Love and Other Ways of Dying (45 page)

In writing the introduction to the trials in a handbook distributed to the Cambodian people, Hun Sen put it most simply.
“The crimes of the Khmer Rouge period were not just committed against the people of Cambodia,” he wrote, “but against all humanity.”

December 9, 1970: Feeling frustrated by the changing tide of the war in Vietnam, Richard Nixon calls his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to discuss closing down North Vietnamese supply routes through Cambodia. “I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them,” says the president. “There is no limitation on mileage, and there is no limitation on budget.” Throughout the conversation, Nixon seems agitated, peeved. “The whole goddamn Air Force over there farting around,” he says. “It is a disgraceful performance.… Get them off their asses and get them to work now.”

Minutes later Kissinger is speaking to Alexander Haig: “I just talked to our little friend,” says Kissinger. “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order; it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?”

On the transcript, the response is described as follows: “Couldn’t hear but sounded like Haig laughing.”

Over and over and over, in past, present, and future, it’s happening, has happened, will happen again. Like this:

In 146
B
.
C
., the Romans attack Carthage, jealous of its wealth and refinement. After giving up their weapons to avoid war, the Carthaginians are asked to abandon their beloved city, and when they refuse are set upon, beaten, and burned alive. Over the course of a week, Roman soldiers employ all manner of killing—using swords for stabbing and spears for impaling. They loft bodies from rooftops to the cobbles below and bury children
and old people alive or stampede them beneath their horses. According to one account, bodies are torn asunder “into all kinds of horrible shapes, crushed and mangled.” When the Carthaginian commander, Hasdrubal, finally surrenders, his wife appears before him at a burning temple with their children, and, reproaching him for his cowardice, she slays her children, tossing them into the fire and plunging in after them.

Witnessing it all, the Roman commander Scipio clasps the hand of one of his lieutenants. “A glorious moment, Polybius,” he says, “but I have a dread foreboding that someday the same doom will be pronounced upon my own country.”

Or in other words, our own genocide forever comes next.

Before returning to Cambodia during the phase of Duch’s pretrial hearings, I was reading a lot. Books about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Books about torture and genocide. I sat in a room, in the middle of winter, ice shagging the windows, staring at pictures of the Brothers Khmer (oddly bloated while everyone else starved)—and some of their victims (fed on teaspoons of gruel; you could see their ribs). I read and took notes. By the time I recorded the details of one horrific happening, it was subsumed by the details of the next. It was hard to accept the incomprehensibility of the feat, the sheer creativity of Angkar’s sadism. But there it was, in the pictures taken at S-21, in the still-alive faces auguring death.

During this time, I thought that perhaps if you applied logic (for instance, a syllogism) to something illogical (for instance, a genocide), you might reach, well, the beginning of understanding. One afternoon, poring over my notes, a couple of disparate lines unmended themselves, floated up, and spun down again. It was a beginning:

My first morning back in Phnom Penh, I met at the hotel with a defense attorney for Comrade Duch named François Roux. The ECCC was set up in such a way that for every Cambodian attorney, there was also a corresponding international attorney. Roux shared his defense duties with a Cambodian lawyer named Kar Savuth, who himself had lost two brothers and nearly his own life to the Khmer Rouge.

Roux had spent thirty years doing this work, traveling the world from Rwanda to French Polynesia to defend the accused. He’d defended José Bové, the man who tore down a McDonald’s in France protesting genetically modified crops. Here in the United States he’d helped save the so-called twentieth hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, from the death penalty. “I like being on the side of the accused,” he said. “I find it edifying.”

At the hotel, he waved off the sumptuous five-star buffet, a cornucopia of pancakes and dumplings,
pho
and shrimp lo mein, and instead drank a single cup of orange-pekoe tea. He was a diminutive, impish man with quick, intelligent brown eyes, clad in a slightly ill-fitting black blazer and ironed white shirt. He’d spent so much time in Cambodia lately, he’d taken a little house to live in, and he found his life completely entwined with Duch’s, whom he met with every day. Yes, they had formed a bond, he said, a client-attorney bond, but a human bond nonetheless. “I wouldn’t say we are friends,” said Roux, “but we have an understanding, a very good understanding.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly. Was Roux here to act as an apologist for Duch, to report that he’d looked into the
man’s soul and seen something that the rest of humanity had somehow missed? Somewhere along the way, Duch had converted to Christianity, but thirty years and fifteen thousand dead bodies later was it okay to say, “Oh yeah, that stuff back there, that was a big mistake”?

I’m sure it wasn’t the first time Roux had been confused with one of his clients, and he tried his best to explain, but for a moment I stubbornly, irrationally, held to my own simplistic syllogism:

The Frenchman’s mouth kept moving—“due process … accepted responsibility … true justice …”—but I lost track of what he was saying. Only later, when I went back to the transcript, did I hear his voice again, almost plaintive in its individuation.

“I’m only here to try to make something fair out of something unfair,” he said.

At S-21, when Duch had been omnipotent, when it seemingly hadn’t occurred to him to question his own actions or seek expiation from his god for the sins he was committing, he preferred whips and electric shocks to waterboarding in order to keep his prisoners alive.

