Sunday July 22, 2007Review by MARTIN SPICE
The Star Online (Malaysia)
This is a story that needed to be told, and that needs to be listened to.
In the mid to late 1970s, men, women and children arrived at Tuol Sleng, or SS 21 as it was codenamed, in the middle of the night and left only to be executed in what came to be called the killing fields. Now, men, women and children arrive in coaches and depart for lunch in their nice hotels, many of them shocked and chastened by what they have seen.
Visiting Toul Sleng is a brutal experience. It has been left more or less as the liberating Vietnamese forces found it in 1979. School buildings that look pretty much like any others of the era were crudely converted into a high security prison. Iron bedsteads that were used to transmit electric shocks still sit in the downstairs rooms and there are dark stains on the floors.
Upstairs is a long iron bar to which prisoners were shackled lying down and elsewhere, on the wall, is a signboard that tells prisoners how they must behave. Point 6 advises, “Whilst getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.”
Of the 20,000 people who passed through Toul Sleng’s gates, just seven survived.
Yet, for all the horror of the physical environment of Toul Sleng, it is the photographs of some of these 20,000 that haunt the visitor most. The Khmer Rouge were fastidious about keeping records and every prisoner was photographed when they entered the prison.
These black and white portraits are chilling. The faces are often expressionless, the eyes blank. These are the faces of the condemned, of men, women and children who surely knew that they were about to suffer indescribably and then die at the end of it. And for what? For a confession that they had been CIA collaborators, or sympathised with the Vietnamese or ? whatever their torturers wanted to hear, for not until there was a signed confession could execution release them from their torment. The fact that the confessions were wildly improbable and wholly made up was not important; what was important was the signed document.
It was these pictures that haunted photographer Nic Dunlop and, in turn, he started to photograph them. But it was the discovery of a photograph of Comrade Duch that began his obsessive search for the director of SS 21.
Armed with this photograph, Dunlop set off to find the man who had presided over the madness that was Tuol Sleng and The Lost Executioner is his account of the history of Toul Sleng, of his interviews with people who worked there, with one of the seven who survived and finally of his success in meeting Comrade Duch. It is a gripping, horrifying and important story.
At the beginning of the book is a photograph of Duch as a boy. He has thick black hair, neatly parted, and is looking directly into the camera. He is neatly turned out for what is clearly a studio shot and he looks slightly solemn as befits such a serious occasion, with just the merest hint of a smile.
The next picture, chronologically, sees Duch in standard Khmer Rouge attire, seated behind a microphone addressing an invisible audience. It is this photograph that Dunlop carried around Cambodia in his back pocket until, eventually, he was able to identify Duch in 1999 and get him to confess to his deeds as director of SS 21.
The Lost Executioner is a grim read but it is a story that needs to be told and needs to be listened to. It is fraught with questions and moral dilemmas. How did this almost cherubic boy become the man who could scrawl with impunity, “Kill every last one of them” on prisoners’ files and become “one of the worst mass murderers of the 20th century”?
How valid is it to claim, as many Khmer Rouge have done, that they did what they did because they were “just obeying orders” and would have themselves been killed had they not done so?
After being identified, Duch is imprisoned, but in the preceding years he had converted to Christianity and was known as a talented and compassionate aid worker.
Would it have been better for him to have atoned for his sins by helping others rather than languishing pointlessly in a jail?
And on a bigger issue, why have there been no trials of the Khmer Rouge leaders? Why was the West so blind to what was happening in Cambodia that it actually recognised the Khmer Rouge as a legitimate regime?
The Lost Executioner is a fine book that puts flesh onto the horrifying statistics that tell the story of the Khmer Rouge genocide, five years in which approximately two million people – nearly a quarter of the population – died. At one point in the book, Dunlop refers to Stalin’s chilling quote that one death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. Thoughtful, reflective and compelling, The Lost Executioner brings home forcefully that this particular set of statistics is almost unbearably tragic.
THE LOST EXECUTIONERIF you have been to Cambodia in recent years, the chances are that you will have been to Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh. There is a savage irony in the fact that this former secondary school that was used as a prison and torture centre by the Khmer Rouge regime is now on the tourist trail.
