Interrogation and confession were the main instruments of this system, which was based on the Angkar's deep suspicion that there were entire networks within the Khmer Rouge that were disloyal and had to be rooted out. There was an irrational element to this, to be sure, since the terror of the purge led both to the decimation of the regime and to the escape into opposition of the very group that would cooperate with Vietnam in its overthrow. But what can't be underestimated is the conviction, shared by most revolutionary leaders, but largely baseless as far as can be known, that clandestine and ruthless groups were out there working to seize power from the clandestine, ruthless group that held it, or to sabotage its effort to forge a new, utopian society.
The interrogations and torture by beating and electric current overseen by Duch, which could last for months until he was satisfied that the confessions were complete, were designed to produce the information wanted by the Angkar, often with fanciful details added by the desperate-to-please prisoners. Detainees would confess to being spies for the CIA and the KGB simultaneously, as well as spying for the Vietnamese, against whom the Khmer Rouge were by 1977 waging a bitter border war. Some would list just about every person they knew as traitors to the revolution, in the futile hope that by furnishing more than was being asked of them they might get better treatment. The prisoners apparently did not know that they faced certain death.
Duch passed these confessions on to the people he referred to in his sessions with the tribunal's investigating judges as "the superiors," meaning most frequently Son Sen, an Angkar member, later murdered, who was Duch's patron and supervisor. In special cases, the confessions went to Brother Number Two, Nuon Chea, now in prison and awaiting trial in Phnom Penh, who, armed with this evidence, could order the arrest and interrogation of those who were named. These unfortunates would in turn be dispatched to Tuol Sleng for Duch to handle in the ongoing cycle of interrogation, torture, confession, and execution. Like the existence of Tuol Sleng itself, the confessions were kept secret. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Son Sen was angry at Duch for having failed to destroy the evidence of the center's existence.
Is this system irrational from the point of view of the leadership? Or is there some kind of twisted rationality to it?
Note also how ideology was used to cement the loyalty of the leaders of the movement even while they were being killed left and right in internal purges:
In 1972, the French ethnologist François Bizot, studying Buddhism in rural Cambodia, was captured by the Khmer Rouge and brought to M-13, where he had the longest exposure to Comrade Duch of any foreigner during the Khmer Rouge period. Among the techniques Bizot observed and recounted in his 2003 book The Gate were meetings of the prison's guards during which they tried to earn the admiration of the "beloved Angkar" by pointing out each other's mistakes and shortcomings. The goal, as Bizot noted, was to create a cadre whose members "so loved the revolution that they were unafraid to denounce their fathers or their brothers."
This was the hothouse atmosphere of indoctrination that helps to explain Duch's skill at extracting denunciations from prisoners at Tuol Sleng, though Bizot describes him as a man not devoid of kindness or even a sense of humor, if sometimes a dark one. At one point, Duch left the camp to attend a meeting at which it was to be determined whether Bizot was or was not a CIA spy, a question whose answer literally meant life or death for him. "You have been exposed!" Duch announced as he returned to the camp from his meeting. When he saw Bizot sink to his knees in despair, an expression "between surprise and embarrassment" came over Duch's face and he quickly assured his captive that he was only joking. "Did you believe me?" he said. "You're going to be set free." And then, after he had helped Bizot to his feet, he assured him, "You'll be home for Christmas."
In general, Bizot's findings about Duch are not very surprising. Like other seemingly "ordinary" people working for murderous regimes, Duch was a firm believer in both the utter goodness of the revolution he was a part of and the utter evil of anybody who might oppose it. "When we have rid our country of the vermin that infect people's minds," he told Bizot, "when we have liberated it from this army of cowards and traitors who debase the people, then we will rebuild a Cambodia of solidarity, united by genuine bonds of fraternity and equality." When Bizot asked him about the beatings of prisoners, Duch's reply was that they had already been caught in the act of spying and the only way to uncover their networks was "to terrorize them, isolate them, and starve them.... I beat them," Duch continued, "I beat them until I am out of breath." Nearly three decades later, in 1999, after Nic Dunlop had discovered him near the Thai border working for an American refugee organization, Duch said, "I feel very sorry about the killings and the past—I wanted to be a good communist; I did not take any pleasure in my work, All the confessions of the prisoners—I worried, is that true or not?"
Later, however, when he spoke to the investigating magistrates of the Extraordinary Chambers, Duch admitted that he knew the confessions to be false. How could they not have been, since torture was systematic and much of the content of the confessions determined beforehand? "Duch now maintains," the indictment states, "that he was, from an early time, sceptical of the veracity of the confessions, claiming that they were demanded from above" and, in his view, used as "excuses to eliminate those who represented obstacles." Duch continues: "Even the Standing Committee, in my opinion, did not really believe in it."
Did anybody really believe at the time in all of these absurd confessions, as the earlier Duch said, or was the later Duch right to say that nobody believed these things at the time? Was it simply that Duch had to give sufficient proof that he believed to escape the fate of his prisoners? Was he, as he is quoted as saying later in the article, a "hostage" to the regime, and was the regime sustained by the fact that everyone was hostage to everyone else?
Anyway, it's an excellent article - read the whole thing! - that also raises many questions about what to do with people like Duch after the regimes for which they worked fall.
(The classification of the Cambodian regime under Pol Pot as a "totalitarian" regime is not entirely uncontroversial. For a defense, see this article (JSTOR) by Rosemary H. T. O'Kane. If you want to know more about the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge, Phillip Short's political biography of Pol Pot is excellent - I'm currently reading it right now).
(cross-posted)
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