Asia Literary Review - Asian writers

Among the victims of Cambodia’s depraved Khmer Rouge regime were countless intellectuals considered enemies of its agrarian revolution. In the decades since the mid-1970s disappearance of professor Phung Ton, his wife and daughter have sought answers to agonising questions concerning his probable torture and murder. The recent trial of Pol Pot’s chief executioner, at which a notorious interrogator was called to testify, gave them hope of release from their torment.

Would they, in the end, be free?

HIM HUY WAS 17 when Khmer Rouge soldiers went to his village in Kandal, southern Cambodia, to draft able-bodied young men into their insurgency. The year was 1972 and the ultra-communist movement, with its call for empowerment of the peasant masses, was rapidly gaining strength.

Although his family viewed with contempt the US-backed government of Lon Nol – along with the elite in the capital, Phnom Penh, it seemed exclusively to serve – Him Huy had little interest in revolution. He had stopped attending school two years before, and hoped only to continue planting and harvesting corn in his family’s fields.

Conscription, however, was compulsory, and the Khmer Rouge cared little about the fitness of their troops. When Him Huy told his commander he feared battle, he was not dismissed but rather offered a post in the navy, away from most of the fighting. He chose to stay with the ground forces, knowing he would be hopeless on the water. “I was afraid of the crocodiles,” he said in a recent interview. “And I didn’t know how to swim.”

In the next two years he deserted his unit and ran back to his family twice. He stayed for one night the first time and five the second, returning only because he suspected he would be killed if he didn’t. Frustrated, his commander transferred him in 1974. The following April his new unit assisted in the swift assault on Phnom Penh that clinched the Khmer Rouge victory, approaching from the south and helping to secure enemy railway tracks in the capital’s outskirts.

By the time he reached the city proper, thousands of people were reacting to Lon Nol’s surrender with enthusiasm, even some of the defeated soldiers. After five years of civil war, those who gathered on roadsides to cheer the Khmer Rouge tanks and trucks hoped their new leaders would bring about an era of peace and recovery. As it happened, the fall of Phnom Penh marked the beginning of one of the most destructive regimes ever to come to power: from April 1975 to January 1979, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians – nearly a quarter of the population – died of overwork, malnutrition, disease or execution.

The Documentation Centre of Cambodia

Khmer Rouge soldiers pictured at the Independence Monument

after the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. The monument was built

in 1958 to mark Cambodia’s independence from France five

years earlier.

At the helm was Saloth Sar, alias Pol Pot. The son of a wealthy landholder, Pol Pot first learned about Marxism-Leninism while studying in France in the early 1950s. On returning to Cambodia he worked as a teacher in Phnom Penh before a crackdown on progressives prompted him to flee to the jungles of the northeast, where he began winning over recruits with talk of a more egalitarian society sustained by large-scale irrigation projects. These, he said, would make the country entirely self-sufficient, and thus removed from the foreign influences he viewed as threats to the ethnic Khmer majority.

Those with tertiary education or ties to the old government had no place in Pol Pot’s vision of agrarian utopia; many were executed in the early days of his rule. All Cambodia’s cities, from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap to Battambang, were soon evacuated, with the regime sending their residents to rural communities headed by peasants.

The Documentation Centre of Cambodia

Khmer Rouge cadres receive instruction during a political study session.

Before long, more ominous signs began to emerge. Post-conflict, crop production fell; division leaders were eager to please the Standing Committee and sent as much food as possible to Phnom Penh. The workers – deprived of food and, in the case of the resettled urbanites, training for their new agricultural tasks – therefore fell far short of the regime’s lofty initial production quotas. But instead of discerning the flaws in his plan, Pol Pot viewed the poor start as evidence of an internal plot to thwart him and charged his security division with rooting it out.

It was in this division that Him Huy spent the whole of the regime’s rule. His transfer in 1974 had placed him under Comrade Hor, a much-feared soldier in his mid-twenties who became deputy chairman of Tuol Sleng (or S-21, the designation referring in part to the Khmer Rouge security police), a secondary school turned prison that served as the hub of Pol Pot’s execution campaign. Hor installed Him Huy as a guard at the facility and in doing so made him witness to the interrogation, torture and execution of up to 16,000 men, women and children.

Vann Nath, one of the few Tuol Sleng survivors, has described Him Huy as a “very cruel” member of the team that transported prisoners to the “killing fields” after their interrogations were complete. Him Huy, who views himself as more victim than perpetrator, claims to have had little involvement in the killings and to have treated prisoners with sympathy.

Nevertheless, he has repeatedly expressed remorse for his role in one of the 20th century’s most efficient extermination machines. To the historian David Chandler he once remarked, “I don’t feel that [working at Tuol Sleng] is what my parents intended me to do.” When I met him in July at his home south of Phnom Penh, he said: “I don’t know why I helped the revolution. The revolution did not help us.”

