Mass Murder Relies on People Like Us: An Interview With Thierry Cruvellier
In
Phnom Penh, between 1975 and 1979—the years of Khmer Rouge terror that
Cambodians often refer to simply as Pol Pot Time—a former schoolteacher
named Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, orchestrated the torture and
execution of at least twelve thousand men, women, and children. The
Khmer Rouge murdered close to two million Cambodians in that period.
That’s what their particular brand of Communist revolution amounted to:
killing. Duch wasn’t one of the masterminds, but he was their zealous
servant, and he was entrusted with the command of S-21, the prison where
Khmer Rouge cadres were sent to be purged. The purges were constant.
While ordinary Cambodian civilians were killed on an industrial scale
and without ceremony, it was Duch’s mission to insure that everyone held
at S-21 was broken down until they confessed to counter-revolutionary
crimes—working for the C.I.A., say, or for the K.G.B., or for both, even
though most prisoners had never heard of either agency before Duch’s
torturers went to work—and then he had them slaughtered.
Duch didn’t expect to survive the revolution:
he had sent most of his own mentors to their deaths, and, by the logic
of S-21, his time, too, would come to confess and be condemned. But,
before that happened, a renegade group of Khmer Rouge officers backed by
Vietnam drove the Pol Potists from power. Duch had kept excellent
records of his work; unlike nearly everyone else in the revolutionary
hierarchy, he had failed to destroy them in the end. So, in the
nineteen-nineties, when it was discovered that he had survived, there
was no denying his crimes. By then, he had converted to Christianity,
and he said he repented of his career as a Khmer Rouge murderer. That
made him singular. In 2009, thirty years after he fled S-21, he was the
first Khmer Rouge figure to be brought to trial before a newly
established, U.N.-run tribunal in Phnom Penh. And, luckily, Thierry
Cruvellier, who has spent the past fifteen years observing international
war-crimes prosecutions more closely than any other reporter and
writer, was there for every day of Duch’s trial.
Duch was an intensely engaged participant in his own trial, and
Cruvellier gave his exceptionally fine portrait of the man and his
judgment the double-edged title “The Master of Confessions.” When the
book originally appeared, in France, Cruvellier was immediately
acclaimed as a master in his own right—a deeply informed and deeply
thoughtful observer of the legal, political, moral, and psychological
complexity of his subject. He is an elegant, understated writer, with a
keen and rigorous intellect, and a wry, quiet wit. We first met and
became friends in May of 1995, in Kigali—his first book, “Court of
Remorse,” drew on the five years he spent at the U.N.’s Rwanda
tribunal—and, shortly after the American publication of “The Master of
Confessions,” last month, we began this e-mail interview.
You’re the only journalist who has attended all the post-Cold War
international tribunals. You’ve spent years watching these trials. What
drew you to them? What kept you going back? How has your view of them
evolved?
The good thing about working on the same story over a long period of
time is that you tend to get better at what you’re doing. The bad thing
about working too long on mass violence is that it doesn’t make you a
happier man.
You are often sharply critical, even damning, in your account of
these courts. Are we better off with them than we were without them?
It’s true that I can be very harsh on these institutions and on those
who run them. Historically, it is understandable that these judicial
experiments had to be tested and developed, and some have been more
convincing than others, at different stages. But, in the beginning, when
the Rwanda tribunal got under way, most of us were quite naïve; we
thought that this was our Nuremberg. In fact, the quality, efficiency,
and sense of purpose of international tribunals—and of the International
Criminal Court, which is their heir—have deteriorated steadily over the
past decade.
The Duch trial had its shortcomings, of course. The prosecutor’s
office, for instance, was very weak. Yet it remains by far one of the
most complete, fair, and valuable trials I have covered. The “mixed”
nature of the court, with equal participation of Cambodians and
internationals; the fact that it took place in the country, in Phnom
Penh; and the fact that victims were accepted as full parties to the
proceedings made this trial much more relevant and “real” than those
held in The Hague.
Journalists and historians lay a lot of blame for the destruction
of Cambodia and Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia on the actions and
inactions of major Western powers. But tribunals never consider such
outside responsibility. Do you think that they could or should?