By Nic Dunlop
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 316 pages
(ISBN: 978-0747566717)
In the mid to late 1970s, men, women and children arrived at Tuol Sleng, or SS 21 as it was codenamed, in the middle of the night and left only to be executed in what came to be called the killing fields. Now, men, women and children arrive in coaches and depart for lunch in their nice hotels, many of them shocked and chastened by what they have seen.
Visiting Toul Sleng is a brutal experience. It has been left more or less as the liberating Vietnamese forces found it in 1979. School buildings that look pretty much like any others of the era were crudely converted into a high security prison. Iron bedsteads that were used to transmit electric shocks still sit in the downstairs rooms and there are dark stains on the floors.
Upstairs is a long iron bar to which prisoners were shackled lying down and elsewhere, on the wall, is a signboard that tells prisoners how they must behave. Point 6 advises, “Whilst getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.”
Of the 20,000 people who passed through Toul Sleng’s gates, just seven survived.
Yet, for all the horror of the physical environment of Toul Sleng, it is the photographs of some of these 20,000 that haunt the visitor most. The Khmer Rouge were fastidious about keeping records and every prisoner was photographed when they entered the prison.
These black and white portraits are chilling. The faces are often expressionless, the eyes blank. These are the faces of the condemned, of men, women and children who surely knew that they were about to suffer indescribably and then die at the end of it. And for what? For a confession that they had been CIA collaborators, or sympathised with the Vietnamese or ? whatever their torturers wanted to hear, for not until there was a signed confession could execution release them from their torment. The fact that the confessions were wildly improbable and wholly made up was not important; what was important was the signed document.
It was these pictures that haunted photographer Nic Dunlop and, in turn, he started to photograph them. But it was the discovery of a photograph of Comrade Duch that began his obsessive search for the director of SS 21.
Armed with this photograph, Dunlop set off to find the man who had presided over the madness that was Tuol Sleng and The Lost Executioner is his account of the history of Toul Sleng, of his interviews with people who worked there, with one of the seven who survived and finally of his success in meeting Comrade Duch. It is a gripping, horrifying and important story.
At the beginning of the book is a photograph of Duch as a boy. He has thick black hair, neatly parted, and is looking directly into the camera. He is neatly turned out for what is clearly a studio shot and he looks slightly solemn as befits such a serious occasion, with just the merest hint of a smile.
The next picture, chronologically, sees Duch in standard Khmer Rouge attire, seated behind a microphone addressing an invisible audience. It is this photograph that Dunlop carried around Cambodia in his back pocket until, eventually, he was able to identify Duch in 1999 and get him to confess to his deeds as director of SS 21.
The Lost Executioner is a grim read but it is a story that needs to be told and needs to be listened to. It is fraught with questions and moral dilemmas. How did this almost cherubic boy become the man who could scrawl with impunity, “Kill every last one of them” on prisoners’ files and become “one of the worst mass murderers of the 20th century”?
How valid is it to claim, as many Khmer Rouge have done, that they did what they did because they were “just obeying orders” and would have themselves been killed had they not done so?
After being identified, Duch is imprisoned, but in the preceding years he had converted to Christianity and was known as a talented and compassionate aid worker.
Would it have been better for him to have atoned for his sins by helping others rather than languishing pointlessly in a jail?
And on a bigger issue, why have there been no trials of the Khmer Rouge leaders? Why was the West so blind to what was happening in Cambodia that it actually recognised the Khmer Rouge as a legitimate regime?
The Lost Executioner is a fine book that puts flesh onto the horrifying statistics that tell the story of the Khmer Rouge genocide, five years in which approximately two million people – nearly a quarter of the population – died. At one point in the book, Dunlop refers to Stalin’s chilling quote that one death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. Thoughtful, reflective and compelling, The Lost Executioner brings home forcefully that this particular set of statistics is almost unbearably tragic.
4 comments:
“The Lost Executioner – A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields”, on page 184-185, Nic Dunlop offered valuable political and conspiratorial information relevant to the “genocide”, which implicates the Hanoi government showing their deliberately attempt to deceive the international community.
