François Bizot: Facing the Torturer

The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2012

In 1971, François Bizot, a French ethnologist living in Cambodia, was seized by Khmer Rouge insurgents. Held in a prison camp for 77 days and then freed, he is the only Westerner to have survived anything but the briefest brush with Khmer Rouge captivity. His interrogation sessions evolved into a twisted facsimile of friendship with the camp’s commander, Comrade Duch. Convinced that his prisoner wasn’t after all working for the CIA, Duch persuaded the Khmer Rouge leadership to let the Frenchman go.

Phnom Penh fell to the Communists in 1975. Not so long after, Duch was appointed director of the new regime’s Tuol Seng prison. There some 17,000 people—men, women and children—would perish over the next four years, frequently after torture designed to “prove” a guilt that no longer had to be anchored in any reality. When Mr. Bizot later discovered what his tormentor-savior had become, he agonized over Duch’s “monstrous transformation.” Partly in response, in 2000, he published “The Gate,” a powerful, if lushly overwritten, memoir of his capture, release and eventual evacuation with other foreigners from Phnom Penh after that city’s surrender to the Khmer Rouge. He reached the perversely empathetic conclusion that Duch had merely managed to “tame” the terror that must have enveloped him in the nightmare world of the Khmer Rouge, just as Mr. Bizot had come to control his fear while chained up in that camp. In the book’s epilogue, Mr. Bizot described a return to Cambodia prompted by Duch’s arrest in 1999.

“Facing the Torturer” (at least notionally) picks up where “The Gate” left off and culminates in the author’s appearance as a prosecution witness at Duch’s 2009 U.N.-supervised trial. But this short book—and for a short book it can be very long-winded—is rooted in Mr. Bizot’s prolonged reinterpretations of his experiences in the Cambodia of four decades ago. It is a reappraisal colored by incidents that stretch even further back, and the book’s first chapter features a meditation on a possibly necessary evil from his youth—the killing of a beloved pet—and on an incident when, as a small boy in occupied France, he was punished by his panicked mother for sticking his tongue out at a German officer. “I understood that fear could push anyone beyond the normal limits of their behavior.” There is also a recollection of the unease he felt walking past a slaughterhouse as a child and memories of his time in the French army fighting in Algeria.

Such moments are assembled as evidence for a broader case, not so much against Duch, whose individual responsibility Mr. Bizot readily accepts, but against humanity as a whole. We are all capable of horror, he wants us to know: a discovery about as startling as the realization that, as a species, we walk on two legs. In 2010, Duch was convicted of torture, murder and “crimes against humanity” and is now serving a life sentence. Mr. Bizot sees the verdict almost as collective alibi: “We never look under the mask of the monster to make out the familiar face of a human being.” Oh, please.

Mr. Bizot corresponded with his former captor and went to see him in prison. But what lies behind that mask remains, in the end, elusive. Duch’s sparse and dutifully contrite written response to “The Gate” is included in “Facing the Torturer” but gives little away: “Life forces us to do things we do not like doing.” Given the grotesque cruelty of Tuol Seng, there must have been something more than mere opportunity, or the chaos of midcentury Indochina, that turned Kaing Guek Eav, a former math teacher, into another of the 20th century’s lethal everymen.

Duch was a merciless jailer, killer and torturer. But he is neither insane, nor, it seems, a sadist. Nor was he just obeying the orders of a leadership too dangerous to defy. The best clues in the pages of either book (and “The Gate” and “Facing the Torturer” should be read together) as to why—and how—Eav became Duch are tantalizingly incomplete. We glimpse a “demanding and moral being” (he has now, make of it what you will, converted to Christianity) who becomes “possessed” by a cult that offers him the austere pleasures of purification and an intoxicating immersion in a quest for a liberation that was anything but.

Mr. Bizot explains how torturing was for Duch “part of a whole. It was nothing more than putting the ardor of his commitment into practice, the action being in proportion to the greatness of the revolutionary ends . . . a task that he could only carry out by making himself literally ‘out of breath.’ ” Doubtless, it became easier over time.

But of the cult that consumed this “man of faith,” there isn’t much analysis in either of Mr. Bizot’s volumes—just sightings of shadows and fragments of a greater malignancy. The “dreadful smothering” of Cambodia lurks, for the most part, either offstage or in echo or reflection. But the evil comes into clear view in Mr. Bizot’s terrible, telling details. In “Facing the Torturer,” he recounts the chaos of the refugee camps set up in Thailand for Cambodians as their country collapsed into darkness. The camp that the Khmer Rouge had—astoundingly—been permitted to run on Thai territory stood out for “its cleanliness, silence, discipline.”

It was there that some of the evacuees from the French embassy—”journalists and humanitarians”—came across a “half-naked boy tied to a post: He had fainted under the scorching sun.” They complained to the authorities, only to be told that the child was a thief. He had been caught stealing from “one of the bags of rice allocated to the collective.” Well, the camp was so much more orderly than anything else the visitors had seen that they found themselves “unable to utter any protest.” They muttered a few words of lukewarm praise and left. “I was,” recalls Mr. Bizot, “familiar with this kind of silence.”