What can be said about an executioner?
We have already seen Anwar Congo in the documentary The Act of Killing directed by Joshua Oppenheimer: a thug from Medan who proudly claimed to have slaughtered many "communists" people in the mid-1960s, but in the final scene he was almost completely silent. Only his cough sounded at the former site of the murder. Only his tired old body down the stairs.
When the movie ended, there was no story about what happened to Anwar Congo at that time, after that. "Ultimately, human is not complete to be documented," I thought. Anwar Congo is not just one.
Perhaps as well as with Duch. His real name is Kang Kek Iew. In the blood-soaked history of Cambodia during the 1970s, he was an official of the Khmer Rouge who led the Tuol Sleng Prison, which is also called the "S-21". He was a terrible cruelty figure.
During the four years of the Communist Party in power in Cambodia, thousands were held in a place means "the poisonous tree hill"
Duch, director of the "S-21" since 1975 was the taker of life. When Khmer Rouge defeated and he was captured and put on trial, the evidence was demonstrated: there was his written orders, for example, to "hit until destroyed" to 17 detainees (8 teenage boys and 9 children). In the list of 20 female prisoners he wrote the instructions below each name: "take it to be executed"; "continued interrogation"; "for medical experiments".
He was a meticulous math teacher. Almost every victim was recorded and photographed. When Khmer Rouge left Phnom Penh and escaped from Vietnamese troops and establishing a new socialist government, Duch did not have time to burn the documentation, and it was ensnaring him.
Why the cruelty should be recorded? Expression sadism of a butcher? Or part of the future design which is expected to require the massacre evidence is the future that will justify it?
Duch believed, that's what will happen: the future will justify it. For him, violence is inevitable to move history. "No matter the number of victims", Douche said, "What is important is the majesty of the goal".
He said it in one night, in a corner of the forest to a man who was arrested on charges of "CIA spy" : François Bizot. Bizot, a young anthropologist from France was studying Buddhism in rural Cambodia. It was 1971, not a safe period for anyone. Local communist groups, "Khmer Rouge" emerging, and increasingly powerful because American bombing. Being around Angkor Watt under their control, Bizot was captured. He was chained in a prison camp in the forest.
Two of his friends -- Cambodia people -- were also arrested (and then they were killed). Bizot was allowed to stay alive. Even after three months finally locked up, he was released. About 30 years later -- after a long silence -- he wrote a book about his experience: Le Portail. He wrote it with "infinite bitterness".
The "bitterness" was not coming from Duch. The man he called "torturer" let Bizot bathe in the river and took a walk around the camp. Bizot could speak Khmer. Douch could speak French. Gradually, there was a match between the two of them.
On the eve of the Bizot released, Duch made the party: speeches, songs, and a dinner with 13 chickens. And until the morning, the prisoner and the executioners sat chatting in front of a bonfire which was slowly extinguished.
What can be said about Duch? He is a man who is very confident about the future and at the age of 29 he's ready to be a killer. But Duch also the man who risked his own life when he proposed to his seniors so that Bizot was released. When then Duch was caught and taken to court, Libération reporter asked whether he was willing to be a witness. This former prisoner replied, "Yes, if the prosecution asks him. Yes, if the defense asks him."
Ambiguity. Because, for him, a butcher in the camp "S-21" was a tragic figure: "a boy who dares to live among wolves". In order to live, "he drinks their milk, and learn to howl like them". Since then, terror in power and "persuades him to wear the face of morality and order."
"Morality" means pure communist beliefs, the purest. "Order" means to eradicate what is considered defective. Duch living with the ecology of the Cambodia violent modern history: Colonialism, the Cold War, American bombardment, the Vietnam War, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the ruler of brutality and misery in inland areas. And so was born with the intention to change the world ideology, with absolute faith and bubbling. The world was split into : "old" and "new", "patriot" and a "traitor", "proletarian" and "bourgeois". History is the story of two camps which hit each other to be Red or Black.
But not all of it immediately unfolded to Duch. Bizot said, "When I met Duch, he was not destined to be a killer. He did not know where the revolution would take him. Such as young children in the 1930s Nazi wearing a brown uniform with a swastika. At that time, they did not know what would be symbolized by the uniform."
Douch is a combination of confidence and ignorance. With these factors he went into the process in which about two million people were killed in the name of Cambodian revolution.
What can be said? "I think," Bizot said, "The only answer is to look inward, not to anyone else. Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, Rwanda killer are humans with the same figure as we are."
We will remember all the cruelty that ever happened and presumably it's the basic of "infinite bitterness" which encourages Bizot to write.
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