‘The tree grows in the rural areas,
but the fruit goes to the towns’
IN 1961, DUCH PASSED the Brevet d’Etudes Secondaire de Première Cycle, which brought him to the same educational level as French students of the same age. He was fifteen. He then went on to Siem Reap to attend the Lycée Suryavarman II, where he passed the first part of his baccalaureate. This took most students two years to complete, but Duch passed his in one–a rare achievement. The same year he was offered a place in the prestigious Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh, specialising in mathematics. It was here, among the boulevards of flame trees and yellow stucco walls of the lycée, that he successfully passed the second part of his baccalaureate, coming second in the entire country.
Arriving in the capital in 1962, Duch would have witnessed at first hand the widening gap between town and country. Many peasants distrusted the wealthier city people and officials, whom they saw as corrupt and often outright hostile to the poor. Historian Michael Vickery recalled how officials on weekend picnics, entertaining guests, would stop in a village, drop in on a house and ask the owner to kill a chicken and prepare a meal. A request from an official was as good as an order. The official would then impress his guest with the traditional hospitality and relative prosperity of Cambodia’s farmers. It was not thought of as an imposition.
All discontent was internalised. Open displays of anger were generally suppressed and frowned upon. The taxes the peasants paid went to the city, as did their produce. The Khmer Rouge later exploited this resentment. As Cambodia’s leading leftist, Hou Yuon, wrote, ‘The tree grows in the rural areas, but the fruit goes to the towns.’
Like many students, Duch lived for free at a riverside temple, Wat Ounalom, not far from the Royal Palace. As he became more and more drawn into political activism his visits home decreased. Ke Kim Huot, his old teacher, had since moved to teach at a lycée south of Phnom Penh. It is likely that he supported Duch financially. To a young country boy in his late teens Phnom Penh must have conformed to much of what Duch had been told. And self-conscious, as undoubtedly he was, he would have been all too aware that his background excluded him from much of what Phnom Penh had to offer.
Duch wanted to become a professor of maths. He fell in love with Kim, Ho Ngie’s sister, the friend with whom he had studied the newspapers. Together they began to study maths at the University of Phnom Penh. The families were in agreement over the match and they got engaged. But for reasons that are unclear the engagement was broken off and Duch concentrated on becoming a teacher.
In 1964, following in Ke Kim Huot’s footsteps, Duch began studying for his teaching certificate at the Institut de Pédagogie, a stone’s throw from his Phnom Penh lycée. The institute was a cradle of activism and the director was a Paris-educated mathematician called Son Sen. He fled the capital that year to join Pol Pot in Cambodia’s infant Communist Party as a member of the central committee. Later Son Sen emerged as Defence Minister of the Khmer Rouge and Duch’s immediate superior when Duch became commandant of Tuol Sleng. According to one former Khmer Rouge, Duch was introduced to the Communist Party of Kampuchea by a man named Chhay Kim Hour, a professor at the institute. He was head of a communist cell in the capital. Chhay Kim Hour took Duch under his wing, giving him training sessions and educating him about the party. They became close.
About fifteen years later, just before the Khmer Rouge regime collapsed, Chhay Kim Hour, like Ke Kim Huot before him, arrived blindfolded at the gates of Tuol Sleng. He was taken in by Duch, his former protégé, and executed.
By the time Duch was studying to become a teacher, Cambodia was growing increasingly unstable. Despite its putatively neutral status, the country’s leader, Prince Sihanouk, was busily trying to keep Cambodia from being dragged into the escalating conflict in neighbouring Vietnam. He was wary of US influence and began cultivating a closer relationship with China. (He later severed diplomatic relations with America completely, greatly alarming Cambodia’s powerful elite.) Privately he believed that the Vietnamese would win the war and had secretly allowed the North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong to ferry supplies down the Ho Chi Minh trail and from Cambodia’s port at Kompong Som. By doing so he thought that Cambodia would be spared the ravages of war. It was a dangerous gamble that would prove disastrous for Cambodia.
Nicknamed ‘the playboy prince’, Norodom Sihanouk saw himself as father of the nation, referring to his people as ‘mes enfants’. During his frequent trips around the country, clamouring crowds would line the roads at the prospect of seeing him and some would travel great distances just to be able to touch the ground where he had trodden. He was intelligent, calculating, erratic, charismatic, passionate, hysterical and incredibly vain. He was also an unpredictable political animal and a shrewd negotiator, as he had proven in his dealings with the French when they granted full independence to Cambodia in 1953.