"There were plans to begin one, hence by Van Tay. Cambodians had only known the leadership as the Organization and not who was behind it; most knew nothing beyond their cooperatives. Ironically it was the Vietnamese, one of the sworn enemies of the Khmer Rouge, who personalized the regime. Democratic Kampuchea became ‘the Pol Pot time’.
By drawing on the parallels with the Nazi death camps, the Tuol Sleng museum was organized as a deliberate attempt to distance the Vietnamese from their former allies the Khmer Rouge. They wanted to vilify the Khmer Rouge and its leaders still further as part of a propaganda war to justify their invasion. Visitors to the museum were encouraged to think of the Vietnamese as akin to the liberators of Europe’s concentration camps.
There was no text narrating progress from room to room. Visitors viewed the museum through a series of images and objects. The intention was to provoke outrage through a primarily sensory experience rather than to enlighten. The Cold War was at its height and, for many in the West, Tuol Sleng was a propaganda tool for a regime that had seized power through an illegal invasion.
All museums are manipulations. Apart from the map made of skulls created by the Vietnamese, the raw displays were graphic and chilling and, although inaccurate in form, were real in substance. The atrocitious nature of the place itself was hard to contrive. The fact that visitors were being manipulated and that the information on display was there to serve a political purpose seemed to pale in comparison when faced with such overwhelming viciousness".
David Chandler, in his book, “Voices from S-21 – Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret prison”, page 2-6, has summed up the political manipulation and propaganda ramification by the Vietnamese authorities, which deliberately attempted to organize Tuol Sleng Center as the so-called the “The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crime” for the political purpose of deceiving the Cambodian people as well as the international community:
Sensing the historical importance and the propaganda value of their discovery, the Vietnamese closed off the site, cleaned it up, and began, with Cambodian help, to examine its voluminous archive.
A Cambodian survivor of S-21, Ung Pech, became the director of the museum when it opened in 1980. He held the position for several years and traveled with Mai Lam (Vietnamese) to France, the USSR, and Eastern Europe in the early 1980s to visit museums and exhibits memorializing the Holocaust. Although Mai Lam remained in Cambodia until 1988, working at Tuol Sleng much of the time, he concealed his “specialist-consultant” role from outsiders, creating the impression that the initiatives for the museum and its design had come from the Cambodian victims rather than from the Vietnamese—an impression that he was eager to correct in his interviews in the 1990’s.
In February or March 1979, Mai Lam, a Vietnamese colonel who was fluent in Khmer and had extensive experience in legal studies and museology, arrived in Phnom Penh. He was given the task of organizing the documents found at S-21 into an archive and transforming the facility into what David Hawk has called “a museum of the Cambodian nightmare.” The first aspect of Mai Lam’s work was more urgent than the second. It was hoped that documents found at the prison could be introduced as evidence in the trials of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, DK’s minister of foreign affairs, on charges of genocide. These took place in Phnom Penh in August 1979. Although valuable information about S-21 was produced at the trials, none of the documents in the archive provided the smoking gun that the Vietnamese and PRK officials probably hoped to fine. No document linking either Pol Pot or Ieng Sary directly with orders to eliminate people at S-21 has ever been discovered, although the lines of authority linking S-21 with the Party Center (mochhim pak) have been established beyond doubt.
THEY THOUGHT THEY COULD GET AWAY WITH IT!
I read an article, "Clear and Convincing Evidence" written by Koun Khmer sometime mid last year. Since the KR trial is starting the process, I believe KI-Media should republish the article again.
"Why was the West so blind to what was happening in Cambodia that it actually recognised the Khmer Rouge as a legitimate regime?"
The US understood the evil of communism and fought against it and the Khmer Rouge while virtually every other western nation was essentially rooting for the bastards to win. Enough Americans were equally foolish, so the US gave up nd left. Then after the second Vietnamese communist invasion of Cambodia to install yet another communist regime, the US did what it could to get the bastards out again, and succeeded when the Vietnamese finally left in '89. Ask Cambodians whether or not they're glad the US forced the Vietnamese out. Very few will say "no."
Post a Comment