Searching for answers in Cambodia

Thursday, 19 February 2009
BBC News

Thirty years after the Khmer Rouge committed genocide in Cambodia, Jonathan Head witnesses the first UN war crimes trial of a prison camp commander.

"The banality of evil."

That phrase, made famous by the political scientist Hannah Arendt in her study of Nazi war criminals, kept coming back to me as I watched the small, grey-haired man, blinking behind glasses, taking his seat in the newly built Phnom Penh courtroom.

His name is Kaing Guek Eav, a former maths teacher, but in Cambodia he is known everywhere simply by his revolutionary nom-de-guerre, Duch.

And he may in the end be the only person ever held to account for one of the greatest atrocities of modern times, the killing fields of Cambodia.

Frail defendants

It has been an epic struggle even getting this far in the quest for justice for the millions of victims of the Khmer Rouge.

The Extraordinary Chamber in the Courts of Cambodia, as this hybrid tribunal is known, has suffered repeated false starts, shortages of funds, and bitter verbal spats between its two sponsors.

The idea of a tribunal was first mooted back in the mid-1990s, but the Cambodian government wanted to run it, while the international community - represented by the UN - argued that Cambodia's judicial system was not up to the job.

It took a decade for them to agree to set up trials presided over by both Cambodian and international judges.

The surviving Khmer Rouge leaders were not indicted until just over a year ago. They are now elderly and frail, and may not live long enough to face trial.

"So is this it?" I thought, watching Duch shuffling in the dock. "The reckoning for the great terror of the Khmer Rouge, falling on the skinny shoulders of this little old man. Is it really worth all the diplomatic wrangling, the millions of pounds wrung from donors?"

It is a question journalists, academics and human rights researchers have been asking Cambodians for years.

The answers they get are ambiguous.

Some victims have welcomed the opportunity offered by the tribunal to confront their tormentors in court. Others say they would rather forget.

Almost two thirds of the Cambodian population is too young to remember the Khmer Rouge years, and in surveys they tend to highlight problems like economic development as a more important priority.

But this is still a traumatised country. Surveys have also repeatedly shown alarming levels of stress and anxiety left by the long years of war and revolution.

So perhaps even one successful trial will help heal the wounds.

Chance encounter

And Duch is an extraordinary defendant. For a start, he is remorseful.

Unlike the other four defendants, all top Khmer Rouge leaders, who have implausibly denied all knowledge of the killing fields, Duch has admitted his role as Pol Pot's chief executioner.

He burst into tears when taken back last year to the prison, now a grim museum, its walls lined with the harrowing faces of the thousands of prisoners he had photographed before they were tortured and killed.

Duch vanished after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979 that drove the Khmer Rouge from power, but he was discovered by chance 20 years later by a British photographer, Nic Dunlop, who had been haunted by a grainy snapshot of Duch he had carried in his wallet for 10 years.

The former prison chief had converted to Christianity and was then working for an international aid group.

When confronted by his past, Duch calmly went through the documents presented to him that he had left behind in Tuol Sleng. He confirmed his signature on execution orders.

"It's God's will that you are here," he told the photographer.

Torture and confessions

The memory of Duch etched in the minds of the handful of survivors from Tuol Sleng is of a meticulous man who always remained calm, but never flinched from ordering the most unspeakable cruelties on his victims.

Almost everyone who passed through his hands - at least 14,000 prisoners - was murdered, even small children.

The documents so carefully kept in this once secret facility offer terrifying evidence of the Orwellian madness and paranoia of the Khmer Rouge.

In the language of the party, prisoners were swept away or smashed to bits.

A sign still visible on the wall of the prison orders them not to scream while being tortured.

In the last years of the Khmer Rouge many of Tuol Sleng's victims were loyal party members, accused of fantastic treacheries and tortured to extract confessions that ran to hundreds of pages.

The sole British victim, John Dewhirst, who was detained in 1978 while sailing off the Cambodian coast, was forced to confess that he had been recruited as a CIA spy by his father at the age of 12.

"I remember the Englishman well," Duch told Nic Dunlop. "He was very polite."

We may never know what turned Duch from a mild-mannered maths teacher into a ruthless executioner. Perhaps even he cannot explain that.

But his trial does offer the chance - perhaps the only chance we will get - to glimpse the kind of mentality that lay behind this unfathomably cruel regime.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Thursday, 19 February, 2009 at 1100 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.