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In 1970, François Bizot, a French ethnologist with five years’ Cambodian experience, was restoring ceramics and bronzes when he learned that heavy fighting had broken out in Siem Reap. A civil war had begun. The Americans in Vietnam had recently backed a coup against the Cambodian king. They installed as the new ruler a favourite general, Lon Nol, who was now on the rampage against communists, both the domestic Khmers Rouges and the neighbouring Vietnamese. A prudent ethnologist would have got the hell out. Bizot, however, remained in-country and came to grief in the following year.

“My work had taken me to a monastery in the Oudong area, to the west of Phnom Penh, [to conduct] research into Buddhist practices associated with the state of trance,” he would write in an important memoir entitled Le Portail. “We were due to visit an elderly monk who was known for his knowledge of rites. When we arrived, we were ambushed by a group of Khmers Rouges. I recognised their uniforms, imitating the trousers and black shirts of peasants.” They thought he was a spy working for the CIA. In fact, he was demonstrably anti-American. “Whenever a Khmer spoke to me in English, it put me in a bad mood straight away,” he wrote. The language reminded him of “the Americans’ uncouth methods, their crass ignorance of the milieu in which they had intervened, their clumsy demagogy, their misplaced clear conscience, and that easygoing, childlike sincerity that bordered on foolishness. They were total strangers in the area, driven by clichés.”

Bizot was force-marched to a jungle camp whose other prisoners were to be murdered one by one, usually by being bludgeoned with a tree branch or a spade. He quickly met the man named Kang Kech Leu (one Chinese parent, you see) but called Ta Duch (the honorific means “grandfather,” but has nothing to do with age). Duch, spelled Douch by the French, was a former mathematics teacher with “a friendly air” and unprepossessing style. “His black jacket was too big and his trousers stopped just above the ankle, revealing finely shaped feet […] He looked young, not yet 30. Nothing in his unassuming demeanour had indicated to me that he was in charge here. But his authority was total; there were no limits to his power over the detainees.”

Bizot managed to survive because Duch and he became friends. They respected each other and every day had intellectualized and even philosophical conversations. Bizot wasn’t a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, for he did not embrace any of Duch’s precepts or beliefs. He simply found him fascinating, “a child venturing among wolves: to survive, he had drunk their milk, and learned how to howl like them, and let instinct take over.” Elsewhere, Bizot writes: “somehow I trusted him. Of course he would have me killed without hesitation if the order came [yet this] terrible man was not duplicitous; all he had were principles and convictions.”

Such was the friendship that Bizot, a fluent Khmer speaker, realized over time that Duch was willing to buck the chain of command to get his favourite captive released after only a few months. When challenged at one level, Duch went higher up, until he got the order to let Bizot go. The order was ultimately confirmed by the despotic and genocidal Pol Pot himself. In Bizot’s telling, such tactics put Duch in line for praise as well as putting him at risk. “My freedom, obtained after a hard struggle, had become a sort of personal success for him, spurring on his career as a revolutionary.” On Bizot’s last day in custody, Duch threw him an all-night farewell party attended by all the other inmates, who would be killed soon afterwards. The relationship of the two men sounds like something from a Graham Greene novel, not because of the tropical locale or the wartime setting, but rather because of the twisted moral atmosphere in which two such figures could become buddies.

In 1975, at the same moment the Americans were driven out of Saigon, the Khmer Rouge, the extremely radical and merciless agrarian movement led by Pol Pot, became the government of Cambodia by storming into Phnom Penh unopposed, forcing the populace to vacate the city for the countryside. Phnom Penh was soon a ghost town. Pol Pot also tried to eliminate religion, family relationships, money, and even the very concept of time (calendars and clocks were forbidden). He murdered not merely ethnic minorities, but whole classes of society. Teachers, students, administrators, and anyone considered an “intellectual” ended up in a shallow grave. Even those who merely looked as though they might be educated were exterminated. For example, people with little depressions on the bridge of the nose suggesting that they wore spectacles and therefore knew how to read and thus were subversives. He killed many types of peasant farmer, as well. Pol Pot’s Cambodia was one of the twentieth century’s notable dystopian nightmares, yet he believed himself an idealist.

Years after his release and the horrors that followed the horror of the civil war itself, Bizot returned to Cambodia where he learned that Duch, following his assignment at the prison camp, became a major executioner (the shuddering irony that Greene would have loved). He became in fact the commandant of the former high school known as S-21. This was the secret prison used as a holding area for prisoners later sent to execution by the truckload. It was discovered by the invading Vietnamese soldiers in 1979. Between fourteen thousand and sixteen thousand prisoners, including many murdered on the spot and hastily buried out back, spent their last days there. It is a moving and horrifying place. When M and I went there a few years ago, we were shown around by a man who became quite emotional as the tour went on. He spoke faster and faster until his tenuous grasp of English began to slip, so that Pol Pot’s name came out sounding, to our ears at least, like purple. Finally he told us of all the members of his family who had been murdered there.

Pol Pot died in 1998, but Khmer Rouge elements still participate in governing Cambodia. This fact has made a mockery of the deal the United Nations reached with Cambodia in 2003 to finally put some highly placed former Khmer Rouge officials on trial, cases that would be heard in Cambodian courts and financed through private donations. So great was the reluctance to bring imprisoned Khmer Rouge leaders to justice that a number of them died off in the interim. Duch, however, was a healthy sixty-six when I returned to Phnom Penh in 2009. The day I checked into the Hôtel Splendide was also the first day of his trial. The city was full of foreign reporters from Agence-France Presse and the West’s other large media organizations. When his turn came to make an opening statement, Duch apologized. Not everyone took his sincerity seriously, but then he could hardly stand in the docket and say “It wasn’t me, it was some other dog.” Contemplating Duch, one cannot help but remember Hannah Arendt’s famous statement about “the banality of evil” in her book about the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

For his part, Bizot remains an interesting character: mysterious and elusive and evidently more of an ideologue than his captor. He has written of how the Americans’ “irresponsibility, their colossal tactlessness, their inexcusable naïveté, even their cynicism, frequently aroused more fury and outrage in me than did the lies of the communists.” This passage has been much quoted in France, where his book became a bestseller, and in the United States, where people puzzle that someone can be both anti-communist and anti-American.