THE VIETNAMESE INVASION had saved Duch. Before the collapse of the Khmer Rouge the issue of weeding out spies had been taken over by the need to fight the Vietnamese. Without their intervention it is almost certain that Duch too would have been killed. He had ensured that all references to him in the confessions had been erased before they were sent to the Higher Organisation. But more prisoners kept coming; and more confessions produced more names, which in turn meant more arrests and more killing.
When Duch arrived at the border he disappeared into the murky world of secret camps that made up ‘the hidden border’. Details of his whereabouts remain sketchy. It is believed that he went to the forests of Samlaut, which was still a Khmer Rouge zone, under the direct control of Pol Pot. Here he was reunited with his family in Nuon Chea’s headquarters, known as camp 404. He was demoted by Nuon Chea, apparently because of his failure to destroy the documents at Tuol Sleng, then offered a job in logistics.
Duch didn’t get along with Nuon Chea. In fact Nuon Chea had reproached him on at least two occasions whilst he worked in S-21. ‘Brother Number 2’ wasn’t liked by many of the cadres. Whilst Pol Pot had always been charismatic and revered, Nuon Chea was aloof and arrogant. The fact that most of the archive had fallen into the hands of the Vietnamese reflected badly on Brother Number 2, and badly on Duch. As a result Duch was relieved of his duties.
While Duch’s position had been an extremely important one, it was also extremely precarious. He could be a liability–he had a lot of incriminating information, which only strengthened the case for eliminating him. It seems a wonder that he wasn’t killed. I later found out that he taught Son Sen’s children in one of the camps. Duch also became close friends with Khieu Samphan’s wife. He was still close to the leadership. He must have had the protection of someone in the party, most likely his former boss, Son Sen.
Here on the border Duch learned to speak Thai. He also taught himself English and apparently worked on producing school textbooks. In 1983, he had an accident with an AK-47 that he was cleaning and blew his finger off. If he had returned to teaching as some said or, if he had no duties at all, what was he doing with an assault rifle, I wondered?
When Duch went to Son Sen’s camp he would have had to traverse the length of the border. The only way to do that would have been through the safety of Thailand. He would have gone through countless checkpoints and past the town of Aranyaprathet up over the Dangrek mountains and on to Ubon near the Lao border, courtesy of the Thai military.
Here, in this zone of impunity, the Khmer Rouge leadership led a life of privilege. They could come and go as they pleased. They had houses in the coastal town of Bang Saen and near the provincial town of Trat. Their bases along the border were protected by Thai soldiers and artillery, many of them safe and out of reach of the Vietnamese. They were escorted through the VIP channel at Bangkok International Airport and accorded all the formality and benefits that other foreign VIPs and diplomats enjoyed. When Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge commander known as ‘the butcher’, lost his leg to a mine in the early 1980s, he was reportedly evacuated to Bangkok, where he was treated in St Louis Hospital. Ieng Sary’s daughter studied in Thailand’s prestigious Thammasat University before going on to City College in New York, where her father was a UN diplomat. Every month they visited the nearby Thai resort city of Pattaya escorted in unmarked cars with blacktinted windows.
Based alongside the relief agencies in the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet, Unit 838 had been set up by the Thai military specifically to look after the needs of the Khmer Rouge coalition. From shipments of arms to intelligence and strategic planning and support, this secret unit coordinated the Cambodian war effort against the Vietnamese and the regime in Phnom Penh. When Khmer Rouge forces were pushed out at one point on the border the Thais would pick them up, close the roads and move them to another more secure part of the border. Being close to the leadership, Duch would have been taken to these various camps by Unit 838. Some of the relief agencies may have been waved down by Thai soldiers as his convoy was rushed through the checkpoints before being permitted to continue on to their work assisting the refugees.
While Duch had Thai military protection, life for the majority on the border was as precarious as ever. The Thai-Cambodian border was defined by what the Thais called a strategic canal. A deep ditch, the width of two squash courts and about five metres deep, ran the entire length of the frontier to prevent Vietnamese tanks from gaining easy access to Thai territory.
On Christmas Morning 1984, a young Jesuit, Bob Maat, began another day’s work in Nong Samet, a camp controlled by the non-communist resistance in the coalition. When he arrived he was faced with the sight of some 60,000 terrified people huddled in the ditch as the sound of shells thundered across the skies. The Vietnamese had launched a major attack.