To an interrogator under his command, he gave these words of advice: “Beat [the prisoner] until he tells everything. Beat him to get at the deep things.”

At our meeting, Roux had spoken eloquently about how it could be that we might allow someone like Duch back into “our human community.” He went on to point out how the trial would allow his client to make his amends with the Cambodian people, how the criminal was always bigger than his crimes, that Duch had undergone a conversion. He was now a Christian, but more than that he was
changed
somehow.

Changed how? By sudden guilt? After the Vietnamese had poured into Phnom Penh in January 1979, effectively ending the rule of the Khmer Rouge, Comrade Duch had stayed at S-21 until the final second in order to oversee the killing of the last of the prisoners (the ones photographed by the Vietnamese, bodies bound on the rusted metal bed frames, throats slashed, bled out on the umber-and-white floor); then he’d disappeared into the jungle, eventually making his way to China to teach Khmer. Later he worked for Pol Pot as a bureaucrat and then taught school again in a small village, where he was regarded as a good teacher with a mean temper. Sometime after his conversion, he became a lay minister and worked in the countryside with the Christian relief agency World Vision, which is where he was found in 1999, under an assumed name, by a young journalist whose own initial visit to Tuol Sleng had led him on a personal manhunt for Comrade Duch. Would he have ever come forward if he hadn’t been discovered?

I admit I had a hard time buying the tale of his full conversion, especially from the French defense attorney whose advantage it was to sell that particular narrative, however passionate and personable Roux was, however much I trusted Roux’s intentions and his absolute faith in the process of justice. “Every case needs someone to defend,” he had said. He implied that even someone like Duch could be saved.

But if, as Roux insisted, the criminal was always bigger than his crime, I wanted to know this: Wasn’t the victim much bigger than both?

Roux, who was rushing to catch a plane to Rwanda, insisted that I speak to Kar Savuth, the other defense attorney. And so we set a meeting for a few nights later at the hotel bar. In 1994, Savuth had taken his oath as one of the first lawyers in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge, completing a dream that had been delayed twenty years: He’d been a law student when the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975. Instead of seeking revenge, a victim of the Khmer Rouge was defending them.

When he arrived at the bar, I would have guessed him to have been anywhere from forty-five to sixty-five years old (he was seventy-seven), wearing a gray shirt and gray slacks, sporting a gold watch and diamond ring, and carrying three cell phones, which he laid out before him on the table. We took a seat in the far corner with my translator, a woman named Veasna, and beneath the rotating paddle fans that hung from the ceiling, drinking seltzer, Kar Savuth wanted to make something very clear. He saw himself as a medical doctor, with Duch as his patient. He understood his obligation to his client. But he was not willing to forget.

He was not willing to forget how they’d killed his brothers.

He was not willing to forget how they’d killed his cousin’s entire family.

He could not forget his own feelings of survivor’s guilt.

He could not forget watching a woman killed in front of him, her liver removed, cooked, and eaten by the soldiers … then her hip meat … then her breast.

Kar Savuth sat on the cushion edge of the rattan chair as he spoke, straight at attention, his face a mask. He said all of it without a trace of emotion. His strength seemed almost severe. When he himself had been interrogated, he told them he was a cyclo
driver, and then they asked him the distance between two hospitals in the city. A month later, three months later, a year, and three years later, they asked him the same question over and over again. What is the distance between the two hospitals? If he’d changed his answer, they would have killed him.

And of course he remembered nearly starving to death, being so sick that his hair had fallen out. He’d playacted that he was clumsy so they might take pity—and ever after, he’d been clumsy, unable to relearn how to ride a bike, for instance. He’d even unlearned how to read. “It took a long time to become a human being again,” he said.

And yet, he said, when he first met Duch, the former Khmer Rouge commandant had cried, overwhelmed by guilt, then gathered himself, pointing out that the first commandant of S-21 had been killed and that he knew it was only a matter of time before he himself would be killed, too. Duch asked Kar Savuth a question: If they told you they were going to kill your family, what would you have done?

And Kar Savuth said, “I would have done exactly what you did.”

There have been many myths about the trials: One is that the Cambodians don’t want them, that the two-thirds of the population born after 1979 think of the Khmer Rouge as a scary bedtime story they’d rather not hear, while the other third would rather not recall the actual horrors they actually survived, suffering still as they are from PTSD and ungovernable fear. Another is that they won’t be able to handle the trials, that the idea of Western justice is foreign enough to the populace at large that a sentence other than life in prison (the death penalty is forbidden) will spark violence. And yet these misreadings—or half readings
(of course, a third of the population
does
live in fear, but their Buddhist faith prohibits revenge killing)—by outsiders are just a continuation of centuries of
farang
misapprehension.

Despite the constant whiff of Western condescension that has hung over the country since the French made it theirs in 1863, the years leading up to the trials, and now the first trial, the Duch trial, have forced an important if uneasy reckoning. And in large part that reckoning was begun for his people by Youk Chhang.