Kambol (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), 27/04/2009. Press room on the 12th day of Kaing Guek Eav trial at the ECCC.©John Vink/ MagnumBy Stéphanie Gée
28-04-2009
On the first day of the fourth week of Duch’s trial, the accused insisted on the fact that personally interrogating detainees at S-21 did not come under his competence, except for particular cases and upon order from his superiors. Second-in-command, comrade Hor was in charge of military affairs and had the duty to arrest, detain, bring prisoners to Choeung Ek where they would be “smashed”, and to intervene in the event of an external attack. “I was too busy reading confessions...” which had to be fully extracted before prisoners died. He also acknowledged that the M-13 and S-21 centres had many similarities.
S-21 personnel were mainly staff from Division 703, staff from the M-13 security centre, which Duch directed until it was shut in 1975, and intelligence agents from Phnom Penh.
Ranks were topped up with the arrival of teenagers, as Duch asked his superiors for the possibility to recruit them. A handful of them were messengers and others, due to their lack of maturity, were assigned the task of going to collect plants for rabbits, he explained.
Purges against S-21 personnel mainly affected staff from Division 703 and agents from Phnom Penh. Those purges were organised along certain lines: the point was to eliminate the relatives and subordinates of any person who was “smashed” first. At S-21, female interrogators whose husbands were Khmer Rouge cadres met the same fate as them when they lost the party’s trust, and were eliminated.
During the hearing, Duch also provided examples of written confessions of detainees, to explain what the modus operandi was. He used to annotate the first page of every document before sending it to his superior Son Sen, who did the same and then sent it over to Pol Pot, who in turn ticked the corner of the front page to show that he reviewed them. “I was in touch with my superiors on a daily basis”, the accused said simply, explaining that those confessions represented information about the level of infiltration of enemies within the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), and that they were useful for the dismantling of networks of traitors.
S-21, a continuity of M-13
Many similarities existed between the two security centres: to start with, the mission for both was to educate, Duch says. “The goal was to teach these youths that we accepted cruelty and for that training, we used the Communist terminology. [...]. We trained those youngsters [children from a farming background] to be able to react in extreme situations and do whatever we asked them to do. Generally speaking, the character of those persons changed once they had been educated. They went from being gentle to being capable of working in cruel conditions with a lot of swearing and beating [...] And I was the one in charge of that education, of transforming them like that.”
Thus, Duch summed up the fact that what was defined at M-13 continued to be applied at S-21. He later added that when it came to training to cruelty, techniques for interrogations, the use of torture and conditions of detention, things were quite similar to methods used by the Khmer Rouge everywhere else in the country in security centres.
The qualities of a good chief for S-21
In 1976, comrade Nath was dismissed as head of S-21 and officially became the supervisor of the unit for the military communication in the whole country. Duch, then deputy-director of the centre, was asked to take over. “As I have already told [co-Investigating Judge] Lemonde, I was better than Nath at the practice of interrogations. [...] The [Communist] Party [of Kampuchea] did not trust Nath as much as they did me because I was honest and told them the truth. I would have preferred dying rather than lying!”, Duch said. He pointed out before Judge Lemonde that back then, he could boast about experience in the field of interrogations, which started for him in 1971 at M-13. When the co-Investigating Judge heard him - as stressed by Judge Lavergne during the hearing – the accused also declared: “I had the impression that even though I still hated the police work and interrogations, I had to do this job. I did it better than Nath. I had to do it, it was inevitable, it was an order, I had to do it!”
Comparing himself with his predecessor, Duch asserted earlier during the hearing that unlike Nath, he never made any unilateral decisions and always waited for instructions from his superiors.
The defendant then repeated that to start with, he tried to avoid being upgraded and asserted his will to remain deputy-chief of S-21 and offered Nath’s position to another of Son Sen’s students, previously trained to communism. He explained he was “terrified” at the idea of bearing such responsibilities but that in front of the threats of his superior Son Sen, he was forced to comply and accept the new role “without being able to protest any more”, otherwise it would mean putting his life in danger.
Co-Prosecutors’ intervention: easing or biasing debates?
On April 23rd, the Office of the co-Prosecutors distributed to all parties during the hearing a booklet with the main documents in the case file. This initiative was approved by the Trial Chamber but was fiercely rejected by the Defence. Co-lawyer for Duch Mr Roux went back over the initiative and claimed that presenting a “partially complete and therefore biased” selection of documents could not occur before the accused is questioned.
The lawyer reminded that at the Trial Management Meeting held on January 15th 2009, the Chamber indicated that “given the fact that its duty is to ensure the conducting of debates, it must present pieces of evidence first”. “Therefore, it seems to me that presenting such a document before the Chamber before the interrogation of the accused is even conducted is premature and submitting that document while indicating it was a document from the case file when [...] it was actually a selection of documents from the case file, which is completely different, was not fair!”
On the other side of the courtroom, assistant international co-Prosecutor Alex Bates stressed that the point was to assist the Chamber in its work by submitting in advance documents on the basis of which parties wish to debate during the hearing, but also to save time. He added that the document was presented “without analysis or conclusion” and that the Defence was “perfectly entitled to do the same”.
The Trial Chamber eventually decided after the first break of the day that “all Parties are allowed to submit documents and hand them out to the Chamber and Parties in order to facilitate the hearing”, provided those documents do not come with comments and, where possible, documents are given to the Chamber in advance via a greffier.
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