Between February and November 2009, an extraordinary trial took place in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, before a tribunal composed of national and foreign judges. The accused was Kaing Guek Eav, better known by his revolutionary name Duch. He was the former director of an infamous prison under the regime of Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979, during which about 1.7 million Cambodians died of starvation, exhaustion, disease, forced labor, and execution.
What made this trial extraordinary was that Duch was the first former high-ranking Khmer Rouge official to be tried and that he was the only one to admit guilt and cooperate with the court. Due to a legal procedure that did not allow plea bargaining, the trial was an exceptional opportunity to hear the voice of the perpetrator. And for anyone deeply intrigued about how mass murder operates and how a former math teacher concerned with social justice can turn into a zealous agent of the extermination of his fellow human beings, the trial would mostly live up to the expectations.
Duch spoke every day of the trial. He responded to pretty much every piece of evidence against him, including thousands of documents kept in the archives of the S-21 prison that he had run and testimonies from his former staff, as well as from the only three survivors still alive at the time and families of other victims. Duch was intelligent, as fascinating as irritating, and endowed with rare memory. His lawyers would praise his repeated expressions of remorse and his effort to help search for the truth. The prosecutor and most victims’ families would denounce him as manipulative and disingenuous.
And then there was a coup de théâtre.
In the last three days of his trial, Duch gave the impression he had changed his mind. He followed his Cambodian lawyer's incoherent strategy of asking for an acquittal after having claimed for ten years that he would accept the punishment that he deserved. Eventually, Duch was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment in July 2010. Two years later, his sentence was extended to life in prison by the Appeals chamber. Ever since, the exceptional event and drama of Duch's life and trial has inspired journalists, writers (including this reviewer), survivors, lawyers, psychologists, and filmmakers.
An important part of this literature has focused on the personality of Duch, enriching the obsessive and endless reflection on mass murderers, in the footsteps of the celebrated and controversial Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics, [1963] 2006).
Man or Monster? by Alexander Laban Hinton, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, appears as the first academic addition to this very diverse production of the past few years. Hinton has been familiar for years with contemporary Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge regime. His historical knowledge is solid. He attended the trial at different stages and spent time with the three survivors of the S-21 prison, as well as with some actors in the trial, essentially victims’ families and prosecutors.
As the title of the book suggests in the most binary form, Hinton confronts a central question that many people before him have identified and struggled with: how do we make sense of human beings who participate, for a definite period of time, in mass murder? Man or monster, he says, are the “two competitive visions of Duch that ran through the trial” (p. 269). The stories of Duch and his trial “say something about all of us,” (p. 9) he writes, directly echoing the conclusion of American historian David Chandler, who authored the pretrial book of reference on S-21.Footnote 1
“The ‘banality of evil,’” Hinton argues, “is not just the failure to think in exceptional circumstances but part of our everyday thinking. In particular, the everyday ways we simplify and categorize the world in order to navigate complexity … directly parallels a key dynamic in the genocide process” (p. 31). Identifying some of the most profound questions raised by the Duch trial, he asks: “How, then, do we see the other? Do we recognize their humanity? How does the way we see ‘them’ help create an ‘us’?” (p. 268). “We must remain open to alternative framings,” Hinton responds. “This is one critical point a study of the Khmer Rouge reveals. They, like other groups that have committed mass murder, offered a singular vision of the world that made sharp demarcations between us and them. Rather than being open to ‘the other,’ the Khmer Rouge regime sought their elimination” (p. 269).
This book is a strange object that is hard to pigeonhole. It is a partial account, all at once, of the drama in court; the legal process; the questions of guilt, punishment, and justice after mass murder; the claims and illusions of contemporary Western judicial interventions; the history of the Khmer Rouge and of S-21; a meditative ballad among the ghosts of Cambodia; and even a creative writing exercise. Unfortunately, because it leaves the impression of being a bit of everything and not enough of anything new, it is not clear whom this “ethnodrama” (p. 36), as Hinton calls it, may satisfy.
Hinton admits that he got “caught up in the flow of Duch's trial” (p. 265). He is very transparent and genuine about his experience writing this book and “blending narrative styles.” But while he is urging us to pay attention to the most uncomfortable, “redacted,” or “edited out” parts of the story, he is shying away from exposing them. Denouncing the “monolithic representation” (p. 263) that he thinks was offered by this special tribunal, Hinton observes: “What other sets of understandings, we might ask, also mediate the ways Cambodians view the trials?” (p. 264). This is a valuable question, largely untouched in the existent literature. Sadly, it remains unanswered.
The strongest and most revealing part of the book is, in fact, when Hinton ventures outside the courtroom and tells of one of his many encounters with two S-21 survivors, Bou Meng and Chum Mey, during a visit in February 2012 to the genocide museum that has replaced the former prison. There he finally begins to reveal a part of the story that has been “edited out.” He narrates the odd and disconcerting commercial tension and eventual agreement between the two remaining survivors of S-21, whom he finds selling their own biographies to tourists visiting the prison where they were meant to die. What briefly appears then is a strange and out-of-court “cosmic balancing” (p. 281) of justice: Duch will be in jail for the remainder of his life, while S-21, turned into a bookshop by the two survivors, has become their most lucrative reparations scheme.