While he travelled the countryside, cultivating this populist image, his deputy Lon Nol jailed, tortured and murdered opponents to his government. The crackdown fuelled the resentment. Many student activists and teachers were arrested and imprisoned. Among those who fled to the jungle was a schoolteacher called Saloth Sar who was later to take the nom de guerre Pol Pot. He hailed from a relatively prosperous farming family in Kompong Thom, fifty kilometres from Duch’s home. Possibly because of his connections to the royal household in Phnom Penh, Pol Pot had been awarded a scholarship to study electrical engineering in Paris in 1949. There, along with Son Sen, Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan, he became active in left-wing politics and joined the French Communist Party. This group later formed the core of the Khmer Rouge leadership. Pol Pot failed to pass his exams and returned to Cambodia to work as a teacher in Phnom Penh. In 1963, fearing arrest by Sihanouk’s police, he escaped to the jungle. He then spent two years in a Vietnamese army base in the jungles of the north-east before visiting Hanoi and then China in 1966. He then returned to Cambodia. In the remote forests there he drew some of the inspiration for his vision of a classless state from the tribal people who lived without money, property or markets. Many of them were to become his most trusted bodyguards. It was not until the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975 that Pol Pot was announced as prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea.
To Sihanouk, students and teachers were considered threats. Although not necessarily communists, many saw themselves as ‘liberals’ or ‘progressives’. As far as Lon Nol was concerned, there was no middle ground. Sihanouk didn’t disapprove of Lon Nol’s heavy-handed measures, unless of course it was in his interest to do so. There were frequent demonstrations in the capital and many were imprisoned. Others, like Duch’s former mentor Ke Kim Huot, escaped to the forest, as the police became more and more aggressive in their pursuit of these Khmers rouges. ‘There was much pressure from the government–everybody was red,’ one former student said, as the situation between the two camps became more and more polarised. In the countryside too the repression began to be felt.
In 1963, in an attempt to placate the left, Sihanouk began to nationalise export and import trade along with banks and distilleries, arguing that Cambodia should rely on its own resources. Sihanouk had taken this idea of self-sufficiency and nationalisation from two leading left-wing politicians Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn who were still part of his administration. He said he wasn’t going to allow Cambodia to be seen as a client state of the United States, that enough trade was already in the hands of foreigners.
More than ninety per cent of the population lived in the countryside and made their living from agriculture. As the state squeezed the peasantry and took control of the rice exports, resentment deepened. The North Vietnamese army and the National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong, began buying rice directly from the farmers at far higher prices than the state. By 1966, more than a third of the entire rice harvest was sold illegally on the black market. Bit by bit Sihanouk’s government’s control of the countryside was beginning to wane. More heavy-handed measures were required to prevent the farmers from selling their rice to the Viet Cong.
On 28 August 1965, Duch got his teaching certificate and was posted to a lycée in Skoun, a small town in Kompong Cham. Located at the intersection of three national highways, Skoun was the traditional stop for an early lunch for those going overland to Angkor. Little more than a series of shop houses facing a market, Skoun is still famous for a dish called A Ping, a kind of giant forest spider the size of an outstretched hand which is barbecued black and sold by young girls with electric smiles who press their faces against car windows, balancing large plates of these things on their heads.
Arriving at the lycée on his battered Chinese bicycle, the new maths teacher quickly made an impression. With his shirt outside his trousers and his scruffy looks, Duch wasn’t their idea of a Phnom Penh graduate. To Meak Meurn, a former pupil, now himself a teacher at the lycée, Duch was ‘a very strange professor’. In Cambodia, people of more humble beginnings did their best to conceal their poverty and took pride in looking smart. Yet here was the lycée’s most qualified teacher, who was well paid but preferred to dress simply and ride a bicycle to school instead of a car or scooter. He was also a chain-smoker, puffing his way through several packets a day. He shared a house in the town with the headmaster and his bedroom was a mess of scattered papers and books about Mao, Engels and Marx.
But he was a good teacher, earnest yet committed and well liked, particularly among the poorer pupils. Meurn remembered him as ‘a very patient and very gentle professor’, who worked extremely hard and who never punished his pupils. He fed the poorer ones and offered lodgings, just as his own teacher had done. During classes, he was meticulous and particular. As another former pupil recalled, ‘He was known for the precision of his lectures as if he were copying texts from his mind on to the board.’
