Kaing Guek Eav, one of the two surviving leaders of Cambodia during the four years it endured the rule of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, died last week in a Phnom Penh prison hospital at the age of 77.
He died of natural causes, a pertinent detail: Kaing, better known by his nom de guerre “Duch” (pronounced Doik), supervised Phnom Penh’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where some 14,000 men, women, and children were interrogated, tortured, and executed during the four years the Khmer Rouge held power. He also ran the Santebal, Cambodia’s “special branch” for internal security and prisons. In the course of those four years, in a country of some 7 million inhabitants, the Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 2 million people. Duch was hardly the only official to blame for Cambodia’s famous “killing fields” but, as warden of Tuol Sleng, he wore the regime’s death mask.
Like many mass murderers in history, signs of the future in Duch’s early life were by no means obvious. The son of a peasant family of ethnic Chinese origin in central Cambodia, he was a model student and, propelled by a series of scholarships, earned a degree in mathematics at Phnom Penh’s prestigious Lycee Sisowath, where he fell under the influence of its director, who later became the Khmer Rouge defense minister. As a high school math teacher in the late 1960s, Duch joined the radical communist insurgency where, in its jungle redoubt, he was put in charge of a makeshift prison for suspected spies and informers. When the Khmer Rouge seized power, Duch’s reputation for efficient brutality propelled him to Tuol Sleng prison and the Santebal.
The ferocity of the Cambodian genocide was accentuated, to some degree, by its crude methods. Duch recruited poor adolescents from the countryside to torture and kill detainees or transport them to rural killing fields for murder and mass burial.
Ammunition was at a premium, so prisoners were starved or beaten with metal pipes and shovels, allowed to die from untreated illnesses, or worked to death. Children were dropped on their heads from an upper story of Tuol Sleng or smashed against trees. Medical experiments, including operations, were reportedly conducted on living subjects. Hardly anyone in Duch’s custody emerged alive, including victims of purges within Khmer Rouge ranks.
After the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, Duch fled along with other senior officials from the capital to the rural regions along Cambodia’s winding border with Thailand. He fell out of favor with the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, resumed teaching math in Thai refugee camps, and worked for U.S. relief agencies. He also seems to have converted to Christianity. In 1999, he was recognized and profiled by an Irish journalist. When, at the turn of the century, Cambodia began officially settling accounts with the Khmer Rouge, Duch was arrested and, some years later, tried before a United Nations-sponsored tribunal called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.
Most of the surviving leadership chose either to downplay their participation in the slaughter or deny that any genocide had taken place. Duch was a curious exception. Alternately contrite and defiant, he agreed to testify at length partly because he was offended by Pol Pot’s assertion that the Tuol Sleng prison had never existed and partly because he claimed to feel some measure of guilt for his actions: “I am filled with indescribable remorse,” he said at one point. “I participated in crimes against humanity.”
Yet at the conclusion of the trial, he declared himself guiltless and demanded to be freed.
Psychiatrists concluded that Duch was “meticulous, conscientious, control-oriented, attentive to detail … [and exhibited] obsessive traits.” These qualities had led him to keep detailed records of his time as warden and executioner, which, in turn, led to his conviction and imprisonment for life. But they hardly explained the savage cynicism of someone who believed that his victims were innocent but killed them with a cruelty the world cannot forget.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