* * *

Thirty-one years after the Khmer Rouge were run out of Phnom Penh by Vietnamese-backed forces, their rise and dominion remain largely unexplained. This is at least partly because, until last year, no Khmer Rouge leader had ever been made to stand trial.

After nine years of negotiations, the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen joined forces with the United Nations in 2006 to establish formally the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a hybrid tribunal charged with trying senior leaders and “those most responsible” for Khmer Rouge crimes. In February 2009 the tribunal began its first case, that of Tuol Sleng commandant Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch.

Unlike the four other suspects being held by the court – Khmer Rouge Brother Number Two Nuon Chea, Foreign Minister Ieng Sary, President Khieu Samphan and Social Action Minister Ieng Thirith – Duch (pronounced “Doik”), who converted to Christianity shortly after severing ties with remaining cadres in the mid-1990s, had voiced contrition for the killings and had vowed to describe the regime years candidly for judges.

At the beginning of his trial Duch issued a statement that read in part: “I would like to apologise to all surviving victims and their families who were mercilessly killed at S-21. I say that I am sorry now, and I beg all of you to consider this wish: I wish that you would forgive me for the taking of lives, especially women and children, which I know is too serious to be excused. It is my hope, however, that you would at least leave the door open for forgiveness.”

Hopes were high, then, that the value of Duch’s case would extend beyond the symbolic. In particular, observers were looking to see whether he would answer fundamental outstanding questions about the regime – what its ultimate aim was, for instance, and how it managed to transform farmers with no political leanings, Him Huy included, into ardent communists willing to kill.

As the defence team began presenting its case, however, the likelihood of a forthright explanation seemed to recede. Even as he accepted “moral responsibility” for the execution of more than 12,000 prisoners, Duch denied any first-hand knowledge of the abuses that befell them. He told the court he spent very little time at Tuol Sleng, saying he was almost always in a nearby office reviewing confessions furnished by his interrogators.

He also said all decisions on arrests and killings were made by the party’s Standing Committee, of which he was not a member. He carried out these decisions, he said, with an eye towards ensuring his own survival.

Like Him Huy, who is not in danger of being charged because of his low status within the regime, Duch repeatedly stressed that his role in specific crimes had been minor. Asked by judges if he taught his staff how to torture and kill, he responded: “Let me just say I – in the Khmer saying – I do not need to teach crocodiles how to swim. The crocodiles already know how to swim.”

Asked about the defence strategy in the run-up to closing statements last November, Rutgers University’s Alex Hinton, anthropologist and author of Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide, said: “The defence has set Duch up as an almost tragic hero, who, blinded by hubris and a lack of foresight, found himself swept up in great tragedy. He joined the revolution to help liberate the country, only to find himself unwillingly caught in a machine of death that he could not stop. Like a tragic hero, he comes to understand what has happened too late and tries to repent in the end.”

Doubts have been cast on the sincerity of Duch’s apologies, which some suspected were merely part of a bid for a mitigated sentence. During his closing statement, Kong Pisey, a lawyer for civil parties to the case, went so far as to accuse Duch of shedding “crocodile tears”. Such suspicions were only strengthened when, on the final day of closing statements, the man who had earlier told judges he would be willing to subject himself to a public stoning informed them that, all acceptance of “moral responsibility” aside, he wished to be acquitted and released.

Nic Dunlop, the photojournalist who in 1999 found Duch living under an assumed name in western Cambodia, suggested in an interview late last year that the case would probably be remembered as a disappointment even if Duch turned out to be genuinely repentant. Because Duch has insisted on playing down his role in the security system, little new information has been revealed, meaning the regime remains as confounding as ever.

“From the people I’ve talked to, what they’ve been looking for is an accounting. They want something approaching the truth for what occurred,” Dunlop said. “I don’t think any measure of contrition from Duch is enough.”

* * *

Perhaps no one watching Duch’s trial was more disappointed than Phung Sunthary, the 54-year-old daughter of a Cambodian academic sent to Tuol Sleng in late 1976. Her father, an esteemed law professor named Phung Ton, was the only member of her immediate family who did not survive the regime, and to this day the circumstances surrounding his death remain inscrutable.

The Lon Nol government sent Phung Ton, 54, to Geneva in March 1975 to represent Cambodia at an international conference on maritime law. On April 17, the day Phnom Penh fell, he was sent from Geneva to Paris, where he rented a studio apartment in the 13th arrondissement.

Writing to a friend that year, he described the mood among the many Cambodians marooned abroad, a group that included civil servants, students and diplomats. “I have met many Cambodians who are in the same situation as mine and are awaiting the earliest possible opportunity to return home,” Phung Ton wrote. “All of these people are anxiously waiting for news from Cambodia. All they and I want is to return home immediately.”