He rarely relaxed or socialised. While the other teachers enjoyed parties and festivals where they would dance and drink, Duch stayed behind to show Chinese propaganda films that described pest control in the countryside to demonstrate how the parasites, like the ruling classes, fed off the hard work of the people. Often, after classes, he would tell Chinese morality tales that carried political overtones. He even tested them on Maoist theory, handing out leaflets at the end that, according to Meurn, ‘taught us to hate the Prince’s feudalist regime and the capitalist regime’. It wasn’t all theoretical. Meurn described how Duch organised his students to help the farmers build up the paddy embankments and initiate labour classes to assist the peasantry. They learned quickly under his guidance. ‘He tried to teach other students to help the poor and less fortunate in the countryside,’ said Meurn. ‘He was the only one like this.’
These young recruits had become devoted followers. ‘He was well educated and his views were of a high level,’ said Meurn. By now, Duch was a committed communist and his grooming of the poorer students was designed with one sole purpose in mind: to prepare the ground for revolution. And the time was fast approaching.
Not far from Skoun, in the rubber plantations of Chamkar Leou, the Khmer Rouge had a large base. This might explain why Duch was able to continue his communist agitating so openly for as long as he did. The local authorities might have been cautious about moving against people like him, fearing it could upset the balance and lead to open conflict in the area. Kompong Cham and Kompong Thom were known bastions of Khmer Rouge support and further beyond to the east was the North Vietnamese army. Duch was also a graduate of the Institut de Pédagogie, where to be openly leftist wasn’t considered unusual. As Meurn said, ‘we respected different views.’
Then Duch learned that his friend and comrade Chhay Kim Huor had been arrested with ten others in Phnom Penh while handing out leaflets denouncing Lon Nol as a traitor. Chhay Kim Hour was imprisoned without trial for a year. It is almost certain that he had been Duch’s main contact and liaison officer.
By this time, explained Sou Sath of his Kompong Thom study group, Duch had become Monuh Daach-chat a term the Khmer Rouge used to refer to a loyalist who would sacrifice anything for the movement. The random and cruel nature of the various crackdowns resulting in the arrest of so many of his friends would have convinced him of the evils of the current regime. Sath was by now married and living in Kompong Thom with her husband. She was teaching at a primary school and, like many of her colleagues, had become a communist sympathiser. Duch used to give them information when he came to town. He carried a copy of Mao’s little red book in his pocket, along with a larger one entitled The Lectures of Mao Tse-tung. They met discreetly at her house, where he would distribute books and pamphlets among her colleagues and hold discussions about philosophy and Maoist theory.
In 1966, the same year that Pol Pot visited China, Mao Tse Tung unleashed the Cultural Revolution. In order to put an end to ‘revisionism’, young radicals and Red Guards began accusing many top party and government officials of failing to follow original communist principles, branding them ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Nothing was sacred enough to be spared by these mobs as they rampaged through the country. Universities and schools were shut down; intellectuals, artists and writers were humiliated and, in some cases, killed. Thousands were sent to the countryside to be re-educated through hard labour, self-criticism and study sessions. Temples were ransacked and monasteries disbanded, books were burned and any reminders of China’s feudal past destroyed. This constant revolution unleashed forces that proved almost unstoppable. The army was then called in and began its own reign of terror and thousands were killed. They began the Campaign to Purify Class Ranks carried out by Thought Propaganda Teams. Anyone with a suspect background such as a university education was sent to be re-educated.
No other single movement was to have such a profound influence on the Khmer Rouge who, once in power, took the fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution a stage further.
Back in Kompong Thom, Duch had become a passionate advocate of the revolutionary cause. At meetings he gesticulated wildly as he spoke. He constantly railed against Sihanouk and his government, said Sath. She saw he had become a man of ‘rigid principle’. But there was no doubting his sincerity. His speeches were peppered with communist jargon about ‘the feudalists’, and the ‘proletariat’. He was persuasive and charismatic and had become adept at holding people’s attention, winning people’s trust regardless of age or social standing. For Sath, ‘He was the sort of person who liked to be listened to more than the other way round.’
