Finding Comrade Duch - Part II
There’s an enduring conspiracy theory about the murder of Haing Ngor. Many believe that the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot had him killed. That suggests that Pol Pot’s power stretched from the jungles of Cambodia to the streets of Los Angeles. It’s an idea I find wildly implausible, and so do my friends and colleagues who know 1990’s Cambodia as well as I do.
The person probably most responsible for fueling that conspiracy? It was Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch.
Duch was the head Tuol Sleng, the prison and interrogation center run by the Khmer Rouge. He was put on trial in Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge tribunal. That’s where he spread the Pol-Pot-killed-Haing-Ngor rumor; one that had originally emerged at the time of Ngor’s killing in 1996.
Welcome to the second episode of “Finding Comrade Duch” which is episode 10 of “Who Killed Haing Ngor.” This is a real-time and crowdsourced podcast in which we explore lingering questions about the murder and issues connected to the legacy of the Dr. Haing S. Ngor. Best known for his role in “The Killing Fields,” Ngor was also a doctor, a political activist and a businessman.
I’m continuing my conversation with Nic Dunlop - the Irish photographer who found Comrade Duch in 1999. He wrote “The Lost Executioner” about the experience. His book has tense, dramatic moments, but it’s also a very thoughtful chronicle of Nic’s relationship to Duch’s story, Cambodia’s story - and the shades of grey between evil and the moral high ground.
And once again – full disclosure – Nic Dunlop is a friend of mine.
Comrade Duch was arrested by the Cambodian government in May 1999. Ten years would go by before the opening of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia – the ECCC. That’s official name of the Khmer Rouge tribunal.
Comrade Duch was the Case Number 1 – the very first Khmer Rouge official to go on trial. It’s November 2009. The voice you hear is a translator at the ECCC.
TRANSLATOR / DUCH’S TESTIMONY: “If we talk about Pol Pot, he was the highest person. He really designed the theory and the line to destroy - to kill people heinously. I believe that Pol Pot used a kind of trick used by Stalin when he killed Trotsky in order to kill Haing Ngor and me and my wife. Luckily, I survived. Unfortunately, my wife died. Haing Ngor was killed because he appeared in the film, “The Killing Fields.”
That’s the quote that reignited conspiracy theories about Haing Ngor’s murder in Los Angeles in 1996. The Khmer Rouge had been in a state of decline – they were a fraction of the force they once were. Duch was suggesting that Pol Pot blamed Ngor for their situation.
Nic and I both think it’s utter nonsense.
NIC: So he's had a decade to sit in his cell thinking about his story, thinking about his day in court if it was ever to come, he would have thought about all of this stuff, over and over again, he would have had lots of time to reflect…. So I take it with a large dose of salt. I think the Khmer Rouge were too inward looking to be that organized to organize an assassination on the other side of the planet. I just don't think that's possible. At least I think it's highly unlikely.
Here are some details from Nic’s book, “The Lost Executioner.” Duch’s wife was murdered and he was injured in November 1995, in a break-in at their home. He referenced that in his testimony. Duch suspected rivals from within the Khmer Rouge.
Just three months later, in February 1996, Haing Ngor was murdered. To me, the timing says it all: Duch was probably conflating his personal loss of his wife – allegedly by the Khmer Rouge -- with the extended Cambodian community’s shared loss of Haing Ngor. He was essentially saying, The Khmer Rouge traumatized me, the same way they traumatized you.
Clearly, Ngor’s murder triggered unresolved trauma for Cambodians around the world. It’s an issue I’m going into in the next episode of this podcast.
Duch’s belief may have been genuine - born of his grief. It could also have been strategy.
NIC: Possibly it's about… Duch positioning himself closer to the likes of Haing Ngor, who was clearly probably one of the most famous Cambodians, after Sihanouk. So it was very much for a Western audience. And remember, he was very aware of his audience in court, so that I think that's very important.
If you look through a political lens, this notion that Pol Pot killed Haing Ngor because he starred in “The Killing Fields,” and that made the Khmer Rouge look bad? That makes ZERO sense.
You have to consider everything that happened in the 12 years between 1984 – when the movie came out – and Ngor’s murder in 1996.
I’ve put a timeline of this on the webpage, so I’m going to make this quick.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and soon the Soviet Union dissolved. Cambodia was no longer a proxy battlefield for the great powers, and funding for the Khmer Rouge dried up. Cambodia’s four warring factions - including the Khmer Rouge - signed a peace deal in 1991, which brought a massive United Nations peacekeeping mission into Cambodia – the largest humanitarian intervention in history, at that point. The Khmer Rouge later withdrew from that peace plan. That was a dumb move, because the UN elections were a massive success. A new government was formed, thousands of Khmer Rouge foot soldiers defected to the government, hundreds of thousands of refugees came home – all while the Khmer Rouge leadership had sidelined themselves.
