(Bloomsbury, £16.99)
Nic Dunlop's compelling addition to the literature of the Cambodian holocaust examines not only the banality of evil but also its ambiguity, and the resulting doubt and confusion among perpetrators and victims in the aftermath of one of the greatest crimes in history.
Like many of those who visit the Tuol Sleng museum in Phnom Penh, Dunlop was haunted by the display of curiously beautiful individual photographs of some of the 20,000 men, women and children who died there when it was the notorious Tuol Sleng prison. He became obsessed with finding Comrade Duch, the executioner of the title and commandant of the prison, who had disappeared after the overthrow of Pol Pot by the invading Vietnamese army in 1979. Twenty years later, while with a mine-clearance team in a Khmer Rouge zone in rural Cambodia, Dunlop meets a man called Hang Pin wearing a white T-shirt with the initials ARC, for American Refugee Committee. He identifies him as Duch. It turns out that Duch—real name Kaing Guek Eav—is as devout a Christian as he was a Communist. He is now in jail awaiting trial.
It is easy to declare that the Khmer Rouge were evil—they were responsible for about 1.5m deaths during their three years in power—but less easy to explain how such evil was spawned, why it was not ended sooner and why Cambodians are still so reluctant to come to terms with it today. Dunlop's solution is to describe specific events rather than try to explain them in general terms. He notes approvingly the words of Ong Thong Hoeung, another ex-Khmer Rouge activist known as Ho: "We must not ask Duch and other Khmer Rouge why. There is no reason why… The most important thing is to know how the people were killed, not why—that is why a trial is important."
The hunt for Duch is a literary device to help illuminate the darkness of Cambodia's recent history, but it is a device that Dunlop, with his professional photographer's eye, uses to good effect. Among the most memorable parts of the book are the small details observed by the author—the ex-Khmer Rouge hunting in Bangkok for a Manchester United football shirt for his son, the retired torturer standing next to unwitting tourists in the museum and explaining his methods to Dunlop, and the direct speech of ordinary Cambodians that reaches us through these pages.
Dunlop reminds us that Pol Pot came to power not just because the Americans bombed Cambodia or because the regimes of Prince Sihanouk and Lon Nol were corrupt, but also because Sihanouk established a national education system. An intellectual elite of left-wing teachers and their pupils were in the vanguard of the revolution that later consumed them.
The tale of Duch's life and the hunt for him after the war leads inexorably to the question of how Cambodia is dealing—or rather, not dealing—with its legacy of mass murder and violence. Sokheang, a Khmer Rouge loyalist turned human rights worker, and the other main figure in the book, has investigated scores of recent political murders but no one has been charged as a result. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that Pol Pot was able to die after declaring, "My conscience is clear," a war crimes tribunal has been repeatedly postponed, and Hun Sen, the prime minister, is a former Khmer Rouge member.
Although one senses that Dunlop begins to doubt whether a day of reckoning is either possible or desirable, and even whether his exposure of Duch was worth it, he provides plenty of first-hand evidence of a terrible, unhealed wound on Cambodia itself and the conscience of the world. One woman tells him she wants the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders killed: "I don't just want a trial. I want to eat them." Chum Mey, one of only seven adults to enter Tuol Sleng as a prisoner and survive, says ominously that a trial is needed to prevent the children of the next generation doing "the same as the Khmer Rouge did."
Three decades later, it looks unlikely that a cathartic trial of the perpetrators of the Cambodian holocaust will ever happen, even if one or two of the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders are finally brought to justice. In the absence of such a day of reckoning, books such as this to tell the story of what happened are essential.