The letter alludes to his belief that the country was in turmoil, and that he would be met with hardship if he were to go back. “You reassured me about the rumours concerning the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh. Once again, thank you for that,” he wrote. “But I am still concerned by the news I hear on the radio, television, in the newspapers and in some magazines.”

Despite his reservations, Phung Ton, missing his wife Im Sunthy and the rest of his family, returned home in December 1975, arriving in Phnom Penh via Beijing on December 25. His Khmer Rouge prisoner biography – biographies accompanied confessions – states that he was immediately placed in K-5 and later K-6, both camps in Phnom Penh that housed intellectuals returning from abroad. The biography notes that he “had conflicts with others and the Central Committee”. No details are provided.

Photograph courtesy of Phung Sunthary

Phung Ton and Im Sunthy, who married in 1955.

Photograph courtesy of Phung Sunthary

Phung Ton and Im Sunthy on the River Seine

in Paris, sometime after they were married.

He entered Tuol Sleng in December 1976. None of the documents later recovered from the prison reveals who decided to transfer him there. The last document that mentions him, dated June 6, 1977, refers to his various illnesses, including heart and respiratory problems, but says nothing about interrogation sessions or whether he was marked for execution.

Since returning from peripatetic labour in the provinces to Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge were ousted in 1979, Phung Sunthary has struggled to piece together an account of her father’s last days from scattered documents, photographs and personal recollections. These efforts have yielded little, making the tribunal one of the last possible sources of information she needs to make the chronicle complete.

Photograph courtesy of Phung Sunthary

Phung Ton (left) with friends in France a few months before

he returned to Cambodia. The man on the right would

also be sent to Tuol Sleng; the other remained in France.

The Duch case was particularly promising. Because of Phung Ton’s fame, Tuol Sleng staff would probably have monitored him closely from the moment he entered the prison. Additionally, Duch had a personal connection to Phung Ton, having obtained a degree from the Pedagogy Institute of Phnom Penh when the professor was serving as its director.

Phung Sunthary and her mother, Im Sunthy, were accepted as civil parties to the Duch case, and were granted legal representation and the right to testify. They have fulfilled the role with dedication, regularly attending six months of evidentiary hearings and taking meticulous notes.

They were present when Him Huy told the tribunal how Cambodians who had returned from abroad, Phung Ton probably among them, were processed. His unit was responsible for receiving them at a house not far from Tuol Sleng.

The prisoners at first had little reason to believe they had erred, and they are likely to have thought they were merely being transferred to a worksite, Him Huy said. “When they were sent to my location,” he told judges, “they were not yet arrested. They would like to go to another work location, so they came along. Because we had already made the arrangements, they were asked to enter the room, to sit at a table. And then we would make the arrest.”

The prisoners were then led, sometimes in groups totalling 50 or 60, into the Tuol Sleng compound. “A rope would be used to hook through their arms, and they would be walked into the prison,” Him Huy said. “And actually they were blindfolded, so they could not see anything.”

New arrivals were registered in a central administration building, where their basic information was recorded. They were ordered to sit down on a wooden chair so they could be photographed. A metal arm extended from the wall to hold their heads in place to prevent their avoiding the camera.

With these steps completed, the prisoners were sorted into two main groups. Less important prisoners were shackled to long metal bars and forced to lie side by side all day save for a brief period each morning, when staff ordered them to “exercise”. As Vann Nath has recalled, the “exercises” consisted mainly of jumping up and down while holding defecation buckets, even as they remained shackled. “The noise of the shackles and buckets clanged throughout the room,” Vann Nath told one interviewer. “I tried to jump a few times with the others. How could we do that, with one ankle fastened to the shackles and the other foot jumping?”

The prisoners were given spoonfuls of gruel twice a day; many suffered from diarrhoea. Skin infections spread quickly as detainees’ immune systems weakened. Describing how prisoners were cleaned, Him Huy told judges: “Normally they could have been washed by a spray of water from a hose … they would not be released to have a wash because the guards would be afraid that they would abscond.”

More important prisoners were kept in tiny individual brick cells. Up to three times a day they would be blindfolded and escorted across the complex to interrogation sessions, where prison staff would question, intimidate and abuse them for five-hour stretches.

The interrogators employed an array of means – suffocation, simulated drowning, electric shocks to the genitals – in coercing the prisoners to admit to traitorous links. Cambodians who in some cases had never left their villages were made to describe in detail affiliations with the CIA, the KGB and the Vietnamese, and to produce evidence implicating their colleagues, neighbours, friends and family. Chum Mey, a mechanic who had his fingers broken and his toenails ripped off with pliers during 12 days of interrogation, told the tribunal how he had confessed to being in both the CIA and the KGB in a bid to make the torture stop. “Even until now I am still longing for the reason why I was accused of being CIA and KGB, because I have never known anything about them,” he said.

