"History will judge." Neary Ouk
"History will judge."
Rare were the moments when I saw my mother cry. Here in Cambodia, just like a nightwalker wakes up from his nightmare, mum was getting out of hers every morning crying, as if she realized each day the nightmare was our reality. "Malheur à celui qui rêve : le réveil est la pire des souffrances.", in the context of detainees and survivors, waking up is the worst of all sufferings, says Primo Levi. Mum being a big dreamer, every "next day" was made a nightmare by the intrusion of S-21 in our life. For me it was different, I was finding the surrounding world less and less understandable. Things were just going on, and nothing was happening, as if nothing had happened. Crowdy days in Phnom Penh started me crying every evening. Very often in the bathroom after long days hearing facts. Silence helps remembering events and missing ones, and in my case, remaining isolated to think was becoming an increasing necessity.
I remember that day looking at a map of Phnom Penh that street numbers -there are no names- avoided me to understand. After that quiet moment came back to my mind the name of a market, then the name of a road, then the one of a bridge, then of a pagoda, until surprinsingly enough I find myself in a district of the family house where we stayed eighteen years onwards with my brother and mum. There I found myself unexplicably able to talk to local khmers in my own language. Something I am completely unable to do in the everyday life. Memory is a labyrinth. The souvenir of years passed altogether with dad speaking french and mum speaking khmer, reactivated by our journey in Cambodia in 1991, was here, close to the surface, reachable.
In 2010, at the trial, Beth Van Shack, respectable legal advisor at DC-CAM came to me, curious and full of empathy for our story, she decided to try and know more about it, but as it often occurred with others, the next day her spontaneous attitude completely had reversed. She could "just" tell me that my father was considered as a "HIGH RANGKING" prisoner -one has to read : those who were most tortured and ended in the pit named "bodies without heads" in Choeung Ek. Later on, Chandler couldn't confirm this due to a lack of evidences. Doubt and lack of evidences was leaving me bathing into incertitude, unlike Duch, who looked so sure of himself behind the court's bulletproof glass.
"Lack of evidences" was the pretext given to me by an anymous asian american who had come hardly half a day to assist the trial probably on his "asian tour", talking to his neighbor, he judged the case 'non guilty' without knowing who he was addressing himself to in the public gallery, the neighbor was me. One night, sat with mum, I opened a brochure of "tourism to be made in Phnom Penh". The Museum of Genocide was - well, it still is actually- part of the tour that feeds today' s government. I told mum : "See, you still officially don't know that your husband is dead, and yet they already make money out of it.". Mum took the paper with aw and consideration. At this point I must tell that each time we go to S-21, we pay the entrance, which is, mind you, less about the two dollars it costs us than about the emotional cost and the meaning of this heavy transaction.
The gap of time between 2010 and the events (something like 30 years) had helped the lack of knowledge to grow and develop. An asian was now able to tell me that he thought Duch would be judged "NON GUILTY" due to "NOT ENOUGH PROOF" as he said. Out of the context of the whole proceedings, and alike many persons are able to do so if we donnot consider the wholeness of their acts, Duch could try and make believe in half a day that he wasn't the one who could find pleasure in cruelty.
On the picture of Ket's portrait taken by the unhelpful-Nem-En, who says the world should thank him, stands a hit on his beautiful face. The first hit. Concerning the first hit, Primo Levi tells us : "la chose fût si inattendue, si insensée, que nous n'éprouvâmes nulle douleur ni dans le corps, ni dans l'âme, mais seulement une profonde stupeur : comment pouvait-on frapper un homme sans colère?". The "thing" was so unexpected and stupefying that he only had time to wonder how a man could hit another one without reason, with no particular anger towards detainees. I found that Jean Améry says of it : "Le premier coup fait comprendre au détenu qu'il est sans défense, et que ce geste renferme déjà tout ce qui va suivre à l' état embryonnaire. La torture et la mort de la cellule, dont on pouvait déjà avoir eu connaissance sans que cette connaissance ne possède la couleur de la vie, sont pressenties dès le premier coup comme des possiblités réelles, bien plus, comme des certitudes. Bien peu de choses sont dites, quand un homme qui n'a jamais été battu émet la constatation éthico-pathétique qu' avec le premier coup reçu, le prisonnier perd sa dignité humaine." The first hit says it all about what is to come next, and among all : the possibility of death. Several times, Chum Mey told me that he saw Duch hitting the prisoners at their arrival on the face with a wooden stick. I can' t help but thinking that in Duch's case, the first hit was just : fun.
Talking about evidences, I turned interested in the process of getting obedient perpetrators (they call it "brotherhood") such as Mam Naï, Him Huy, or Prâ Khan -others like Pon being now dead. Duch has left written down orders of which methods (he calls it "responsability") they should use for torture. Alec Mellor was his "best of" in relation to that. He wishes we would at times see alternatively the prison' s chief, the victim, the instrument of the Standing Committee (Angkar) in him. But his eyes are full of dark emptiness. The sole details that puts him aside the other accused was this point : in his search for fame, he had named himself, and had wantonly kept material evidences of his task ; accusing with him namely the perpetrators of S-21, and having his victims anonymously, or less anonymously undigged both from an historical and a realistic point of view. The six last tortured persons discovered by Ho Van Thay tell us more about it, though dead for sure.
Seldom do we find direct evidences of the intention of extermination in genocides and war crimes. When ideology was the main purpose emphasized on to justify their decisions, the real aim of the the genocide is difficult to find in official papers for the simple reason that they (the Standing Committee) perfectly knew they were "practising" in the most total illegality and biggest violation of the Human Rights and other Geneva Convention, among all -"lawless" suits the Khmers Rouges Régime even better again.
Just like Himmler enthousiasticly volunteered to please Hitler's orders, and just like nearly no direct order to kill women and children was ever found in official forms, he was making sure he was pleasing his boss through a kind of tacit agreement. This way, the more the number of the deads statisticly was growing, the less any order to stop the massacre would emanate from the top, though this reports were known. So went it for the files of S-21 often read or/and signed by all : Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Ta Mok, Khieu Samphan, Ing Thirith, etc..."History will judge". The Standing Committee wasn't without ignoring the methods used by Duch, but they were silently encouraging it -Son Sen and Ta Mok the Butcher aproving them most particularly but they are also dead themselves.
The sentence "we must pull the grass by the roots" litteraly meant that there should be no family member to survive in case they could find later on who committed the crime. The unpredictable nature itself of terror made Mam Naï, Him Huy, Prâ Khan and many others, act in such a way that they would please their superior, and this is exactly what made them say at the trial that they feared for their own existence by the end of the revolution. Duch was himself in the process, as pleaded desperately M. François Roux before being fired by Duch and obliterated by Kar Savuth, though of course very guilty because he made his concentration camp a perfect dead end for who entered it.
How was the diplomat OuK Ket' s murdering entourage as responsible as the perpetrators?
Himmler, the right harm of Hitler, left in 1943 the following words :
"We come to the question : how is it with the women and the children? I decided to find a clear solution here as well. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate them -that is, to kill them or have them killed- and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of the children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth."
"Secret" was the commanding order of the Standing Committee mainly in the hope for disguising their committment. They forgot faces, bonds, relations, links that one never erase from our memory. With the most desastrous means, the murdering utopia of the Khmer Rouge trying to create a sort of robotic society lasted long before we say it was over and they had failed. It remains that TWO MILLION cambodians and others human beings are still asking for their murder to be repaired. Mr Andrew Cayley quoted in one of his interviews a piece of a text by Ella Wheeler Wilcox : "To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men.".
We, civil parties, are still waiting for accountability.
-Neary Ouk.