On the trail of an executioner

17 Feb 2009
Channel 4 News (UK)

Author and photographer Nic Dunlop first tracked down Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, currently on trial in Phnom Penh for crimes against humanity.

Duch was commandant of the S-21 Tuol Send prison in Cambodia, where at least 14,000 "enemies of the revolution" were jailed and later killed.

Channel 4 News online spoke to Nic Dunlop in Bangkok.

How did you actually track down Duch?
I'd come out to Cambodia because I wanted to have an understanding of why the Khmer Rouge had happened. I began to carry round a photograph of Duch with me. He was a key lnk between the Khmer Rouge leadership and the killing of the Khmer Rouge's enemies.

Of all the people in the world that you'd like to talk to to explain this period, Duch would be the man. A year prior to meeting him (in 1999) I began to carry around a photo.

One day, while on a routine assignment in the west of Cambodia, I had a day off. There was a meeting in a former Khmer Rouge zone which I'd always wanted to go to.

"Of all the people in the world that you'd like to talk to to explain this period, Duch would be the man."

I was wandering around and this mean wearing an American Refugee Committee T-shirt came up to me and introduced himself. So the meeting was largely accidental.

Duch felt protected where he was, and that no matter what happened he would be looked after. Most of these people (a reference to four other high-ranking Khmer Rouge functionaries, due to be tried later this year) were never on a wanted list.

Duch seemed quite keen to tell me that he was a Christian, that he'd seen the light. And I think he just assumed that I would be a Christian.

Several meetings later I, along with Nate Thayer (the last western journalist to have interviewed Pol Pot), confronted Duch. I'm not sure he was aware of why we'd come. He then began an extraordinary confession where he talked about his role as Pot Polt's executioner.

And he's remained true to his word that he's gong to tell as much of the truth as he can. That will be devastating for the rest of them.

How easy or difficult will it be to convict the others if Duch's conviction fails?
Proving they were aware of what Duch was doing isn't going to be difficult. Proving their involvement is going to be more difficult.

When I talked with Duch in 1999 we presented him with signed lists of victim's confessions. But he said the signatures were not his writing but belonged to the others. But I think it may be very difficult to make the link with the others.

30 years on, what meaning does the present process have for Cambodians?
For those who are aware of it, yes, it is meaningful. I've never met anybody who didn't want some accounting, who didn't believe it was terribly important.

But very little is understood outside Phnom Penh. There's a chasm between the world of rural Cambodia and urban Cambodia.

"There's a chasm between the world of rural Cambodia and urban Cambodia."

The problem with this tribunal is that 85 per cent have little or no understanding of the tribunal or don't know about it. The rest know about the tribunal, but beyond that very few people understand it.

At least one lawyer I spoke to said, "We've failed to explain what we're going." I met one woman who had been a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge for three years, and she had no idea that the tribunal was happening.

Cambodia's torture chief set to face justice

February 16, 2009
ABC Radio Australia

Cambodia's UN-backed special court, commonly known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, opens in Phnom Penh tomorrow.

The proceedings will be broadcast 'live' on Cambodian television .. and first up will be former prison chief, Kaing Guek Eav -- better known as Duch. The 66 year old faces charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture and pre-meditated murder for his role in running S-21, a high school in Phnom Penh, transformed into a notorious prison. The communist Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia in April 1975 and immediately began dismantling modern society in their drive to transform the country into an agrarian utopia.

Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: Nic Dunlop, the man who tracked down Duch, and author of 'The Lost Executioner', published by Bloomsbury

Click here to listen to the audio program in English (Windows Media)

DUNLOP: Well, I first went to Cambodia in 89, so it was exactly 10 years later that I stumbled on Duch in 1999, and of course, here we are ten years later and he is the first to go on trial. But the reason that I focused in on Duch is that he was a man at the centre of the killing, but also who had links to the leadership, so he could actually explain the chain of command and responsibility. At the same time, I wanted to understand the kind of pathology of somebody who could carry out horrific acts on a daily basis.

LAM: The general consensus is that Duch will be helpful to the ECCC or the Khmer Rouge Tribunal as it's commonly known because he confessed to his role at Tuol Sleng. Do you agree with that view point?

DUNLOP: Yes, from what I understand is that he's been more than cooperative and so he's actually remained true to what he told me in 1999, that he wanted the truth to be known about what happened.

