Duch violently accused by relatives of foreigners tortured at S-21

Kambol (Phnom Penh, Cambodia). 17/08/2009: Martine Lefeuvre, 57-year-old civil party and wife of Ouk Ket, who was executed at S-21, on Day 59 of the trial of Kaing Guek Eav at the ECCC
©John Vink/ Magnum

Ka-set
http://cambodia.ka-set.info

By Stéphanie Gée
18-08-2009

Monday August 17th, the relatives of victims who disappeared at S-21, the death anteroom ran by Duch, started testifying. Foreigners were the first civil parties to appear: at the stand, a French woman and her daughter, then a New Zealander, cried out their suffering and disgust towards the accused. They revealed the extent of the destruction of their families, forever in mourning. Faced with their anger, or even hatred, the accused, drowned under the voice of the victims, proved highly sober in his comments and took a self-flagellation stance.

Searching for a disappeared husband
Mrs Martine Lefeuvre lost her husband at S-21, a Cambodian engineer-diplomat, with whom she had two children. The French woman, who lives at Le Mans, married in 1971 and followed her husband Ouk Ket to Senegal, where he had been appointed third secretary. In April 1977, the latter received a notice from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, asking him to return to Phnom Penh. He went there, without his family, convinced he would participate to the rebuilding of his country. Very soon, Mrs Lefeuvre was without news from him. She then started seeking any information about him, knocking on every door, first the Chinese Embassy, as her husband previously stayed in Beijing, but also Amnesty International, the International Red Cross. She met with Cambodian delegations with the obsession to find her husband’s trace. To no avail.

On December 25th 1979, she obtained the authorisation, through the Association of Khmer Women, to go to a refugee camp in Thailand where, discovering the horrific and distressing situation of Cambodians there, she rolled up her sleeves and helped them. There, she met a Cambodian friend who broke the news of her husband’s death at S-21, as he had found his name in the list of prisoners who were executed. During her flight back to France, she decided to become a nurse – and graduated the following year – and wondered how she would explain her children aged 4 and 7 that they would never see again the father they had called for every day. In 1991, she renewed with her in-laws in Cambodia and went to S-21 with her two children. As soon as they arrived, they were “overwhelmed by horror” and started scrutinising all the photographs lined up the ones next to the others, searching for the beloved face. Sadness and anger mingled ad nauseam. Ouk Ket’s picture did not hang on the walls and they found it in the museum’s archives. Mrs Lefeuvre spoke clearly and took her time to say the carefully chosen words of a testimony she had prepared for. Her voice was filled with determination as she told her story.

“Ket must have been through harsh times”
Regarding Duch and Mam Nay, the people in charge of S-21 whose names she discovered in the S-21 registrars, she said: “Just looking at their face, I thought Ket must have been through harsh times.” From then on, she decided that such atrocities must not remain unpunished. The woman who fought not to be overwhelmed by emotion gave a detailed portrait of her husband and gave him his humanity back, so that he was more than just a name. Then, she imagined aloud what his detention at S-21 for six long months could have been like.

Duch “could have stemmed the extermination process”
“Ket’s suffering always was and is our suffering. Far from fading with time, I can tell you it has become increasingly stronger. It is like a huge screen too close to the face. To this day, we still have no body, no body returned. We have no grave for Ket. I have no papers from the Cambodian authorities and the result for me is a total human failure. So, I came before this court to demand justice, justice for this barbaric crime, so that the suffering of Ket and all the other Cambodians be finally taken into consideration […] as well as the suffering of survivors. I have also come before you to restore Ket’s dignity, trampled at S-21, and that of our Cambodian and French family. I have also come to refresh the memory of an amnesiac. The instigator of these killings is an intellectual who could have stemmed the extermination process. […] He ordered the torture and killing of 17,000 people […] and in my view, he should have killed himself because even if he was scared of dying, it was not a reason to keep torturing and killing. […] Had that mathematics teacher forgotten to think, to gorge himself on blood, screams of those tortured, and corpses, for nine years? If that’s not called getting a kick doing a dirty job, please tell me what it looks like! […] The death of others was his daily nourishment.”

