BOOK
REVIEW Mindset of a mass
murderer Facing the
Torturer: Inside the Mind of a War Criminal by
Francois Bizot
Reviewed by
Bertil Lintner
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 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.
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.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online
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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. 