Maat watched a woman help her sick husband with one arm and carry their two-year-old daughter with the other, their bag of essentials slung over her shoulder. The husband told his wife to leave him at the side of the road and carry on without him. The shells were landing closer. Crying, she refused to abandon him. People searched frantically among the crowds for their children and loved ones lost in the panic.
At the ditch the Thai soldiers were everywhere. The shells were getting closer and closer. Large clouds of smoke drifted over the refugees’ heads. The camp was now burning and large flames leaped into the sky. A number of handicapped were seated together in the ditch; some in their wheelchairs, some with crutches. The trauma made some pregnant women go into labour. Maat, who had been trained as a physician’s assistant, helped deliver a baby boy among the crowds in the ditch. The shells were so close now that he could feel the percussion against his face as they landed. There were over twenty births in that ditch that morning. And more than 10,000 shells fell on the camp.
After the attack, new refugee camps were established along the frontier in what became a permanent humanitarian emergency as the political stalemate continued. The United Nations Border Relief Operation was set up to coordinate the relief agencies working in the camps and, apart from Khao-I-Dang, all of them were ruled by these coalition forces. There were two controlled by Lon Nol’s old army, the KPNLF, one under the Royalists and a total of five under the Khmer Rouge. The camp populations provided a pool of recruits for these armies. The majority of the Khmer Rouge camps were virtually out of bounds to UN and other NGO staff, and access was severely limited. For the Thai military, the camps provided a perfect strategic buffer against the Vietnamese. They were also a great source of revenue, particularly from the humanitarian relief programme.
In order to appease the more squeamish of their supporters, the Khmer Rouge mounted a propaganda offensive claiming that they had changed. Site 8, the largest and most accessible of the Khmer Rouge camps, was referred to by UN and aid workers, as ‘the showcase camp’. Here, against a backdrop of dramatic limestone cliffs, 30,000 people lived in huts neatly laid out on a bed of red laterite. Here the Khmer Rouge demonstrated how they had now embraced liberal capitalism. This was the façade which Duch and others hid behind. It wasn’t particularly sophisticated, but it had the desired effect.
In contrast to the other Khmer Rouge camps, visitors to Site 8 would be mobbed by throngs of smiling children selling trinkets and souvenirs. With the correct papers journalists were permitted to walk through the gates manned by the Thai military to wander at will. One photographer described how you knew that you were in a Khmer Rouge camp by the bright colours people wore. They had replaced their black uniformity with garish colours of varying hue. Here people smiled and could approach foreigners and talk apparently freely. There was a bustling black market where anything from talcum powder to Coca-Cola could be bought –proof of newly found capitalist credentials. There was also a human-rights office (a judicial system had been set up with the help of the UN) and even a Buddhist temple.
There was a growing swell of opinion among some diplomats, journalists and aid workers that the Khmer Rouge were softening. Many who worked on the border described these camps as better managed and less corrupt than the non-communist ones. One diplomat said that the Khmer Rouge provided the refugees with security and care. Some wishful thinkers began to believe that a more ‘reasonable’ generation of leaders was gaining a foothold. As one former British ambassador wrote, ‘Exposure to Western and local Thai influences is beginning to have its effect.’ While it may have made the jobs of the UN and the NGOs easier, not everyone regarded this discipline as a positive attribute.
Where were these observers getting their information from? Since there were no new reports of mass murder many were wilfully lulled into believing that the Khmer Rouge had indeed reformed.
Come nightfall, when relief agencies had left the camp for the safety of Aranyaprathet, the fear that had paralysed people in the past swooped over the camps and descended once again.
In moves eerily reminiscent of the mass deportations of Khmer Rouge rule, thousands of people disappeared from these camps literally overnight. In 1985, 5,000 people were moved by the Khmer Rouge from Site 8 and across the Thai border into Cambodia. The following year, more than 1,500 people were taken to Natrao, Ta Mok’s camp. Many more were used to porter ammunition.