Duch, road-mender at S-21 and Choeung Ek
Her speech was testament to her great inner strength and was uncompromising. “You must not be more interested in this person [Duch] than in the victims. Because, currently, torturers continue to live next to the victims and that is very damaging for the latter. I would like the torturers to be forbidden from making any profit in relation to the atrocities and facts perpetrated from 1975 to 1979. That confessions, photographs or books written by those who participated to these massacres be handed over to Cambodian and international bodies. I could imagine very well case file no. 1 [Duch] working as a road-mender at Choeung Ek and S-21 so that they are dignified places. I saw papers and cans there. I don’t find it clean. I also expect from the tribunal an educational impact on the young generation so they really understand that it was Khmer who killed Khmer. There is no room for historical denial. […] Ket’s descendants […] need to be reconciled with the Khmer part of its family history and it is not possible to do it at S-21 or Choeung Ek.” Mrs Lefeuvre suggested the creation of a multimedia library in Khmer and French named after Ouk Ket at the place where he lived the first 23 years of his life. “It is by taking a chance on education and culture that it will be possible to soothe our grief and restore the dignity of Ket and other Cambodians who were the victims of this bloody regime.”

No forgiveness for the time being
The daily suffering has already caused her two ulcers and could be felt under the strength she was keen to retain during her testimony. Would she be able to forgive? Not for the time being. “Forgiveness is a process. First, you have to find those responsible. Then, there is a judgment and then reparation. We have not received reparation, we are puppets. What was done to Ket, we feel it in our bodies and minds. […] Maybe in 30 years? Maybe we will need as much time to forgive as we took to uncover the truth?” “They have wrecked our lives,” the civil party articulated with difficulty. “And that is impossible to forgive.”

Testimonies for history, according to Duch
Asked to make observations, Duch spoke briefly. He recognised this testimony as “a historic truth that will remain forever.” “A flower can bloom and fade but the truth can never change. The suffering of the Cambodian people under the Khmer Rouge include the suffering endured by your relatives. That is something that cannot be forgotten.” The accused then recalled he would not seek to shy away from his responsibilities and that the Cambodian nation could blame, curse or punish him. He would do as they wished. And again, he asked for forgiveness.

A daughter forever broken
Mrs Lefeuvre’s daughter succeeded her mother at the stand. 34-year-old Ouk Neary knew her father little, and yet, she bore the burden of his disappearance in horrible circumstances no less. The elegant young woman started with a homage to her father, before family pictures were shown. Her testimony grew darker when she evoked the “shock of her life:” the visit of Tuol Sleng museum in 1991. She was then 16. The detention rooms, the torture instruments, the horror pictures traumatised her. She described everything with an intact memory. The images have haunted her since. That day, everything was turned upside down in her life. “If I describe S-21 so much, it is because the poison seed was planted in me on that day. Since that day, I have never stopped trying to find out what had happened.” She even chose to study linguistics with the sole aim to be able to carry out research on her father. She chose as her dissertation topic the microfilm printing of S-21 documents by Yale University, but was dissuaded from pursuing her work by anonymous threats. In the middle of a sentence, she was interrupted by the president who awkwardly decreed it was time for lunch break.

A descent to hell
All the tortures performed on S-21 detainees she discovered during her research, including the autopsies for anatomy experiments, increasingly stirred disgust in her, Ouk Neary continued in the early afternoon. “I experienced an invisible handicap, a mental agony, a descent to hell, when I discovered all that.” She mentioned the suicidal impulses she suffered from and referred to the Choeung Ek killing field, where she returned in February, as “the worst place I have been to in the world, because it still stains my feet with the supreme injustice that reigns there.” While she was describing the place, her voice choked. “Choeung Ek eroded my self-confidence.”