MPN: Cambodia is opening up and getting all this investment. And Pol Pot is in the jungle shaking his fist at the sky and thinking, You know what? This is all the fault of that damn actor! That just doesn’t make any sense to me.
NIC: I agree. Absolutely…. But yeah, I mean, if that was under the orders of Pol Pot, you'd wonder why. I mean, of all the Cambodians, why would you go to great lengths to have somebody assassinated in the United States? To what end? To what purpose?
After Duch’s testimony, the US State Department responded by reiterating what it said in 1996. They saw no political connections to Ngor’s murder.
Two last points I’ll make on Duch’s quote.
One, the Khmer Rouge had a propaganda machine, which was Khmer Rouge Radio. These were shortwave broadcasts that were monitored by embassies and news outlets. If Pol Pot hated Haing Ngor, we would have heard about it. I don’t have the records, but most of the time, Khmer Rouge Radio was blasting Hun Sen.
Two, as we learned in Episode 7, Haing Ngor traveled to Cambodia on a regular basis for his humanitarian work and business interests throughout 1994 and 1995. If the Khmer Rouge wanted to kill him - they could have done it much more easily in Cambodia. Los Angeles would be just so needlessly risky and challenging.
Duch’s quote was staggeringly implausible, if you know all the context. If anything – it should redirect us to a more compelling question: Who would have the motive and the means to kill Haing Ngor -- in America?
If you don’t buy the robbery theory, there has to be someone else.
The launch of the Khmer Rouge tribunal was considered a real “win” by the international human rights community. The logic was that a genuine peace would never take root in Cambodia - without justice. The Khmer Rouge had to face accountability.
Certainly, Duch’s story offers a compelling narrative to Western observers.
MPN: He decided to come clean because he had become Christian?
NIC: I mean, I think that that has to be a central part of it. As I say in the book, you know, central to any kind of Christian teaching is telling the truth, and confession. And also, unlike Buddhism, - well, the popular understanding of Buddhism -- is that in order to pay back your sins, you're talking about reincarnation. It can't be done in this lifetime. But with Christianity, it affords you forgiveness immediately. You can be born again, which is what happened to Duch.
During his trial, Duch repeatedly read statements taking responsibility for his actions as head of Tuol Sleng. And he repeatedly offered apologies to the families of the victims. I’ll put some links on the webpage.
Nic attended the trial at length. And he was put off by the narrative that was developing around Duch. It was all about remorse and redemption.
NIC: Here's this exotic creature. You know, there's this killer, sadistic killer, who appears to have done a complete, volte face, owned up to his crimes, confess express remorse and sort of, you know, forgiveness. You know, I thought how compelling a story is that? I mean, but I think it's about again, what I think a lot of times I don't know how you feel, MP, but I feel very often we journalists, we tend to impose our own narratives on stories. W e tell our stories back to us, without really engaging with realities that are radically different to our own.
After all, a story-arc about redemption comes from looking at Duch’s past through a Christian lens, or at least a Western lens soaked in Christianity.
As Nic points out, that’s not how most Cambodians process their own history. They just want to know what happened to their loved ones.
NIC: I remember feeling rather disgusted with myself because I became preoccupied about whether, like most of the foreigners I think we became preoccupied with whether his remorse was genuine. And then when I put it to one Cambodian who lost I think, two brothers in s 21. He said, Look, I don't care. You know, his genuine remorse. I really don't care. All I'm interested in is, is he telling the truth? That's all that matters to me. And that sort of put me in my place.
As virtually anyone who followed the Khmer Rouge tribunal, the ECCC, will tell you: it was massively flawed. It was a hybrid tribunal with both Cambodian and international judges -and took place in Phnom Penh. Hun Sen played non-stop political games to undermine it.
Besides Duch, it only reached verdicts against two of the most senior Khmer Rouge leaders.
I haven’t gone into these names, but they are Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea. By 2009 they were geriatric, old men. As with Duch, they eventually got life in prison.
That took 16 years and $337 million were spent. Many have asked if it was worth it. Some will disagree, but to Nic the entire tribunal was mostly for the benefit of the international community.
NIC: I don't know what the purpose of the tribunal was in the first place. I think it was highly political, which the people who worked on it I know a lot of good people worked on the tribunal. A lot of opportunists worked on the tribunal. And I think a lot of civil society did their best to make it - the process relevant ordinary Cambodians. I'm not convinced it was.