Duch himself admitted to knowing at the time that these confessions were largely incredible. “Only 40 per cent were true and only 20 per cent of persons accused were the right suspects,” he told the court. But the commandant, described by those who knew him as forever intent on pleasing his superiors – he chose the alias Duch because it was the name of a well-behaved student in a book he read when he was young – said he was determined to identify more enemies for Pol Pot and thus prove his commitment to the revolution.

Him Huy has maintained that he did not know how interrogations unfolded. He recalled noticing, though, that some prisoners who were questioned returned with welts on their backs caused by lashes, and that “some died of wounds in the prison cells”.

Those who did not succumb to their injuries, he said, had only to bide their time until they were killed. Of the 16,000 prisoners sent to Tuol Sleng, only an estimated 10 made it out alive. “I never saw anyone arrested and sent to S-21 be released,” Him Huy said, “because everyone who was arrested and sent there would end up being dead.”

Mass executions were carried out once every two weeks or so; those whose interrogations were complete were killed as soon as possible. The staff walked around at dusk with a list of prisoners, removed the condemned from their cells or former classrooms and walked them to a truck parked near the entrance, telling them only that they were going to “a new home”. Typically, a few dozen were targeted in each round, though the total for one day in May 1978 reached more than 300.

The prisoners were again blindfolded. Those who could not walk, because of malnutrition or the injuries they had suffered, were carried across the grounds to the gate.

The truck took them to the Chhoeung Ek killing fields, roughly 15 kilometres away. On arrival prisoners were corralled into a hut on the site, where guards turned on a generator to muffle the wails from those outside who were moments from death.

Often, a mass grave had already been dug and prisoners were told by guards to kneel down in a row at its rim. “Then they would use an oxcart axle to strike the back of the necks, and later on they would use a knife to slash the throat,” Him Huy told the tribunal, adding that rounds of executions could take hours to complete.

Chea Leang, the Cambodian co-prosecutor in the Duch case, reviewed each step of this process to great effect in her closing statement last November. “At what point,” she asked, “did the victims know they were about to be executed? Was it when they were sitting on the truck en route to the killing fields? Was it as they were taken down from the vehicle and let out into the darkness, or when they were kept waiting in the small hut, the noise of the generator attempting to drown out the screams of those ahead of them? Surely, they must have known as they were led out one by one and forced to kneel beside the execution pits that their lives were at an end.”

* * *

Duch’s direct and indirect victims sometimes talk of how the horror of such accounts, even when rendered in lurid detail, has been dulled by repetition. They don’t need a tribunal to tell them how the killings were carried out, either because they witnessed them or because the accounts have become part of family lore.

Not surprisingly, the killings also figure prominently in the broader national psyche. The current Hun Sen regime, infamous for corruption and its frequent attacks on democratic institutions, nevertheless has an unbreakable hold on power in part because of the role it played in overthrowing the Khmer Rouge. Every May 20, officials organise a national Day of Anger at Chhoeung Ek, during which participants dramatise the bludgeoning and stabbing of victims.

As Duch’s trial wore on, and a dozen or so S-21 prisoners and staff appeared before the judges’ panel, the testimonies proved far less upsetting to Im Sunthy and Phung Sunthary than the fact that they had no idea if what was being described was what happened to Phung Ton. “Even if his skeleton remains, I do not know where it is or how he died,” Phung Sunthary said. “How am I supposed to accept that, as a daughter?”

On the day they were scheduled to appear before the Trial Chamber the women divided the two tasks before them: to honour the memory of the man they lost to Tuol Sleng, and to press for details concerning how that loss transpired. Im Sunthy spoke first, telling the court of the 20 years she spent as Phung Ton’s wife.

“My husband’s hobby was reading books and researching documents,” she said. “He did not ever waste any time. His time and scheduling of the day was always strict and precise.”

Their bond, as she described it, was in some ways like that between a student and teacher, though he also doted on her, she said. “He educated me very well to understand the right from the wrong and to make myself progress. During the time that I was with him, I also felt the warmth that I received from him, and I knew that I was one of the lucky women who had a very kind and understanding husband.”

Photograph courtesy of Phung Sunthary

The seven children of Phung Ton and Im Sunthy.

Phung Sunthary, the eldest, is in the centre.

She told the court how she and her daughter learned of Phung Ton’s death in late 1979. While walking home one evening from their jobs at the Phnom Penh port, they stopped to buy some palm sugar. The vendor wrapped the sugar in a sheet of paper that caught their attention because it displayed print, the first they had seen since before the rule of the Khmer Rouge, who had banned independent publishing. They eventually discerned that the sheet included names and photographs of people who had died at Tuol Sleng, which they didn’t know existed. Phung Sunthary was the first to spot Phung Ton.

The news of her husband’s death, Im Sunthy told the tribunal, had prompted “a kind of tremendous grief” that has not dissipated in three decades. She added, though, that she obtained some comfort from his obvious influence on their seven children. “Now, I can see that my children are brave, and every day they are outspoken people because they were trained well by their father. Although many believe that they seem to be aggressive by behaving like that, I know my husband would have liked them to be brave and aggressive.”