In fact little had changed. As Norah Niland, a researcher from Trinity College Dublin wrote, ‘The idea of openly “disobeying” Khmer Rouge camp administrators was too frightening a prospect for any refugee to contemplate.’ By most accounts the structure and behaviour of the Khmer Rouge in the camps had changed little since the seventies. Reports of disappearances, interrogations, public beatings and summary executions were commonplace as they exerted their control over their captive populations. The same Khmer Rouge leadership remained in control. And it was the same leadership that had presided over S-21.
One of the camps Duch did spend time in was located to the south, just inside Thailand.
Borai was virtually cut off from outsiders. Just as before, the Khmer Rouge kept the population tightly controlled and in fear. Here in the jungle of the border 4,000 men, women and children lived in makeshift houses surrounded by malarial forest.
Duch taught English and maths at the school and was paid in food and clothing by the UN. Since most of the Khmer Rouge leaders at Borai didn’t speak English, it is believed that he became one of the main liaison persons for the outside world with the UN and the few NGOs who supplied the camp.
Despite all the diplomatic and practical support the Khmer Rouge were given, they still treated outsiders with a barely concealed hostility. Like all the camps the UN supplied, this was supposed to be a civilian camp. The UN had repeatedly asked that the troops from the factions drop their weapons at the satellite camps nearby before entering the civilian ones. The request was met with a cursory agreement, but it was a losing battle. On occasion, with the enlisted support of Thai soldiers who guarded the camp, aid workers would arrange searches for weapons. In one particular house where the inhabitants were all blind, an aid worker talked to one old man then lifted his eyes to the roof above. There, hanging from the rafters, were an assortment of AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and other small arms.
In other camps controlled by the allies of the Khmer Rouge, the people didn’t fare much better. Site 2 was the largest camp under the remnants of Lon Nol’s army. With a population of 152,000 people it was one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Fenced on one side by bamboo and barbed wire and by landmines on the other, it was Cambodia’s second-largest city after Phnom Penh and it was in Thailand.
As before it was the Americans who provided support to the guerrillas. They were paying $24 million annually in assistance to these factions, the logic being that they provided a counterbalance to the Khmer Rouge, something Washington assiduously promoted. But the label ‘non-communist’ conveniently disguised the fact that they were also non-democratic. With this aid they could keep their civilian populations under control and violence became a way of life and Site 2 descended into lawlessness.
Ordinary refugees trapped in these camps had little say in the matter; their lives were governed by varying degrees of brutality, the Khmer Rouge being the worst perpetrators.
The non-communist camps were more open to the aid workers. There they were permitted to work and were able to provide comprehensive health care, nutrition, sanitation, food and a wide variety of educational and social services. What these camps could not do, however, was give people what they sought most: safety and hope.
Not far beneath the smiles of the refugees was a mood of hopeless despair. With the political deadlock, the continuing war and insecurity and little chance of resettlement abroad, the listlessness of camp life was becoming a cause for serious concern. Depression had set in and the social fabric of whatever was left after the Khmer Rouge, the war and the bombing, was beginning to unravel.
Incidents of domestic abuse and rape were on the increase. As one aid worker, referring to a spate of murders in Site 2, reported, ‘It’s not just a cut here or there. They’re stabbed multiple times, twenty to thirty times. People are axing, knifing, throwing grenades, and hitting each other in record numbers.’
Stephane Rousseau, who worked as an UNBRO security officer at Site 2, recalled hearing about a possible murder of a woman outside the camp. He went to investigate with another colleague. They walked for about two kilometres through the wild brush before they came across tufts of hair and pools of blood on the ground. They followed the trail. ‘You knew that the person must have really fought for their life,’ Rousseau said.
They arrived at a clearing where the soil had recently been disturbed. A group of men with tools began to dig. After a few minutes they uncovered the body of a naked woman of about thirty years of age. ‘She had been really atrociously mutilated,’ said Rousseau. ‘She had been axed everywhere, in the head and on the arm and on the leg,’ he said. Her brother, who had come with them, agreed they should cremate her body on the spot.
The woman was well known in the camp; she had been deaf and mute. A lover was thought to have murdered her. He had seen her with another man and in a fit of rage had killed her.
‘And I remember thinking of her last few minutes,’ Rousseau said. ‘It was horrible to that think that this woman couldn’t even scream for help.’
