom
Penh. There was no escape plan, no pull-out plan ..."
But, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the executioner blended back in among
his countrymen, and disappeared, as so many did in the post-war chaos, swallowed
up by the void.
Many years later he was converted to Christianity by American missionaries.
His true identity was discovered in 1998 and soon afterwards he was arrested.
He remains the most disquieting witness of the political madness planned by
the Khmer Rouge, after the death of Pol Pot and Ta Mok, the one-legged "butcher".
I asked him how he converted to Christianity and why that happened. "I
became convinced that Christians were a force, and that this force could beat
Communism. At the time of the guerrilla war, I was 25 years old, Cambodia was
corrupt, Communism was full of promise and I believed in it. But that project
failed completely."
So if Duch has repented now, what is his attitude to all those thousands of
victims of his violence? There was no alternative for people like himself, trapped
inside the machinery of the Khmer Rouge, he said.
"If someone goes looking for guilt, and the various degrees of guilt,
I say that there was no way out for anyone who entered the power system conceived
by Pol Pot. Only at the top did they know the real situation in the country,
but the intermediate functionaries did not know. And then there was that obsession
with secrecy.
"Of course, you are asking me whether I could have rebelled, or at least
fled. But if I had tried to flee, they were holding my family hostage, and my
family would have suffered the same fate as the other prisoners in Tuol Sleng.
If I had fled or rebelled it would not have helped anyone."
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