Phung Sunthary spoke next. She wasted little time in telling the court she had three questions to put to Duch, and said that his professions of remorse would be for naught if he failed to answer them in full.

First question: “Who made the decision to kill my father on the 6th of July, 1977, or a little bit after that?”

The judges, as they did throughout the trial when victims addressed the accused, permitted Duch to respond directly. He stood up to do so. “Although I have the deepest respect for my former professor,” he said, “I do not have any answer to that at this time, and that is the truth.”

“What types of torture were inflicted upon my father?”

Duch said he had no reason to believe the professor had been tortured, but added that he had no way of knowing for sure.

“Who made the decision to transfer my father to S-21?”

“I did not have the knowledge of that,” Duch said before observing: “Maybe Mam Nai is the only person who can actually shed light on the exact details of his fate, if he is willing to do so.”

Duch was referring to his former chief interrogator, who was called to testify in July 2009. The differences between witness and accused that day were stark in nearly every respect. Duch, about five feet four inches tall, sat behind his team of lawyers in a white shirt tucked into pressed black slacks. Mam Nai, who at more than six feet is something of a Cambodian giant, wore a dark green coat, blue fingerless gloves and a red and blue krama, a chequered farmers’ scarf that was a staple of the Khmer Rouge uniform.

The Documentation Centre of Cambodia

Mam Nai (back left) and Duch (back, third left) at Tuol Sleng with staff and

unidentified women and children; 1976.

In those outfits one could read the extent to which their ties to the revolution – the main organising principle of their lives and the fortunes of their country – had long since diverged. Whereas Duch defected voluntarily years before many regime leaders, Mam Nai lives in an area of western Cambodia that remained a Khmer Rouge stronghold until 1998, and his neighbours and relatives still call him by his wartime alias, Comrade Chan.

Little is known about his early life. Born in southeast Cambodia, he met Duch while studying for his bachelor’s degree in Khmer literature in Phnom Penh. Their bond was cemented in the late 1960s, when they were held in the same prison for a short period by the Norodom Sihanouk regime on suspicion of being communist sympathisers.

The pair later worked at a secondary school in Kampong Thom, where Duch taught mathematics and Mam Nai biology. They had much in common even before signing up with Pol Pot. Chandler has written that both “emerge from the record as strict, fastidious, totally dedicated teachers – characteristics that they carried with them, to altered purposes, when they worked together at [S-21]”.

In the early 1970s, fleeing a clampdown on progressives, they went into the jungle to join the Communist Party of Kampuchea – Duch in 1970 and Mam Nai in 1973. With Duch as his “introducer” Mam Nai became a member in June 1974.

Those who later worked alongside Mam Nai at Tuol Sleng uniformly describe him as a fiercely dedicated revolutionary. Nhem En, who took photographs of prisoners entering the facility, discovered this when he was given the task of developing negatives from a trip Pol Pot made to China in October 1977. (China was one of the few countries with which Pol Pot maintained diplomatic ties; it proved a reliable source of political inspiration and economic assistance.) When Mam Nai noticed that a photograph had a blotch above one of Pol Pot’s eyes, he accused Nhem En of intentionally doctoring them as an insult to Brother Number One and had him sent to Prey Sar agricultural prison, a nearby “re-education” camp. Nhem En was not released until Mam Nai discovered, several months later, that the blotch had originated on the negative.

Him Huy remembers Mam Nai’s distinct appearance: the strikingly light complexion, the large ears and the wide mouth that terrified staff and prisoners alike. He said the guards trod lightly when Duch and Mam Nai were around, careful not to make any mistakes that might hint at counter-revolutionary tendencies. “They both remembered everything that they saw,” Him Huy said.

Though Mam Nai concedes that he was not, by birth, one of the peasants in whose name the Khmer Rouge revolution was waged, he told the tribunal he was able to transform his class identity after studying the history of communism in the Soviet Union and China. “I was a former professor,” he said. “I was in the bourgeoisie class, and then I rebuilt myself to adapt myself into the proletarian class, into the workers’ class. I achieved that. And that is the reason why the revolution allowed me to become a member.”

It was this prior link to the bourgeoisie that made him of particular interest to Im Sunthy and Phung Sunthary. Even before Duch’s remark, they were familiar with the interrogator’s background and thought he might know the answers to their questions.

Mam Nai is believed to have crossed paths several times with Phung Ton in the years leading to the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge, when they were both ensconced among the country’s intellectual elite. Like Duch, Mam Nai studied at the Pedagogy Institute – where he graduated at the top of his class of 200 – during Phung Ton’s tenure as director. The professor’s signature is on his diploma.

Even more promising was another link between the two men presented as evidence in the Duch case: Mam Nai’s signature is on the professor’s biography and confession, documents that in many cases were produced only after multiple rounds of interrogation.