Genocide is primarily a national affair. The way Rwandan Hutus and
Khmer Rouge cadres decided to instigate or join the killings, or the way
top leaders orchestrated, instigated, or gradually got into the
mechanics of mass murder are not decisively linked to the support they
may have got from outside. The responsibilities of foreign
governments—and of France in Rwanda, in particular—seem to work at a
different level than what is defined by international criminal law.
Technically, criminal courts can only deal with individual
responsibility, which makes it highly difficult to link a foreign state
to the crime. Ultimately, the genocide is conceived and committed by
nationals.
Then, of course, there’s a more embarrassing reason these courts
don’t go after foreign responsibility: judges and prosecutors don’t want
to get into trouble with permanent members of the U.N. Security Council
or Secretariat, which pays most of their salaries. It’s an obvious
weakness of these tribunals, but perhaps it’s just not their function.
Their credibility problem may lie much more in the poor quality of the
investigations, and in the fact that only the weak are prosecuted.
You make the key point that the Duch trial was the first
international tribunal case to address the crimes of Communism. The
Rwanda and Yugoslavia courts, like the prosecutions at Nuremberg and
Tokyo, dealt with crimes of ultra-nationalist regimes, which you
identify as ideologies of the right. Only the Cambodia tribunal has
addressed the crimes of the left, and you say that made human-rights
lawyers notably uneasy. You say they had great difficulty addressing the
connection between Communist ideology and systematic mass murder. You
say that much of the tribunal crowd preferred to imagine the Khmer Rouge
as noble until it went awry and became vile—and that some were outright
fellow-travellers. For instance, the woman hired by the U.N. to handle
Khmer Rouge victims at the Duch trial was an unrepentant Maoist. Why was
that? And how did this sympathy for the left affect the general
atmosphere of the trial?
There is a historical lineage between the far left and the
human-rights movement. In the nineteen-sixties, after Stalin’s terror
was widely acknowledged; in the seventies, after Solzhenitsyn’s
denunciation of the Gulag; and then, finally, in the eighties, after the
horrors of Pol Pot were fully revealed, many Western intellectuals
moved from the discredited and disgraced Marxism-Leninism to the ideals
of universal human rights. As opposed to the boredom of prosaic reforms,
advocating for human rights is, in its own way, another grandiose and
poetic enterprise where we, as a people, fight against exploiters. As
the French philosopher Raymond Aron astutely noted, human rights, as a
political philosophy, is based on a notion of purity. It’s not about
taking responsibility for a decision “in unpredicted circumstances,
based on incomplete knowledge”—that’s politics, said Aron. Instead,
human rights function as a refuge for utopia.
What was interesting to observe at the Khmer Rouge tribunal was that
former Western Maoists or fellow-travellers were not transformed, when
they became disillusioned with Communism, into skeptical minds. They now
presented themselves as human-rights defenders. The appeal of “pure”
ideologies seemed irresistible to them. Revolutionaries get indignant
about police abuse or ruthless capitalism, and then forgive, in the name
of the revolution, every injustice they had otherwise denounced.
Interestingly, the moral indignation of human-rights activists can
suddenly be silenced when institutions that they helped create and that
were supposed to exemplify their ideals—such as international war-crimes
tribunals—start violating the very principles they have claimed to
stand for. They say that criticism would serve the “enemies” of justice.
They begin to accept that the end justifies the means. Double standards
widely apply. The drive that often made them efficient when they worked
in a hostile environment now, when they are empowered, transforms into
an intransigence that can make them very insensitive to realities that
don’t fit their ideological paradigm. International tribunals can be a
harsh reminder that injustice and unfairness are not incompatible with
humanist intentions.
At the Cambodia tribunal, a surprising number of Westerners who did
not come from the far left also showed a level of sympathy for the “good
intentions” of the Communist project. As a result, the trial was never
going to be a trial of Communism as a political philosophy. Instead, it
was all about Pol Potism, circumscribed and vilified as a despicable
betrayal of a genuine revolutionary ideal. Such leniency would not be
seen at trials against ideologies of the right.
To the extent that Duch defended himself, he claimed that he was
just following orders. At one point, he says, “We had to obey or else we
would be killed.… We were all victims.” His record at S-21 suggests
there was a lot of truth to that claim. So what do you make of Duch’s
claim that he was guilty only of serving a bad cause?
I find the situation under Democratic Kampuchea to be different than
Rwanda under Hutu Power or Germany under the Nazis. In Pol Pot’s
Cambodia, it appears that even if you were on the right side (i.e., you
were a certified member of the Communist Party), you couldn’t fight or
flee, and even if you obeyed with zeal you stood a significant chance of
being killed in mass purges. About eighty per cent of Duch’s victims
were Khmer Rouge themselves. From 1976 on, he was essentially a Khmer
Rouge killing Khmer Rouge. In that context, the classic claim of
perpetrators, that they “had to obey orders,” is much harder to reject
as just a bad excuse. That doesn’t lessen the crimes of the Khmer Rouge.
It just makes it far more presumptuous for us to say that we would have
done better.
Human-rights professionals often speak of international courts
and trials not only as instruments for sorting through the evidence and
executing the law but, more grandly, as organs for establishing
historical truth as the foundation for delivering justice. But you
write, “The more trials you follow, the more you disbelieve everyone.”
Why is that? How did your view of the nature and purpose of trials,
their means and their ends, evolve over long years of observing them?
Perhaps it all boils down to the experience of hypocrisy. Beyond
trying to sort out the evidence in a particular case within a particular
set of rules, international tribunals have been burdened with a range
of expectations, such as deterring other criminals, contributing to
peace and reconciliation, establishing historical truth, providing
closure to victims, etc. Supporters of international justice have widely
used such goals to legitimatize and promote the courts. When it suits
them, judges, prosecutors, and activists happily embrace their role as
peace- and history-makers, in the name of the victims. But as soon as
such expectations look far-fetched, or are necessarily betrayed, the
same people quickly state that this is not what courts are for. Can you
have it both ways?
Honesty, courage, and integrity are not primary values in the
judicial world. Instead, the enterprise is wrapped up in the prestige of
universal values and moral principles. The gap between the two
realities—the way justice is done and the way it presents itself to the
outside—is more shocking than in other fields because those who work or
support these institutions do take the moral high ground, and also
because the lives and the reputations of the suspects are at stake.
International courts have always shown a remarkable lack of modesty as
to what little they actually accomplish, and at a cost that is, whether
they like it or not, increasingly shocking. As the gap widens, it turns
to deceit. And you come out of the experience in disbelief.
You write of “the purely symbolic justice … opportunistically
promoted by international law advocates,” and of the lynch-mob way in
which all sorts of supposedly civilized people presume that anyone
accused in an international tribunal is not just guilty but a monster.
And you say that what Duch’s trial revealed to you was exactly the
opposite: his humanity. You write, “Duch is not a psycho or a monster
and that’s the problem.” Why, or for whom, is that a problem?
The humanity of individuals who become mass murderers like Duch is a
repulsive notion to many people. I can assure you that the predominant
reaction, regardless of social and educational background, is to say
that they are not one of us. In fact, many people do not even understand
how someone can go and defend them in court. When Duch’s lawyer,
François Roux, chose to defend an accused man before the Rwanda
tribunal, his many friends within human-rights organizations first took
it as a betrayal.
Refusing Duch as one of us may give us peace of mind. It keeps us in
the safe belief that if, God forbid, we happened to face extraordinary
historical circumstances we would behave like heroes. But it doesn’t
help us better understand how mass crimes develop and succeed through
mass participation.
At the genocide museum in Phnom Penh, Duch’s victims are presented as
victims, which they certainly were. But eighty per cent of them were
themselves Khmer Rouge, and if they instead had been asked to be
perpetrators the overwhelming majority would have obeyed. To accept that
Duch tells us something about ourselves doesn’t mean we accept his
crimes, and it doesn’t mean we risk showing him sympathy. It makes us
think in more realistic terms about how mass murder operates and how it
relies on people like us.