In June 1986 Duch, on the orders of Son Sen, was sent to China to teach as a Khmer-language expert at Beijing’s Foreign Language Institute. It was at the height of the conflict against the Vietnamese and the Chinese were supplying the Khmer Rouge with all the weaponry and training they needed. Most likely, Duch taught Chinese intelligence personnel and advisers before they left for the border. The Chinese at first didn’t know who he was. When they found out that he had been head of Tuol Sleng, they didn’t review his contract and cancelled his visa. He returned to the border a year later. If he had taught intelligence personnel it was possible that he was still connected to the Santebal.
On his return, however, Duch changed his name to Hang Pinand went to work in Camp 505, just inside the Cambodian border. This was Pol Pot’s secretariat, where he worked as a senior bureaucrat.
Looking over the border now, it’s hard to imagine that such momentous events ever took place here. Much of the terrain is flat and featureless scrubland. The brick model of Angkor Wat at the entrance of Khao-I-Dang is now overgrown with weeds. Apart from the regimented gridwork pattern of the sections of the camps, there is virtually no trace that they ever existed. Their populations are now scattered all over Cambodia and across the globe. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people died crossing this invisible frontier. Thousands more died in the camps. Many were also born there, into a no-man’s-land between Thailand and Cambodia. Here China, the Soviet Union and the West played politics with the lives of countless, expendable Cambodians in a front line of the Cold War.
On a hill just south of Aranyaprathet, on the Thai side of the border, two ancient brick Prasats, or sanctuary towers, sit among the trees on the summit. It is the only hill for miles around. In early 1992, I sat here listening to a tropical storm as it growled above the hills in the distance. Below me, through the trees, the sound of children’s laughter and music came from across the border in Cambodia.
At the foot of the hill, accompanied by a Thai friend who worked in one of the refugee camps, I followed a network of tarmacked roads that disappeared into an unkempt landscape of bamboo. I followed the music and laughter to the end of one road until it petered out into a path that disappeared into the wild brush of the border.
We came to a clearing of several fallow paddy fields. Up ahead I could see TV aerials and a radio antenna. The music and laughter were becoming more distinct. A rickety bridge made of planks of wood stood over a small river. On the other side were several houses built from the wood of Chinese ammunition cases. It was a Khmer Rouge village. We crossed over.
Several people turned to watch me as I walked into the village. The children who were sitting on the dark earthen floor stopped playing and stared at me. I greeted a man sitting on the doorstep of his house; he looked right through me as though I were a ghost. All the men were wearing the Chinese green of the Khmer Rouge which had become standard issue since they were ousted by the Vietnamese. After several minutes I was summoned to the largest house beside the river.
The village was part of a Khmer Rouge enclave that ran down much of the border to the Gulf of Thailand. We were welcomed by a smiling cadre in a freshly pressed Chinese uniform. After shaking us warmly by the hand he invited us to sit down at the table on his veranda. Above him was a calendar with a photograph of Khmer Rouge troops walking along a paddy dyke towards a horizon of sugar palms. We were given hot tea and we chatted for some moments before he asked us the purpose of our unannounced visit. I told him we wanted to visit ‘liberated Cambodia’. He asked what country I came from so I said I was British. I knew that the British would have been known by the Khmer Rouge.
He smiled and said that since we didn’t have permission to be here we should leave. Next time we would have to go through the ‘appropriate channels’ in Bangkok, he told us. He then took us to the bridge that marked the border and, warning us of the mines, told us to keep to the path. Before I crossed, he shook me by the hand and thanked me for Britain’s support for the struggle to liberate his country.
It was well known that the US and other governments were supporting this coalition, but the true extent of the involvement wasn’t revealed until the end of the eighties. When Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was questioned about British support for the Khmer Rouge-led coalition on BBC television she replied, ‘Some of the Khmer Rouge of course were very different. I think that there are probably two parts to the Khmer Rouge: those who supported Pol Pot and then there is a much, much more reasonable group with the Khmer Rouge.’
