'There is No Good War, There are No Good Men'

François Bizot meeting with Duch (Photo: AFP)

François Bizot (Photo: AFP)

Saturday December 08, 2007
Bangkok Post

In Comrade Douch, his captor and a man responsible for thousands of deaths, Francois Bizot saw an image of himself

Of many excellent books written on the Cambodian genocide one stands out. The Gate, written by Francois Bizot and first published in 2003, is unique because he was one of few, and the only foreigner, to survive being captured and imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge. The book recounts Bizot's story from when he arrived in Cambodia as a young scholar of Buddhism in 1965 through to his three-month kidnapping ordeal in 1971 when he became close to his captor Comrade Douch, Pol Pot's chief executioner and later director of S-21, the infamous torture camp in the Phnom Penh suburb of Tuol Sleng. The book goes on to describe Bizot's experiences during the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge in 1975. Like most of the expatriate community and many Cambodian refugees, Bizot sought shelter in the French embassy. Fluent in Khmer, he became the only link between the embassy and the Khmer Rouge consolidating their power outside the embassy gate.

Today, Bizot resides in Chiang Mai where he greets us at his beautiful traditional wooden house on the banks of the Ping River, which is now also home to French Research Institute the L'E{aac}cole Francaise d'Extre{aci}me-Orient. During our meeting Bizot does not speak much about the ordeal of his kidnap, nor of his experiences at the French embassy. This is already brilliantly narrated in his book, which serves as an important background to understanding his bitterness, and the hopelessness and blindness he sees all around him today. One paragraph in the foreword of the book, written by John Le Carre{aac}, reads: ''Bizot has the authority of pain. It is not our fault that we have not suffered as he has. It is not our fault that he is the authentic version of what the rest of us can only imagine.''

As a life-long scholar of Buddhism and ancient traditions and rituals in Cambodia, you may have wanted Bizot to come up with a secret formula or a hidden answer in Khmer history or culture to explain the horrendous acts of the Khmer Rouge and their ability to commit genocide against their own people. On the contrary, Bizot maintains that the killings were no such mystery, but rather something that we have deliberately mystified in a quest to differentiate ourselves from the killers around us.

''We did not really listen to Adolf Eichmann. We did not really listen to the war prisoners during the trials of the Nazis. We do not want to listen to our criminals because we are afraid to listen. We should listen not to forgive but to understand. We are afraid because we would maybe find humans in them. To realise that the monster is as human as you may be yourself is the most frightening thing. We cannot accept that. We still have this very simple and primitive regrettable way of looking at ourselves. We absolutely want the killer's nature to be different from ourselves,'' he says.

Recounting his own experience when dealing with his captor, Comrade Douch, Bizot says: ''I realise that I had a rare opportunity to look behind a killer ... I suddenly realised that I was in front of a monster who killed others, participated in torture, and who would get the order to kill me. I was afraid of him, but when we discussed things I realised that what I saw when he dropped his mask was much more frightening. I saw a young guy like me, he was the same. He was a killer, but he was also the same guy he was before he became a guerrilla.

''Douch married his young wife about six months after I was released. It was a war, it was very bad conditions, he was a director of that small camp, he was torturing people to death, and he was in love and he got married. We as humans need to know that we are able to do that,'' he continues.

Douch is now in prison awaiting trial. He was the first Khmer Rouge leader to be arrested. Bizot has the following to say about the upcoming Khmer Rouge tribunal: ''I would like very much that the trial of Khmer Rouge, if it happens, gives us the opportunity to listen to a man like Douch who accepts responsibility for mass killings. It would be much more clever for us to listen than to only condemn. He is already condemned. The question is not about trying to forgive him. He is totally responsible, and he is guilty. But it would be very interesting to listen. His feelings about how he did commit those crimes would maybe be an opportunity for us to see the failure in our own nature and humanity.''

Bizot has briefly met Douch once since he was imprisoned, but would like to meet his former captor again for a lengthy discussion. ''I know nothing about him now. He is 64, and I wonder what I would have been if it was me who had killed and ordered the killing of thousands of people. I would very much like to listen to him, as I do not know what I would think, feel, or how I would have managed if I was in his place.''

Bizot says he is still horrified by the mass killings under the Khmer Rouge, but admits to feeling pity for Douch as well. ''He is not my friend, but I feel sorry for him because he could have been somebody else. He did so much, he was in charge of so much suffering. So I have a sort of deep pity for him, but I feel the same for man on Earth anyway.''

Bizot acknowledges that the horrors he has witnessed have moulded him. ''Oh yes, I am bitter, no hope. I would very much like to rehabilitate hopelessness as a state of being. In our modern society we like to be full of hope, like we want to be full of hate, like we want to be full of exercise every morning, these sorts of stupid things. We should be aware of what happens, and what happens in our lives on Earth is without hope. It is hopeless, and we should try to find our joy, if not our happiness, through this hopelessness. Is there any other choice?'' he asks.

Bizot visits Cambodia often, but finds it hard to contemplate living there again. While he finds traces of the Cambodia he used to know, he believes the country's roots have been severed.

''The structure is totally destroyed. At that time [I lived there], there was no luxury like in the occidental way of living. But it was an old traditional way of living, which not only gave rice to everybody but also gave space for the traditions, the rituals and the thinking. Today, I just see misery. I don't speak about Phnom Penh, of course, with its businesses, streets and money. It has nothing to do with the Cambodia that I knew. In the villages and the rice fields parents don't have enough money to feed their children. When this is the case, you will be so ashamed of yourself that there is nothing you can do. Don't expect anything from a father who is not able to feed his children.''

He has deep respect, however, for how Cambodian society, in the absence of a trial or any form of justice, has taken its own steps to deal with the genocide. ''We have to realise that they have done the process very well. In very many villages you have both former Khmer Rouge and their victims. They live together, knowing that he was a Khmer Rouge, and that he killed, but when you speak with the victim, he tells you that he would have done the same. Because if you did not kill you would have been killed yourself. If you wanted to survive as a Khmer Rouge you had to kill others. This kind of understanding is very deep, very far from the occidental simplification, and we find it very hard in post-World War Two Europe to understand and accept it.''

Bizot returns to his argument that we need to humanise the mass murderers among us, which means neither seeing them as monsters, nor, citing Napoleon as an example, worshipping them as national heroes. He also believes a mass murderer can stop killing and go on to be just as normal as anybody else. We are quite capable of living with guilt, he argues.

''Of course we can be a monster, and then when the war is over we can become a good father and a very normal person, I'm bloody sure. It has nothing to do with a special nature that would inhabit one person and be kept free from others. To think so is the worst mistake. It is worse than racism.

''Maybe our only hope is to humanise our monsters,'' he continues, ''to say they are no different from you or me and to be aware of it. Then you may start the second part of this introspection, you may start to be afraid of what we are. And if you are afraid of yourself it may be the beginning of something. If George Bush would have had another idea of himself, he may have thought twice before he started the war in Iraq. I speak about Bush, because he is of today, but there were others before him, and there will be others after him. Because there is no good war, like there are no good men.''