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[justinm at ucr.edu]

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The Killing Fileds confession
'They all had to be eliminated'

Kang Khek Ieu was known as 'Cambodia's Himmler', a torturer
who oversaw the deaths of 17,000 people. As he prepares to go
on trial, he gives a chilling insight into the Khmer Rouge –
the most detailed account yet from a top henchman
Exclusive by Valerio Pellizzari, Phnom Penh
The Independent
London
Monday, 11 February 2008

In the West he has been called "Cambodia's Heinrich Himmler";
since Pol Pot himself and his lieutenant Ta Mok cheated
justice by dying, he is the most vivid symbol of the Khmer
Rouge left alive. His name is Kang Khek Ieu, but he is better
known by his nom de guerre, Duch (pronounced "Doik"). This
spring, 28 years after fleeing Cambodia ahead of the
Vietnamese army, his trial for mass murder may finally get
under way.

Now, in the first interview he has given since his capture
more than eight-and-a-half years ago, he talks freely about
how and why he sent 17,000 Cambodians to their deaths in the
killing fields.

And even as he waits to confront the proof of his crimes, it
is clear that, for him, there was never any choice: anybody
who was thought to pose a threat to the revolution had to be
tortured and killed. Asked whether he had any moments of
uncertainty, any doubts or feelings of rebellion while he set
about wiping out his country's entire intellectual class, he
answered: "There was a widespread and tacit understanding.

"I and everyone else who worked in that place knew that anyone
who entered had to be psychologically demolished, eliminated
by steady work, given no way out. No answer could avoid death.
Nobody who came to us had any chance of saving himself."

The command had come from above, he said. "All the prisoners
had to be eliminated. We saw enemies, enemies, enemies
everywhere." He could not have rebelled or fled, he insisted.
"If I had tried to flee, they were holding my family hostage,
and my family would have suffered the same fate as the other
prisoners in Tuol Sleng. If I had fled or rebelled it would
not have helped anyone."

Between 1975 and the beginning of 1979, under Pol Pot, two
million men and women, almost a third of the Cambodian
population, were brutally eliminated by the Khmer Rouge – an
extreme Marxist movement that aimed to take Cambodia back to
"Year Zero", cutting it off from the outside world and
imposing their leaders' vision of an "agrarian utopia".

Of its two million victims, more than 17,000 – party
officials, diplomats, Buddhist monks, engineers, doctors,
teachers, students, musicians and dancers, were brought to a
former school in the heart of Phnom Penh that had been
converted into a torture centre. Only six came out of it alive.

Codenamed S-21, the centre was run by Duch, a former maths
teacher who had become the head of the regime's secret police.
In the former classrooms, over a period of 40 months, Duch
oversaw the extermination of the entire Cambodian intellectual
class with mathematical rigour.

Confessions were extracted by primitive torture: prisoners
were strapped to iron beds, suspended upside down from ropes,
threatened with drowning, tormented with knives and pincers,
locked in tiny cells. Then, at night, they were taken by lorry
to the outskirts of Phnom Penh and killed in the rice fields.
The Khmer Rouge were obsessed with killing by night.

Now at last, after years of argument between the Cambodian
government and the United Nations, the surviving members of
the Khmer Rouge hierarchy are finally being brought to
justice. They will be tried under a hybrid UN-Cambodian
tribunal known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of
Cambodia; the pre-trial hearings began in November and are
still going on. Pol Pot, of course, is long dead, having died
under house arrest before he could be tried in 1998. The
bloodiest of his comrades, Ta Mok, died in 1996. But five
senior leaders including Khieu Sampan, the Khmer Rouge
president, await trial.

Duch made his first appearance in court in November when his
lawyer asked for him to be let out on bail because his "human
rights had been violated, even if he was not beaten or
tortured". A ripple of ironic laughter ran round the
courtroom. The request was rejected.

My quest to interview Duch had begun nearly three years ago. I
first visited S-21, soon after the fall of the Khmer Rouge.
Since his arrest more than eight years ago, nobody from the
outside had even clapped eyes on him. Now, finally, I was
looking at this frail, 66-year-old man with his protruding,
irregular teeth, bug eyes and washed-out grey clothes. I was
confronting the mystery of the banality and the innocence of evil.

Throughout our interview, his voice was low, respectful like a
mantra, a Buddhist prayer, rather than what it really was; the
soundtrack of a nightmare still freighted with questions. His
mild-mannered almost frail appearance in no way suggested the
role of a mass murderer.