Sath was unsure of Duch’s position within the Khmer Rouge. Most people then did not know of the existence of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. It had been obscured by the broad brush stroke when Sihanouk coined the name for the left, Les Khmers rouges. However, she was certain he was taking his orders from someone. Duch was in charge of distributing books and information to people in the area, to friends and colleagues, in order to spread the word. They had a network, she said, and could operate quite easily, ‘because all the people were sympathetic to their ideas’. Duch had become head of a communist cell in Skoun and Kompong Thom with orders to convert and recruit. But it is still unclear what his position was or who he answered to.
By now, Duch was being closely monitored by the local authorities. It was only a matter of time before they came after him, as he must have known. The situation all over the country had reached crisis point. The divisions between the left and the pro-American right and the widespread disenchantment with the government had created a potentially explosive situation.
In 1967, the touch paper was lit. On the other side of the country from Duch, in the district of Samlaut, the government forced a number of peasants off their land and built a sugar refinery. The peasants were angered by the lack of compensation, and their increasingly desperate position made for a tense situation. Then the government sent in troops to collect taxes and ensure that the peasants sold all their surplus rice to the government and not to the Vietnamese. One contingent of soldiers was too forceful and the villagers fought back, killing two of them. Shortly afterwards a local garrison was overrun and arms were taken as the whole area rose up.
The Khmer Rouge took their cue. All over the country similar unrest was being reported. Sihanouk, who was abroad, wanted the uprising crushed, and he wasn’t particularly bothered how. Lon Nol seized the opportunity to move against the left and quell all dissent. Villages were burned and thousands were killed. Heads were mounted on stakes outside Battambang. Trucks filled with more heads were reportedly brought to Phnom Penh so that Lon Nol could see that his orders were being carried out.
Despite growing discontentment and hardship across the countryside, the Khmer Rouge still had neither the support nor the means to launch all-out war against Sihanouk’s regime. They were probably caught off guard by Samlaut but, realising the importance of what was happening, claimed the uprising as their own. Duch’s loyalty to the Khmer Rouge already bordered on the fanatical. Suddenly, he found himself on the front line. He sent a group of his loyal, poorer students to distribute leaflets in Kompong Cham town. The leaflets called for the overthrow of the ‘fascist regime in Phnom Penh’. They described Sihanouk’s government as corrupt, oppressive and feudalistic, and called for the people to ‘rise up’. Three of his students were arrested and jailed by Sihanouk’s police.
When news of the arrests reached Duch, he realised that he was a wanted man. Disguising himself as a farmer he went into hiding, or so his students thought. In fact, he went to the Khmer Rouge base in nearby Chamkar Loeu, where at the recommendation of Chhay Kim Hour, he was accepted as a full member of the Communist Party of Kampuchea.
However there was another reason for him to disappear. According to Sath, he owed a lot of money from playing Tontin, and his creditors had reported him to the police. Tontin is a rotating credit scheme between friends where each member of the group puts an equal amount of money into a kitty. They then take it in turns to borrow the total and repay it. Sath couldn’t understand it–it seemed so out of character. Duch was generally a cautious man. She didn’t know how much money had been involved; ‘I just knew that he played Tontin to collect money to help the revolutionary forces. When it was time to pay back the money, he didn’t have any and he escaped into the jungle to Chamkar Loeu.’
Whatever the real story, a few months later Duch was arrested by the authorities. He was then jailed in Kompong Cham before being transferred to the Central Prison in Phnom Penh and then to Prey Sar, the main holding centre for political prisoners just outside the capital. There, along with hundreds of others, he was held without trial for the next two years. He was thrown in the same cell as Norng Soun, the editor of the left-wing paper Prachachon, and Mam Nay or Chan.
Sihanouk, retuned home, realised he needed to curb Lon Nol’s increasing power and distance himself from the repression, and demanded his deputy’s resignation. He then accused the two remaining prominent leftists in Phnom Penh, Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn, of leading the uprising. They then disappeared, believed murdered by Sihanouk’s death squads. In Phnom Penh, 15,000 people came out to demonstrate their support for the two men and a state of emergency was declared. Although he later distanced himself from the crushing of the uprising in Samlaut, Sihanouk said that he ‘read somewhere that 10,000 died’.
The leftist opposition of the schools and centres of study and the grievances of the peasantry were beginning to converge. The picture-postcard image of an abundant, peaceful land, created largely by the French, was beginning to unravel. Ironically, it was this idealised image of Cambodia that the Khmer Rouge would attempt to create. But, in order to launch a revolution with the full backing of the peasantry, a major cataclysm was needed.