LAM: What were your first impressions when you met Duch?

DUNLOP: I suppose one is incredulity, because on the one hand, yes I was looking for him and keeping an eye out for him, but then to find that he actually walked up to me in the end was a little startling. So it took a rather surreal quality. And I also did not know his position in the area that I met him at the time, so it was very difficult to ascertain as to whether he had actually left the Khmer Rouge police or special branch, which he used to head or whether he was simply as he claimed a school teacher.

LAM: So how did he strike you?

DUNLOP: I think he was a rather sort of eccentric figure. He was all and rather wiry looking I suppose and he extremely friendly, not perhaps the idea that a lot of people may have of a killer.

LAM: Indeed, someone once spoke about the ordinariness of evil and I am paraphrasing here. Did that strike you about Duch .. that he was perhaps, either willingly or not, part of this very evil process and yet seemed a most unlikely candidate?

DUNLOP: What's disturbing is how much we have in common. In fact, if we're really honest, we all carry the ability to carry out horrific acts with us all the time. It's just that we luckily for the vast majority of us have never been in a position where that has occurred. So I think the disturbing aspect of it is the fact that people like Duch are extremely ordinary. There is nothing that would suggest that they were necessarily killers immediately to you and that is where it becomes very, very disconcerting.

LAM: Did he speak to you about his time at Tuol Sleng at all?

DUNLOP: Yes, at the time he expressed what appeared to be genuine remorse. He said that I was very sorry for the killings and he felt that the truth about what had happened in Tuol Sleng and elsewhere should be made known to the world. It was an extraordinary confession and an extraordinary moment. But you also have to remember that this is tempered by the fact that the background to this is the death of thousands of innocent men, women and children. But just exactly how sorry he is or to what extent he will tell the truth remains to be seen.

LAM: You're listening to Connect Asia on Radio Australia. In Phnom Penh, we're heard on 101.5FM and in Vientianne 96 FM and this morning I am speaking with Nic Dunlop, author of the book "The Lost Executioner".

Nick Dunlop, how important is it for Cambodians that he acknowledges what he did?

DUNLOP: Incumbent I think that's very, very significant. It's very rare that you will meet people who you can say this in many cultures that people admit to wrongdoings and admit to extremely difficult things. I think that most people, everyone carries around with them bad memories that you would much rather pack away. To find somebody in a culture where it is not very reflective, in general, most people don't tend to analyse a great deal of their actions. I think it's extremely significant. All the Khmer Rouge to date, bar Duch, have shifted responsibility or made up excuses or other, but Duch is the only one who has actually spoken anything approaching the whole truth about what has happened.

LAM: How important is it do you think for the present generations of Cambodians, that this Khmer Rouge Tribunal, not just bring the perpetrators to justice, but also be seen to be bringing some kind of closure for the country?

DUNLOP: Well, my own view is that it is as important that the vast majority of the population, most of whom never experienced the Khmer Rouge, that they understand this process, why it's important, why it relates to them and their society and this is an area that I think the tribunal has yet to prove itself. So I think it's extremely important that it's understood beyond the walls of the actual tribunal itself. The trouble is that according to a recent report, 81 per cent of the population have little or no knowledge or understanding of the process, and I think that's a cause for serious concern. There is a danger that this whole process will become irrelevant.

LAM: Do you think it's important to broaden the hearings or do you think this is, even though it might be a symbolic gesture, symbolic process, that this in itself is better than nothing?

DUNLOP: I think it is better than nothing, but I do believe to have real credibility it's got to widen the net. There are many, many more people alive who are directly involved in the killings, indeed, there are at least two candidates for prosecution who have not been indited yet, who are directly responsible for sending people to Tuol Sleng and to Duch. So when you are holding only five to ten people accountable for crimes that were committed 30 years ago, that they understand why that is and the danger is that they don't. In fact, from my experience, they don't. I mean I think it's important to widen the net as much as is possible - certainly for the next tier of Khmer leaders who haven't .. or nobody as yet has been charged.

‘Kill every last one’

Sunday July 22, 2007
Review by MARTIN SPICE
The Star Online (Malaysia)

This is a story that needed to be told, and that needs to be listened to.

THE LOST EXECUTIONER
By Nic Dunlop
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 316 pages
(ISBN: 978-0747566717)

IF 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.

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.