From the moment he began testifying Mam Nai proved a troublesome witness. He refused to answer several questions owing to self-incrimination concerns, even though prosecutors have made clear they do not view him as a senior leader and have no plans to pursue a case against him.

He also took pains to stress all the work he did for Duch that did not involve processing prisoners – cultivating rice fields, planting potatoes and transporting cattle, among other things. “And later on,” he allowed, “I was assigned to interrogate unimportant prisoners.”

Asked to elaborate on the interrogation process, he alluded to the control he sought to exert over those made to answer his questions. “When a prisoner was taken to me, after the prisoner was shackled … I started to interrogate the person,” he said. “But first I had to play politics with them – to speak, to tell them, to make them understand – so that they would agree to make confessions. And then I started to ask about the biography, and I would ask them to talk about their personal histories and activities.”

But he rejected suggestions that he and his fellow interrogators resorted to physical violence. When prisoners did not confess their involvement with the CIA, the KGB or the Vietnamese, he said, there were only two options: to “explain to them further”, or to send them back to their cells so they could “reflect on their negative and positive activities”.

In reality, the process of obtaining a confession was far more abusive, a point driven home by Mam Nai’s own interrogation notebooks, which were recovered after the Vietnamese stormed Phnom Penh in January 1979. In them, he lays out the appropriate ways in which to inflict psychological and physical assaults on his subjects.

Some prisoners were forced, for example, to salute images of two dogs, one of which represented “Vietnamese consumers of our territory” and the other “American imperialism”.

“We have them pay homage so as to hold them firmly, because when they are arrested, 90 per cent of them still consider themselves revolutionaries,” reads one passage of the notebooks. “After they have paid homage to the dogs, they will realise that they are traitors.”

Another passage not only acknowledges torture, but justifies its use.

“Take their reports, observe their expressions. Apply political pressure and then beat them until [the truth] emerges,” Mam Nai wrote. “Thinking only of torture is like walking on one leg – there must be political pressure [so that we can] walk on two legs.”

The judges were familiar with the notebooks and were not swayed when Mam Nai claimed to be telling them everything he knew. At one point during his testimony a judge asked Mam Nai whether he had “any problems” with his memory. Mam Nai said he had recently had a bad fall that left him unconscious “for about an hour”. “After the recovery, I seem to forget a lot,” he said.

Photographs of victims on display at the Tuol Sleng

Genocide Museum, located in the former Tuol Sleng

prison, Phnom Penh.

He had not, however, forgotten the arguments used to justify the regime’s treatment of prisoners. At M-13, a prison in Kampong Speu province where he and Duch worked before transferring to Tuol Sleng, detainees were shackled and made to stand in pits, their heads poking just above ground. Survivors and staff have said it was not uncommon for prisoners to drown when it rained. Asked about the practice, Mam Nai told judges: “The country was bombarded, so villages would be bombarded by bombs by the Americans. So in order not to put these detainees in danger, we had to put them in the pits.”

He went on to say that he believed most prisoners at M-13 and Tuol Sleng were “bad people” deserving of execution. “Through my observations, there were less good people than the bad people,” he said. “I’m very regretful for those good people who died and those people who are less good and also died. But I’ve never been regretful for those bad people who died.”

When she was given the floor, Silke Studzinsky, the German lawyer representing Phung Sunthary and Im Sunthy, asked Mam Nai what he knew about Phung Ton’s death. Mam Nai said he knew nothing about the professor’s time in Tuol Sleng.

Studzinsky then pointed out that Mam Nai had signed Phung Ton’s confession. This spurred Mam Nai to concede that he had in fact written it. “It is my handwriting,” he said. But he added that he could not remember whether he had actually conducted the interrogation.

Studzinsky, one of many lawyers appearing before the tribunal, had only 15 minutes to question Mam Nai. She informed him that Phung Ton’s wife and daughter were present in the public gallery. By that point, the two women could be heard sobbing in their seats. “It would be really helpful if you would contribute to find the truth for the relatives of Mr Phung Ton, and if you could elaborate,” Studzinsky said. Mam Nai said he would like to provide information about any interrogation, but that he knew nothing.

Then one of the judges stepped in, asking Mam Nai to explain why he would have written out and signed a confession stemming from an interrogation he had not conducted.

In response, Mam Nai reversed his earlier statement – and appeared to come close to addressing the torture question. “Regarding the interrogation of Phung Ton, I did the interrogation,” he said. “There was no – he was not forced to confess.” That was the closest he came to giving any new information during the initial round of questioning.

As with all witnesses, Duch was afforded a chance to comment on the testimony. Though these responses were generally respectful, he was more hostile with Mam Nai, accusing his former subordinate of withholding information out of fear.