17,000 reasons to give the maximum sentence
She could no longer choke back her tears, but did not pause. “I spent my life trying to get close to the truth, the truth which the accused thinks he holds and which I didn’t. […] I wanted to know what my story was, what the truth was. This search, I did it on my own and I owe it only to myself. […] Since the beginning, the witnesses have been asked if they know the accused. I want to highlight that it is the accused who does not know me, but I have learned to know him, because I have observed him for some months. However, I know enough to tell the accused I am not interested in him. Whether I have my father’s confessions or not, I give them back to him and I hope he drowns with them. As a Cambodian woman, I am not fooled by his obsequiousness, which does not hide the cynical and blood-thirsty brute I know he is. As a French woman, the accused gives himself responsibilities without ever getting his hands dirty, by evoking his principled agreement, as he says. He forgets to say that back then, he did not have a job as an objective, but a dirty job that was carefully thought by others. As far as I am concerned, I think he is the shame of human race. There were not 17,000 victims because of the accused, but 17,000 reasons for the maximum sentence.”

Testifying to live again
Ouk Neary cited an extract from the preface to Vann Nath’s book, A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge S-21 Prison, written by film-maker Rithy Panh: “The older you grow, the more the history of the genocide comes back insidiously like a poison distilled in our body every day, little by little. The only way to live again is to testify.” Since February, she has started her grieving process, she said, adding she understood “the need for verbalisation in Cambodia today.”

Kambol (Phnom Penh, Cambodia). 17/08/2009: Ouk Neary, daughter of Martine Lefeuvre and Ouk Ket
©Stéphanie Gée

Duch maintained the stance he seemed to have adopted, maintaining reserve. “Her [Ouk Neary’s] testimony has a historic importance for the future generations, so as not to forget this tragedy and prevent such crimes from happening again.”

A brother smashed, a New Zealand family destroyed
New Zealander Robert Hamill, 45 years old, lost a brother, Kerry, at S-21. The yatch which the latter had boarded with friends found itself in Cambodian waters in 1978, where it came under fire by a Cambodian ship. The occupants of the boat were arrested and brought to the detention centre ran by Duch. “He unquestionably suffered beyond all imagination.” Robert Hamill came with a photograph of his brother, a smiling young man, whom he described as a pillar of the family who retained his sense of humour until the end. He cited examples: in his confession found at S-21, Kerry, was forced to admit he was a CIA agent but wrote that Colonel Sanders, the founder of the fast-food chain KFC, was one of his superior officers, gave his family’s phone number as the CIA’s operative number, etc. He even managed to include a cryptic reference to their mother’s name, whom he presented as his instructor. “It was as if, whatever the final outcome, he would have the last say and he has,” the devastated brother commented.

Robert Hamill evoked the importance of the family, whose life was marked by the joys and misfortunes of each of its members. Kerry’s suffering became that of the others to the point this formerly harmonious and happy family of four children disintegrated. He was overwhelmed, crushed, by emotion and his lawyer requested a saving break.

When Duch killed a brother, he killed another one
When his brother disappeared, Robert Hamill was only 14. It was only two years later that his family learned about Kerry’s tragic end in a newspaper article. Nobody warned them. They were devastated. Not death by drowning or fatal accident, but “death by torture,” the civil party hammered with rage. The effect on the family was violent and manifold. First, several months later, another brother, John, took his life by throwing himself off a cliff out of despair, and the father was unable to attend his funeral as he was unconscious from taking too many drugs. The parents did not know how to deal with their grief and masked their affliction in the cloak of medication… Tears burst out at every sentence. “Duch, when you killed my brother Kerry, you killed my brother John as well. The effect these two devastating losses had on our family simply cannot be measured.” Robert never saw his mother cry, but she became consumed, weakened by illness, then depression, and she stopped engaging with life. However, she did not prevent Robert from joining a rowing race across the Atlantic, in spite of all the risks entailed by the adventure. She died in 2003 before seeing anyone held responsible for the death of her son, he lamented. As for his father, he “lost the ability to function effectively.”

