Mindset of a mass murderer

Facing the Torturer: Inside the Mind of a War Criminal by Francois Bizot

Reviewed by Bertil Lintner
Asia Times Online

23 June 2012

In October 1971, Francois Bizot, a young French ethnologist, was captured by the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The country was then at civil war and the Khmer Rouge had not yet seized power, but the radical movement had already established its first "interrogation center", codenamed M-13, from which nearly nobody emerged alive.

Bizot, the only foreign prisoner held at M-13, was one of the detention center's few survivors. He was released from Khmer Rouge custody because he managed to establish a rapport with his jailer, then a 27-year-old former mathematics teacher known as Kaing Guek Eav, later and better known as the infamous "Comrade Duch."

Bizot's unique, first-hand testimonies of Khmer Rouge brutalities make his work stand out in the already voluminous literature on Cambodia's fanatical communists and their crimes. Bizot related his experiences while in detention in his earlier critically acclaimed book, The Gate. In Facing the Torturer, Bizot offers an even more personal and philosophical account of his own sufferings and the mental makeup of his tormentor.

The Khmer Rouge leveled the same accusations against Bizot, a French national, that it did against Cambodian prisoners. He was accused of being a spy for the US Central Intelligence Agency as well as the then Soviet Union's KGB. The Vietnamese secret service was later added to the list of foreign agencies with which prisoners had supposedly collaborated.

Their "confessions" did not have to be authentic, but, as Bizot quotes Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot saying, should be "in compliance with the correct model." That aspect of the Khmer Rouge's unique brand of "justice" became even more apparent after its victory in April 1975 - when Kaing Guek Eav became head of the Khmer Rouge's more notorious torture center, also known as S-21.

Located in Tuol Sleng, an old high school in Phnom Penh, S-21 became a hell on earth where 17,000 people branded "enemies of the state" were interrogated, tortured and then beaten to death in an open field in the outskirts of the capital city. At least 100 prisoners died after having their blood drawn for transfusions for Khmer Rouge soldiers who had been wounded in pre-invasion skirmishes along the Vietnamese border. Surgical operations were also performed on detainees in order to train novice medical staff.

Duch led the extermination campaign with the precision of a mathematician, keeping meticulous records of all those he tried and ordered to death. Duch, who escaped to the Thai border when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978-January 1979, managed to escape the attention of the outside world until Nic Dunlop, a Bangkok-based photojournalist, discovered him in a small village in the country's western region two decades later in 1999.

To Dunlop's surprise, Duch had become a born-again Christian working for an American charity which, according to Bizot, "thought highly of the care and efficiency that he had displayed in organizing camps for survivors and orphans near the Thai border." When confronted with his past sins, Duch willingly confessed as a "good Christian". Those revelations contributed to his eventual conviction.

To date he is the only Khmer Rouge leader who has been tried and convicted at a special tribunal established in 2001 by the United Nations in Phnom Penh to try crimes committed under the Khmer Rouge's 1975-79 "Democratic Kampuchea" regime. He is now serving a 30-year sentence for crimes against humanity, a punishment many observers felt was too lenient.

Bizot served as a witness in Duch's trial, where he gave a detailed description of the M-13 interrogation center and Duch's involvement in the torture of its inmates. He also sent his former tormentor a copy of his first book, in which he also relates his experiences of being a captive of the Khmer Rouge. Facing the Torturer includes a long commentary on The Gate by Duch, where the ex-jailer and torturer explains without justifying what he did during the country's civil war in the 1970s.

Bizot was released against all odds because Duch believed that he did not serve as a CIA or KGB spy. "War", Bizot writes, "unmasks the individual, bringing out different sides of him, some striking as good and others as evil." On the side of evil, Duch did not release Ung Hok Lay or Kang Son, the two Cambodian assistants who worked with Bizot for Ecole Francaise d'extreme-orient, or the French School of Asian Studies, while he was documenting the country's cultural and religious heritage. They were both executed at M-13.

Both of Bizot's autobiographical accounts, The Gate and Facing the Torturer, reflect the guilt he still harbors for leaving them behind when he was released. Duch claims in his commentary that he wanted to release them as well, but was prevented from doing so by his immediate Khmer Rouge superior, the dreaded Ta Mok, also known as the "Butcher" for the violent purges he oversaw. He was captured in 1999 and died in detention seven years later before ever facing trial.

Bizot's book is a brilliantly written personal account of the suffering he endured as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge and how subsequently he has tried to come to terms with the personal mental scars and broader sorrow he feels for the tragic fate of a country he loves. Facing the Torturer follows on Dunlop's likewise excellent book, The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge, but tends to dwell more on the psychological side of an evidently intelligent man turned mass murderer.

The blurb on the book's back cover claims Bizot's account is "an unparalleled investigation into the nature of humanity itself." That is no glib exaggeration. Facing the Torturer is a deeply moving book not only about Cambodia but the nature of evil. What takes place inside the mind of a torturer, and what in the end drives him to become deeply religious and confess all of his past sins? Haunted by his own guilt decades later, Bizot is still searching for those answers.

Facing the Torturer: Inside the Mind of a War Criminal by Francois Bizot (Rider Books, London, 2012. ISBN-10: 1846042550, 212 pages, US$25.

Bertil Lintner is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review and author of several books on Southeast Asia, including Blood Brothers: the Criminal Underworld of Asia. He is currently a writer with Asia Pacific Media Services.