“Please, please don’t be afraid,” he told him. “Just tell the truth. You cannot really use a basket to cover the dead elephant, so don’t even attempt to do that. I said I am ready to accept or be accountable for all of the crimes that I have committed. And I would want you to do the same.

“So when it comes to Professor Phung Ton,” Duch continued, “we both admit that he was our teacher. I don’t want to elaborate further on why I liked this professor, but I’m here to talk right before the civil parties, and the daughter of my teacher. Here we are now trying to tell the truth of what happened to him, the victim, because the world and the Cambodian people are looking forward to hearing the truth. I think it is the best opportunity for us to put together the piece of the puzzle of this matter. So please be reminded that civil parties are here with us and they want to know how our professor died, and they just want to know even where he died and where his ashes would have been buried. So I think it is good that we should help them to locate that place. I think communism should not be in our spirit or blocking our views to tell the truth.”

When Duch finished, Studzinsky again asked Mam Nai whether he could share anything about the fate of Phung Ton. Mam Nai began to cry. “I would like to make the following comments,” he said. “I would like to express my regret to the family of Professor Phung Ton.”

His court-provided lawyer then asked for a break so Mam Nai could compose himself. After a few minutes, he was able to continue. “I have been very remorseful,” he said. “I am very remorseful because even my brothers or relatives died. I think it was a chaotic situation, and we have nothing other than to be very regretful, and we cannot do anything else. Through this court, I think the family of Professor Phung Ton is informed of my impression.”

* * *

When I caught up with Phung Sunthary not long after closing statements ended, she acknowledged that the hearings had been draining, and lamented the fact that none of the regime figures – not Duch, not Him Huy and certainly not Mam Nai – had told her anything new. But she remained convinced that because Mam Nai was one of Phung Ton’s former students, he would have monitored how the professor was treated and how he died.

She also said she had been moved by the interrogator’s tears, which she believed were genuine. “Duch’s tears, his crying, that’s a lie,” she said. “But Mam Nai’s are real tears.”

I told her I had decided to attempt to interview Mam Nai away from the tribunal, and asked if she had anything she would like me to say to him. She said I should ask him the same three questions she had posed to Duch, then she handed me a book: I Believed in the Khmer Rouge, by Ong Thong Hoeung, a student in Paris who, like Phung Ton, returned in 1976 hoping to assist the revolution.

Phung Sunthary had underlined a passage describing an encounter Ong Thong Hoeung had with Phung Ton at one of the camps for intellectuals. “We were living in poor conditions – no sanitation, not enough food, no suitable clothes – and this caused us to come down with all kinds of illnesses,” the passage reads. “We tried to tell each other not to eat the unsanitary food, but after a while we had to eat first and think about death later. One day I saw Phung Ton collecting a dirty banana leaf and eating it – he was not careful about the food anymore because he was so hungry.”

This was one of the few snippets of information Phung Sunthary had unearthed about her father’s life following his return. If Mam Nai were to see it, she told me, perhaps he would be willing to describe his own encounters with the professor.

Mam Nai’s village, Chamkar Lhong, less than a mile from the Thai border in western Cambodia, is four hours by car from Battambang, Cambodia’s second city. As I drove there with my translator last December, travelling on mud roads turned hard and dusty in the dry season, I thought about what Mam Nai stood to gain from his reticence.

There was a chance, of course, that he simply did not have the answers to Phung Sunthary’s questions, although his contradictory statements in court suggested he knew more than he let on. Or perhaps he viewed the regime years as too traumatic to revisit. That would have explained his repeated refusal to sit for interviews, a stance setting him apart from many former cadres.

But there was also the possibility that, 31 years after the Pol Pot regime was toppled and branded “genocidal”, he still had faith in the ideals that shaped it, and believed it ultimately did more good than harm.

Mam Nai’s house stands at the end of the only road in Chamkar Lhong. When we arrived we saw his daughter-in-law, So Teavy, sitting outside. She greeted us warmly, and told us that Mam Nai was working on a farm 40 miles away. We said we would be willing to drive there, but she said no one in the village knew where it was, and that Mam Nai didn’t carry a telephone. We told her we had a gift for her father-in-law. She did not respond.

Then an older woman, dressed in a blue shirt, light flannel jacket and bright green pants, walked over from a house down the street. It was Mam Nai’s second wife, Khun Lak.

We explained the purpose of our visit and her smile turned into a sneer. “When I saw your car I thought you were my son,” she said. “If I had known you were not my son I would not have allowed you into this village. All the foreigners who come here just want to get more information from my husband. But he already spoke at the court for two days! He said enough. No more information. So don’t even try.”

I knew Khun Lak had accompanied her husband when he testified in Phnom Penh, so I asked her about her impressions of the tribunal. Standing in the yard with her arms crossed, she said that she had none.