Kambol (Phnom Penh, Cambodia). 17/08/2009: Robert Hamill lost his brother Kerry, torture victim at S-21
©Stéphanie Gée

The New Zealander spoke with generosity about all his family, relative after relative, and all those who mattered in Kerry’s life, like his brother’s fiancée, who never married, or the sister of Briton John Dewhirst, Kerry’s travel companion, who also ended up at S-21. He wanted to show the extent of the damages caused by the disappearance of his brother. Robert Hamill wore his heart on his sleeve and did not hold anything back. “Time is a very very slow healer,” he said.

The accused should bear the burden
The civil party then spoke directly to the accused, calling him by his name, “Duch,” a name the French women who talked before the New Zealander could not or did not want to say. Rage then arose in Robert Hamill. “Duch, at times I’ve wanted to smash you, to use your words, in the same way that you smashed so many others. At times, I’ve imagined you shackled, starved, whooped and clubbed viciously, VICIOUSLY. I have imagined your scrotum electrified, being forced to eat your own faeces, being nearly drowned and having your throat cut. I have wanted that to be your experience, your reality. I have wanted you to suffer the way you made [my brother] Kerry and so many others. However, while part of me has a desire to feel that way, I am trying to let go and this process is part of that. Thank you for that. Today, in this courtroom, I am giving you all that crushing weight of emotion: the anger, the grief and the sorrow. I am placing this emotional burden on your head. For it was you who created this burden, which no one deserves. It was you who should bear the burden, you to suffer, not the families of the people you killed. From this day forward, I feel nothing towards you. To me, what you did removed you from the ranks of being human. If anything at all has to come from this trial and from my statement on behalf of those I love, let it be that the world takes notice of the evil that can happen when people do nothing and let it be that the world decides that doing nothing is not an option.”

Duch’s acknowledgment: a “small but significant contribution”
The civil party again talked to the accused, this time on a more appeased tone: “I am angry beyond words with you and what you did, but I acknowledge and respect your guilty plea. Your acknowledgment is a small but significant contribution to redressing the harm that you caused. Those that have not pleaded guilty and do not accept the harm, they of course are doubly worth of our hating and ridicule.”

Kambol (Phnom Penh, Cambodia). 17/08/2009: Photograph of Kerry Hamill, shown on the ECCC screens
©Stéphanie Gée

“I wonder. Duch, could you think of anything else concretely as to what you can do to help the victims, including my family?” “I am not able to assist anybody at this stage,” the accused answered him. “The best I can do, I already did it in Vorn Vet’s case. I bowed before him and he called me a killer, while he was being taken away. […]”

Duch promises he will not hide from the wrath of his fellow citizens
The accused was invited to make his observations. “Two people died at S-21 and two families suffered, one in France, the other in New Zealand. The suffering of the Cambodian people is also immense. […] As the director of S-21, I bear this responsibility and I would like to give the chance to the victims and survivors to point their finger at me. I would not be offended. That is your right and I will accept it with the respect owed to you. As S-21 director, I have already told the Chamber repeatedly that even if I were stoned to death, I will not say anything and I have no intention to kill myself. […] I am filled with remorse and I speak here from the bottom of my heart.” Duch remained impassive all throughout this day of trial. And discreet.

Kambol (Phnom Penh, Cambodia). 17/08/2009: An important Cham community visited the court on Day 59 of Duch’s trial at the ECCC
©John Vink/ Magnum

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Debate on civil party applications postponed
Out of the 20 civil parties scheduled to appear, the defence recapitulated, two of them have renounced to be heard while maintaining their application as civil parties. The defence expressed reservations on the validity of some of these applications and noted the lack of evidence proving kinship between the victim represented and the civil party for 23 out of the 93 existing civil parties. The Chamber announced it would not rule on the admissibility of the application of some civil parties for the time being.