To many, Hun Sen’s manipulation of the tribunal was an indirect admission of guilt. He had been a Khmer Rouge regimental commander in the Eastern Sector, according to Human Rights Watch. Clearly, he wouldn’t want any Khmer Rouge to take the stand and point a finger at him.
Nic makes no apologies for Hun Sen. But Nic is a guy who thinks a lot about narratives.
You see, after the Khmer Rouge were overthrown, they survived on covert funding from the US and China through much of the 1980’s. They were even allowed to keep their seat at the UN – for years.
Hun Sen, meanwhile, had been fighting the Khmer Rouge since he defected in 1978 - decades before the E triple C came along.
NIC: The UN were very - genuinely very arrogant, believing they were coming in with a clean slate, without really understanding that the UN has had a long and fairly grim history in Cambodia. And it's been involved in things that really the UN had no business being involved in -- and being used, very often, by a big powers behind the scenes… The man who actually brought the Khmer Rouge to the end, to actually destroy the Khmer Rouge movement, or can claim, to that is Hun Sen not the United Nations. But the UN felt that they could walk in there and lay down the rules, when the UN were used to rebuild the Khmer Rouge in 1979… So to walk in there to say that you know, Cambodians are corrupt Hun Sen is a former Khmer Rouge, I mean, the guy’s - yeah, he is a product of his environment. Certainly. I'm not defending him for a moment. However, we are not the guys in white caps either.
It had been ten years since they’d seen each other. But Comrade Duch clearly remembered Nic. As the Khmer Rouge tribunal went on, there were moments when he and Nic caught each other’s eye.
NIC: He peered through the glass, and he smiled, and then he went like this - sort of US military salute at me and I returned the gesture, and that was it. But you know, I think there was that one time and then another time, I was filing out after the proceedings for one day. And again, he caught me, and I looked up at him, and I suddenly felt really intimidated. I thought I've got you know, this is it's really unpleasant to be anywhere near this man. Not because of any sort of revulsion, but just - he knew how to intimidate people. He was very manipulative.
As I mentioned, and the YouTube links reveal, during his trial, Duch repeatedly took responsibility for his actions as head of Tuol Sleng and apologized to the families of the victims.
When you think about it, Duch was confessing with an earnestness that he would have demanded of someone he interrogated at Tuol Sleng. He was trying to purge himself from his association with the Khmer Rouge. Who’s to say if it was genuine, strategic, or both?
NIC: Here's a man is as you know, who’s a strategic thinker who had stayed alive. Even when he was at the heart of the Khmer Rouge killing machine, he managed to, you know - operate and - you know, survive. I mean, he was a survivor as well.
Nic is still based in Bangkok. He doesn’t go back to Cambodia much - partly because it’s being so badly overdeveloped by the Chinese. And partly because that chapter of his life has simply run its course.
One thing that’s hard to wrap your head around? So many Khmer Rouge joined the revolution because it was meant to be about “liberation.” They were infatuated by the idea that abolishing capitalism would - in modern terms – “elevate human rights.”
NIC: So the idea that somebody is a monster is convenient, but it's very rarely the case that somebody is purely evil.
Comrade Duch had deeply internalized the revolution – he was the top executioner for the Khmer Rouge. To him the violence served a higher purpose.
To most of us, killing “the people” in order to save “the people” is absurd. It’s sociopathic. But Nic found himself constantly reminded in his years following Comrade Duch that the Khmer Rouge were… just people.
NIC: This journey isn't about going - getting closer to them, but realizing they're actually much closer to us, and that they are us. Given the wrong set of circumstances, in times of great extremity, we will have the capacity to carry out horrific acts with varying degrees, of course. But I think that’s the ultimate recognition is that Duch was a man. … One of the things I learned also is that I think that compassion and empathy are things that need to be actively nurtured, that these are not traits that come easily to us …Empathy is something you have to work at. It’s easy to obviously kill people if you reduce them to abstractions.
Nic had heard a rumor that after his conviction, Comrade Duch converted back to Buddhism. I haven’t been able to verify that. So we don’t know if he was resigned to Buddhist reincarnation or reconciled with the idea of a Christian afterlife - if that’s important to any listeners.
Comrade Duch died in September 2020, at the age of 77.
Thank you for listening. In the next episode we’ll hear more the unresolved trauma from the Khmer Rouge period that continues to impact Cambodians living in the US.
My name is M.P. Nunan. Remember, this is a crowd-sourced podcast – an experiment in journalism. If you knew Haing Ngor personally and would like to contribute – even just an interesting anecdote - please get in touch. If you know any details about his murder you think are relevant, please get in touch.
The best way to reach me is to email whokilledhaingngor@gmail.com