When all other attempts at small talk failed I tried again for some time with her husband, who I suspected was somewhere on the property. I said there were questions we hoped to pose that had gone unanswered during his two days of testimony, specifically relating to Phung Ton. I said we had a gift from Phung Ton’s daughter, one that she hoped would jog Mam Nai’s memory and allow him to recall more details about the death of her father. But Khun Lak remained unmoved.

“And I want to say the following to Phung Ton’s daughter,” she added as we retreated to the car. “Who do you think you are? Only the court has the right to ask him. If you ask him again and again about the Khmer Rouge he will just say the same thing. It’s okay if you come here to ask about his health or how he’s doing – he is fine. Sometimes he gets sick, but he’s okay. But about the Khmer Rouge? I want to say the following to Phung Ton’s daughter: you have no right to ask about that.”

* * *

On the morning of July 26, Phung Sunthary and Im Sunthy joined their fellow civil parties, as well as scores of diplomats, journalists and direct and indirect victims, in the tribunal’s public gallery for the announcement of the verdict on Duch, 18 months after his trial began. The proceedings unfolded with little pageantry: as Trial Chamber President Nil Nonn read out a summary of the ruling, Duch sat in the dock with his arms folded on the table in front of him, staring straight ahead at the judges’ panel.

A few days before, Him Huy told me he already considered the case a success, arguing that it had forced Cambodians to examine in depth a period many would just as soon skirt over. “When I clarified my case at the court, it seemed that the story I was telling had happened the night before,” he said. “I think the court is very good because it makes us remember, and helps us to find justice for the victims.”

Before announcing the particular form justice would take in the Duch case, Nil Nonn read out the names of all accepted civil parties, thus making their roles official. “Bou Meng, as a survivor of S-21 and for the loss of his wife, Ma Yoeun, alias Thy,” he said. “Chhin Navy, for the loss of her husband, Tea Havtek.”

Photographs: Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

Former Khmer Rouge soldier and guard Him Huy gives evidence at Duch’s trial (left).

Duch awaits the tribunal’s verdict (right).

After six names had been read, Phung Sunthary and Im Sunthy received formal confirmation that Duch’s role in the death of Phung Ton had been registered as legal fact: “Phung Sunthary and Im Sunthy, for the loss of their father and husband, Phung Ton, respectively.” This would turn out to be the only tangible benefit either woman would garner from their participation.

Last year, the civil parties requested by way of reparation everything from free medical care to the construction of memorials to the establishment of a national victims’ commemoration day. Having listed the accepted civil parties, Nil Nonn informed them that most of those requests had been rejected, either because they were deemed too vague or because they fell outside the jurisdiction of the tribunal. He noted, however, that their names would be included in the final judgment, and that all statements of apology made by Duch during the course of the trial would be compiled and distributed.

Then came the verdict, with Nil Nonn announcing that Duch, 67, had been found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Under Cambodian law, he faced a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, though the prosecution had requested that he be made to serve 40 years. The court sentenced him to 35, from which five were subtracted for the illegality of his detention by a military court from 1999 to 2007, five years longer than permitted. With credit for the 11 years he has already served taken into account, Duch faces a maximum of 19 more behind bars.

Afterwards, many foreign observers who had flown in for the verdict credited the court with handing down a “fair” sentence that reflected a range of mitigating factors, among them Duch’s cooperation with the tribunal and his “potential for rehabilitation”. But the reaction among Cambodians was more critical. Predictably, Duch’s victims were among those who said he had been treated far too leniently.

“Regardless of whether the world is happy, I am not happy,” said Chum Mey, the mechanic tortured at Tuol Sleng. “My tears will still fall – we have suffered once under the Khmer Rouge, and now we are suffering again, so I am not satisfied at all.”

A few hours after the proceedings concluded, Phung Sunthary, who in the last year has emerged as one of the most vocal civil parties, had little to say about the sentence or the reparation ruling. “My family and I were very disappointed and shocked when the court announced this,” she said. “I am not happy, and it is not fair for the victims.”

A visitor inspects photographs of prisoners taken on entry

into Tuol Sleng. Most, if not all, were bludgeoned to death

in the killing fields.

Asked about the possibility that Duch will leave prison alive, she allowed only that it “makes me sad”, and noted that 19 years amounted to a little more than half the time she and her mother had been living without Phung Ton.

These were the sorts of criticisms beamed around the world in news reports about the verdict. They came from Cambodians with a direct connection to Tuol Sleng, as well as those who don’t but who know enough about the Khmer Rouge revolution to blame it for the many hardships that still buffet their country. It would have been naïve to expect widespread acclaim for any verdict in the Duch case, particularly when one considers that, for some victims, the only punishment befitting the commandant of Tuol Sleng is 16,000 death sentences. But it is difficult to take issue with the frustrations of a woman who, having followed the proceedings in the hope of obtaining answers to the most painful questions she has ever faced, received instead a judgment she viewed as hollow, and a promise that her name would be included in a legal document affirming what she already knew.