It was revealed in the Daily Telegraph and in TV reports by John Pilger that the SAS had been training members of the non-communist forces in the Khmer Rouge coalition. These claims were vigorously denied by the Conservative Government at the time. However, in 1991, in a written parliamentary answer, the government admitted that the SAS had indeed provided training to the Khmer Rouge’s allies since 1983. It was then revealed that the SAS had trained Pol Pot’s guerrillas directly. A Human Rights Watch report, written by former British serviceman Rae McGrath, revealed that the SAS had taught the non-communist factions how to set up booby traps, attack airports, blow up bridges and railway lines, and lay minefields. ‘The very things,’ McGrath told Pilger, ‘that we call terrorism.’
Over the years I had met many Cambodian soldiers who had been trained by the Thais, the Malaysians, the Americans and the British. None of them had been Khmer Rouge, but members of the non-communist forces. I continued to ask former Khmer Rouge in different parts of the country. Yet still, more than ten years after these reports, no-one had talked to a former Khmer Rouge who had attended these trainings.
Then I had a meeting with another former Khmer Rouge in a village south of Battambang. I asked him if he had ever received training by foreigners. He replied that he had.
He was a small, dark man in his late forties who had spent all his life with the Khmer Rouge. He was visiting from another part of the country and appeared unused to talking with a foreigner. It was like talking to a shy teenager.
In late 1986, he had received a direct order from Ta Mok, ‘the butcher’, to attend a series of training courses. The courses lasted for a period of six months and, as it was too dangerous for them to take place on Cambodian soil, they were held at a secret base ten kilometres inside Thai territory in Sisaket province.
The camp covered an area of some five square kilometres with forest on one side and Thai fruit orchards on the other. It was supplied by the Thai military. There were several warehouses where food, ammunition and other supplies were stored.
He said that he was among a group of twelve other Khmer Rouge divisional commanders. In total there were five different workshops and five British instructors, but only one trained his group. His instructor was called ‘Mr Gary’.
‘How did you know they were British?’ I asked.
‘Because they told us.’
He didn’t recognise their insignia but they all wore ‘light grey’ berets. ‘They were very well equipped,’ he said. They were all officers. There was also a general who was in charge who carried a walking cane.
They were taught tactical guerrilla fighting, arms training, weapons technology, including booby traps, and sabotage. He was also trained in mines technology and strategy. He said that, despite having extensive experience, he didn’t know much, but what he learned was, ‘very useful’.
Outside of the training they had no informal contact with the British, but often saw them eating and drinking tea with Ta Mok. ‘They were friendly with him.’ The British also accompanied them on long-range reconnaissance patrols deep inside the country. One time they even went as far as the forests that surround the temples of Angkor. They never took part in the fighting and acted only in an advisory role. They helped in the planning and debriefed the guerrillas afterwards.
To date, the British government has never admitted to the training of the Khmer Rouge. Nor has it explained why the SAS, at the expense of the British taxpayer, was sent to train these groups in the first place.
The Vietnamese knew they could never win. The world was changing and the Cold War was coming to an end. In 1989 Soviet troops left Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall came down and Communist rule ended in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. The crippling effects of the US embargo and the war in Cambodia were proving too costly for the Vietnamese to sustain their ‘irreversible’ occupation without Soviet support. By 1989, save a few advisers, all ground troops had left. As soon as the last Vietnamese soldiers crossed back into Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge and their allies swept over the border and attacked government forces. In less than two months, the strategically important town of Pailin had fallen to the Khmer Rouge with, it was rumoured, Thai support. The Khmer Rouge had then begun to advance up Route 10 towards Battambang, Cambodia’s second-largest city. The same was reported all over the country, in Kompong Speu, Kompong Thom as well as Siem Reap and Beantey Meanchey. Khmer Rouge activity was reported less than two hours from the capital and a curfew was imposed.
By May 1990, alarmed by Khmer Rouge gains and an upsurge in fighting in Cambodia, the public outcry prompted both Ireland and Sweden to withdraw their support for the coalition seat at the UN. Mounting domestic pressure was put on western governments to prevent a return of the Khmer Rouge.
In Phnom Penh a curfew was imposed. People would stop me in the street and ask me anxiously whether the Khmer Rouge would return. In my previous visits I had assured them confidently that the world wouldn’t allow it. Now with the Khmer Rouge just over an hour from the capital, I wasn’t so sure.
Comrade Duch confesses to mass murder, Ta Sanh, Samlaut 1999 (Photograph by Nic Dunlop)
