History: Nic Dunlop's book The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge is a harrowing journey to the heart of darkness writes Maeve Donelan.
Six years ago Nic Dunlop, an Irish photographer, found one of the most brutal mass murderers of the last century, Comrade Duch, the former Khmer Rouge (KR) head of the secret police. Dunlop had been looking for Duch for years, travelling into Khmer Rouge areas as they fell to government forces, or as the last of its leaders gave themselves up for an amnesty.
The 30-year war in Cambodia was just over and the KR was no more, but Dunlop found himself wondering "how many with blood on their hands had quietly slipped into life beside their former victims", and what could turn a seemingly ordinary man into a mass murderer.
Duch, now calling himself Hang Pin and working for the American Refugee Committee, introduced himself to Dunlop and showed great interest in his Leica - and Dunlop, recognising Duch from a photograph he carried around with him, surreptitiously snapped him.
Since then, Duch has been in jail, awaiting a trial that may never happen. Dunlop points out that a quarter of a century has passed since the KR slave state dispensed with a third of the population in truly horrible ways and that no one has been held accountable.
Dunlop brings us on a harrowing journey to that heart of darkness behind the smiling faces, back from today to the lost might of the 12th-century Ankor kingdom built on slavery, and the secret US carpet-bombing that killed or wounded one million people and drove the terrified and starving survivors into the towns and cities - and into the arms of the KR. They were a small clique of Cambodian communists who had met as students in Paris in 1949 and had fled to the jungles in the 1960s. Deposed in a CIA-backed coup in 1970 at the height of the bombing, King Sihanouk's call to Cambodians to "go to the jungle and join the guerrillas" set the seal on eventual KR victory.
From the safety of The Irish Times foreign desk in 1975, we followed the progress of the last barge convoy bringing "vital supplies" to starving and encircled Phnom Penh. Under KR attack from the banks of the Mekong River, the number of barges diminished nightly, but on arrival their cargo was found to be air-conditioning equipment and not food. Days later, the KR emptied the city.
During the three years and eight months of terror that followed, Comrade Duch presided over Toul Sleng, code-named S-21, a secret torture and execution centre in which only seven of the 20,000 prisoners survived. Dunlop points out that visitors to this chilling museum today may not realise "that Toul Sleng was created for rooting out enemies from within the party". To be sent there on a charge meant you were guilty; the guilty must be punished; the punished must be killed to purge the party and keep it pure. That was the logic of the extermination machine. "Better to destroy 10 innocent people than to let one enemy go free" was the edict.
But first the guilty must confess and implicate others. Dunlop recounts one torturer giving a prisoner the choice of being involved in a CIA, KGB or Vietnamese plot. The interrogators knew it was a fiction, but they kept it up, photographing every prisoner on arrival and documenting their confessions. Children aged as young as nine were torturers. Younger children were often killed by being thrown off the balcony, and babies were swung by the legs and their heads smashed in "just to be rid of them". By 1977, paranoia and splits in the KR leadership factions were extreme and the pace of extermination at Toul Sleng was stepped up.
When Cambodians who had escaped to Vietnam returned with the Vietnamese army and liberated Pol Pot's genocidal state, the KR and their people fled to the Thai border to continue their cruel rule in the refugee camps.
"Reports of disappearances, interrogations, public beatings and summary executions were commonplace as they exerted their control over their captive populations," Dunlop writes. "The same Khmer Rouge leadership remained in control . . . In other camps controlled by the allies of the Khmer Rouge, the people didn't fare much better."
From the camps the KR attacked Cambodia, where the Vietnamese were now intensely involved. The KR was now armed by the US and China, putting into effect the US's objective to punish Vietnam. At the UN for the next decade, the US bullied most of its western trading allies into voting for the KR to be seated as the legitimate exiled government of Cambodia. An embargo was put on foreign aid to the devastated country.
Torture was not invented by the KR, who brought the excesses and paranoia of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to a new level. "At the turn of the 19th century the whole process of arrest, confinement and punishment was characterised by severe torture and the methods employed no less brutal than those used by the Khmer Rouge," Dunlop writes. Lon Nol, who overthrew King Sihanouk in the CIA-backed coup, continued the tradition.
In 1999 Duch was posing as a former teacher and working with refugees. He was a Baptist convert and seemed relieved to confess, but after four years in jail he is now blaming Dunlop for his incarceration and Dunlop has decided that it would not be safe to continue visiting former KR areas. At this, I gave a great sigh of relief. Having lived in Cambodia myself, Dunlop's fearlessness in the face of scowling men with AK47s in remote places had worried me.
In 1993 the KR, one of the parties to the interim administration prior to UN organised elections, had broken the ceasefire and was attacking with impunity as Eric Falt, the UN spokesman, sought to overlook this fact and insisted on proper UN newspeak. KR genocide was now "the policies and practices of the past". If you used the wrong terms he threatened to exclude you from his press conferences.
During that time Vietnamese fishing villagers on the Tonle Sap lake were massacred and western friends were abducted and killed by the Khmer Rouge. I was in a UN helicopter that caught a bullet as we landed in a clearing - its progress slowed by the water bottles we were ferrying for election staff and stopped by a Canadian soldier's flak jacket that he had put under him. The KR was very scary and, unlike Dunlop, I had no wish to get closer.
Dunlop has found no media takers for his photographs of Cambodia since the UN left. "Cambodia" he was told, "has been done." An exhibition of some of the thousands of official photographs of Toul Sleng victims was displayed in the New York Museum of Modern Art, and a "sumptuous" book of those photographs produced without captions. The more explicit images, such as that "of a man whose head had exploded from the impact of a shovel", were left out.
To Dunlop it seemed "disingenuous to display these photographs without making clear why it is considered important to show them. There is a danger of it becoming a self-defeating exercise in highbrow voyeurism".
Haunted by images of mass graves in lush countryside, Dunlop first travelled to Cambodia aged 19 in 1989. Based in Bangkok, he has returned many times. His book vividly depicts the war, the meticulous records kept by the KR of their victims, their horrible tortures and the effect of the tragedy on Cambodians today. It is a tough and brilliant read. For Dunlop the Toul Sleng photographs have "become a permanent reminder of the world's impotence, of our collective guilt in failing to prevent the crime of genocide."
Maeve Donelan is an Irish journalist who wrote for the Phnom Penh Post and the Cambodia Daily, and worked for the Norwegian Save the Children Fund, Redd Barna, Cambodia, in 1993-1994
The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge. By Nic Dunlop, Bloomsbury, 324pp. £16.99