For the interview, the rules were strict: no tape recorder, no
camera, no talking to him directly in French or English but
only through a Cambodian interpreter. General Neang Phat,
Cambodia's Secretary of State, and other generals were sitting
in the same room, listening to and scrutinising this
indefinable and unfathomable man. Some of them, too, have evil
memories of the Khmer Rouge years. But Duch was the exact
picture of the banality and innocence of evil.

Duch, the nickname he assumed when he was young and joined the
guerrillas, told me that the torture centre at Tuol Sleng was
set up in August 1975, four months after the Khmer Rouge
entered Phnom Penh, and began work two months later.

"I was given the task of creating it and starting it up,
although I never found out why they chose me. Before 1975,
when the Khmer Rouge lived in hiding, in the jungle, or in the
liberated zones, I was the head of Office 13, I was the chief
of police in the special zone bordering on Phnom Penh."

He described a routine of bureaucratic monotony. "Every day I
had to read and check the confessions. I read from seven in
the morning until midnight. And every day, towards three in
the afternoon, Professor Son Sen, the minister of defence,
summoned me. I had known him since my time as a high school
teacher. It was he who had asked me to join the guerrillas.

"He would ask me how my work was going. Then a messenger would
arrive, an envoy, who collected the confessions that were
ready and took them to Son Sen. These messengers were the only
links between one office and another."

I wanted to know if Duch had any moments of uncertainty,
doubts, feelings of rebellion while he was wiping out his
country's entire intellectual class.

He admitted the idea had crossed his mind. "When the work
started at Tuol Sleng, I asked my bosses now and then, 'Do we
really have to use all this violence?' Son Sen never answered.
Nuon Chea, the No 2 Brother in the power structure, who was
above him, told me: 'Don't think about these things.'

"I personally had no answer. Then with the passing of time, I
understood. It was Ta Mok who had ordered all the prisoners to
be eliminated. We saw enemies, enemies, enemies everywhere.

"I was cornered, like everyone in that machine, I had no
alternative. Pol Pot, the No 1 Brother, said you always had to
be suspicious, to fear something. And thus the usual request
came: interrogate them again, interrogate them better."

Sometimes Duch was tempted to be merciful, he claimed – and
his superiors began to mistrust him. He recalled the time a
cousin was brought to S-21.

"I knew him well, we had formed sincere family ties but I had
to eliminate him anyway. I knew he was a good person but I had
to pretend to believe that confession extorted with violence.
So in order to protect him I didn't analyse those statements
too rigorously. And on that occasion my superiors began to
lose full trust in me. At the same time I didn't feel safe any
more."

But the moment of official doubt passed. The interrogations
and executions continued, remorselessly until the end.

"You kept your post until the end," I said. "Did you always
carry out your orders thoroughly?"

Duch answered: "I obeyed. The work carried on until 7 January
1979, when the Cambodian liberation forces, supported by the
Vietnamese, conquered Phnom Penh. There was no escape plan, no
pull-out plan ..."

But, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the executioner
blended back in among his countrymen, and disappeared, as so
many did in the post-war chaos, swallowed up by the void.

Many years later he was converted to Christianity by American
missionaries. His true identity was discovered in 1998 and
soon afterwards he was arrested. He remains the most
disquieting witness of the political madness planned by the
Khmer Rouge, after the death of Pol Pot and Ta Mok, the
one-legged "butcher".

I asked him how he converted to Christianity and why that
happened. "I became convinced that Christians were a force,
and that this force could beat Communism. At the time of the
guerrilla war, I was 25 years old, Cambodia was corrupt,
Communism was full of promise and I believed in it. But that
project failed completely."

So if Duch has repented now, what is his attitude to all those
thousands of victims of his violence? There was no alternative
for people like himself, trapped inside the machinery of the
Khmer Rouge, he said.

"If someone goes looking for guilt, and the various degrees of
guilt, I say that there was no way out for anyone who entered
the power system conceived by Pol Pot. Only at the top did
they know the real situation in the country, but the
intermediate functionaries did not know. And then there was
that obsession with secrecy.

"Of course, you are asking me whether I could have rebelled,
or at least fled. But if I had tried to flee, they were
holding my family hostage, and my family would have suffered
the same fate as the other prisoners in Tuol Sleng. If I had
fled or rebelled it would not have helped anyone."[End]

______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
2617 Humanities Building
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu