What Lingers After Cambodian Genocide
you is no loss.”
I had arrived in Cambodia in 1996, when the country was ragged and panting from the ravages of four years of mass killing, followed by more than a decade of civil war as the Khmer Rouge returned to their jungle insurgency.
I’d seen trauma before, but never an entire traumatized nation. I reminded myself regularly that all the adults I met were survivors or former killers, who now had to try to live with what they had seen or done. Almost everyone, survivor or killer, had lost family members. They carried around inside themselves millions of tiny worlds of suffering.
I visited land mine victims from the civil war in the military hospital, a dark and dreadful place without regular water or electricity, where men begged me for crutches.
Others, crippled and rejected by society, hopped around the market seeking alms.
At a government hospital I interviewed a psychiatrist — one of the few who survived the Khmer Rouge years — who was treating traumatized survivors. But he seemed unable to focus. His words wandered away to his own losses: a child, a spouse, a parent. But he insisted he was not suffering from trauma.
A 52-year- old rice dealer told me she had intestinal problems and passed out when she went to the bathroom. She said she suffered convulsions and was afraid to go out alone.
She closed her eyes. “I see a man running, and I see a man shooting,” she said. “I hear gunfire. I can hear the people saying, ‘Oh, they killed him!’ It is like a snapshot in my mind.”
Many with similarly haunting memories said they were troubled by the questions: Who did this to us, and why?
The trial attempted to answer these questions and compiled an unassailable record of historical data. But in the process it raised a deeper question: What drove these killers and torturers? Are men like Duch different from us, or do we all carry within us seeds that in the right conditions could turn us into beasts?
“How do human beings become part of a project of mass murder,” asked Alexander Laban Hinton in “Man or Monster?,” his book about Duch. “It’s too easy to dismiss people as sociopaths or psychos. Instead you really have to grapple with their humanity.”
Duch told the court that he’d tried to get out of his assignment at Tuol Sleng, but when he took on the task he was determined to do it correctly.
He stated proudly that he had invented or refined some of the methods of torture he described. He controlled the lists of those to be executed, including one list with the names of 17 children. It carried his instruction: “Kill them all.”
A scholar of Cambodian history, David P. Chandler, examined the question of culpability in his book “Voices from S-21” and concluded that “to find the source of the evil that was enacted at S-21 on a daily basis, we need to look no further than ourselves.”
It was easy to imagine, as he stood in the dock, that Duch was a man who could command an institution devoted to torture. For him, a courtroom was nothing. The force of his personality made everyone else seem smaller.
Sometimes he corrected witnesses about their testimony or lawyers who mistook a page number or a reference. Once, a judge admonished him that laughter was not an appropriate answer to a question.
I wanted nothing to do with this laughing torturer.
I had been observing him for days through the wall of bulletproof glass that separated the spectators from the courtroom. And Duch had apparently noticed me as well.
During a break in testimony, I walked closer to the glass wall, and he turned and looked at me. He waved.
Without thinking, I waved back.
Where everyone is either a survivor or a former killer.