When Hannah Arendt wrote about Eichmann, she cast him as an
archetypal figure, and she defined the archetype, forgivingly and
inaccurately, with the phrase that has become such a cliché: “the
banality of evil.” Of course, she attended only a few days of Eichmann’s
trial. You were there for every day of Duch’s trial, and you represent
him as neither banal nor simply evil but rather as complex and
perplexing, brutal and misguided, and, above all, as human as the rest
of us. So, with all your experience of war-crimes trials and the war
criminals they present to us, do you see him as typical? Or is he
exceptional among the defendants you’ve observed?
He is both. He was typical in his struggle with the atrocities he
committed—a mix of emotionless acknowledgment, denial on specifics,
acceptance of irrefutable facts, and questioning of weaker
allegations—as well as in his search for excuses: the duty to obey, fear
under duress, etc. He was more exceptional in his capacity to reflect
on ideologies and political systems, and in his obvious long experience
and expertise in human psychology, which allowed him to assess his
various interlocutors in many subtle ways. He is also endowed with two
remarkable skills: an astonishing memory and great mental strength.
Who, in the end, benefitted from Duch’s trial? Was it good for
the victims? Was it good for the nation? Was it good for human rights?
Was it good for international law? Was it good for the rest of the
surviving Khmer Rouge, including Hun Sen and his crowd?
A single trial of a single man for a crime of such nature and
magnitude is obviously a form of absurdity. The second Cambodia trial,
involving the last two surviving top members of the regime, was much
more significant, but Duch is likely to remain the symbol of
Pol Pot’s murderous regime in people’s memory. Similarly, S-21 itself, a
prison mostly devoted to the killing of Khmer Rouge by Khmer Rouge, has
become the ambiguous genocide museum in Cambodia. That’s something of a
historical travesty. So, yes, it was probably largely to the benefit of
Hun Sen’s regime, which can claim to have defeated the Khmer Rouge and
to have brought them to justice without ever letting the process
implicate him or a number of other top officials, some of whom were
superior to Duch under Pol Pot.
As for the victims, it is always very difficult to assess what they
really get from a trial, but perhaps some of Duch’s victims felt they
got some response to their suffering. For the millions of others who
didn’t lose their relatives at S-21, I don’t know. Still, this very
limited judicial enterprise, and the momentum that the Duch trial
created, have been decisive in allowing, for the first time, a national
public debate on the Khmer Rouge era. In 2009, while the Duch trial was
ending, a short history of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea was finally
introduced in the history curriculum. For thirty years, that history had
not been officially taught in Cambodia.
On several occasions during the trial, Duch broke down. What was it, do you think, that got to him at those moments?
In my view, the moments when Duch broke down seemed to come
essentially from genuine shame. But some victims and families saw it
differently, and said they didn’t believe in his tears of regret. Some
even saw in them a sign of Duch’s manipulative mind.
You also saw Duch laugh at times, and you saw him smile with
something like amusement or bemusement. What made the killer of twelve
thousand people or more smile? What made him laugh?
Duch often smiled and rarely laughed. But I found his bursting and
uncontrolled laughter to be the most uncomfortable thing to deal with.
What triggered his laughter was in no way funny—for instance, the
testimony on the torture of one of his former subordinates that Duch
found to be a fabrication.
His smiles, too, were often triggered by instances of human
vulnerability: a lie, an exaggeration, a lack of education on the part
of a witness, or the defeat of his opponent in court. And sometimes he
smiled at moments of real intellectual agility from someone he admired.
Duch’s smiles seemed to reveal both the arrogance of a clever man and
his real, sarcastic sense of humor. In a way, they gave his intelligence
its seduction and its menace.
At one point, Duch even compared the tribunal to S-21, as an
institution by which a system of power imposed its idea of justice upon
its disciples and captives alike. Am I reading you correctly when I say
that you don’t exactly disagree?
Yes, of course. This was irony on the part of Duch, and Duch himself
must undoubtedly prefer to be brought before this tribunal than before
his staff of executioners at S-21. But, as a general remark, how could
we not agree?
Photograph by Lauren Mulligan/The Times/Gallo Images/Getty.
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