WHEN DUCH LEFT his home in 1970, he disappeared into a new, secret world from which he would not return for more than twenty years. Here in the zones of the Khmer Rouge, he discarded his old identity, assumed a new name and began a new life. He was appointed head of Special Security by his immediate superior, Vorn Vet, and sent to an area at the foot of the Cardamom mountains. There, in the forests of Amleang, he began his new incarnation as a prison commandant.
By May 1972, Lon Nol’s US-backed republic was under siege. Apart from a few strips of road linking the provincial capitals, the towns and cities were surrounded. Refugees who had escaped the fighting and bombing camped out in the streets. The towns became little more than garrisons supplied by air lifts.
Far from the front lines, in Amleang, Duch set up his first prison, code-named ‘M-13’. A second prison, ‘M-99’, was also established two years later in the nearby Oral district, closer to the mountains, also under his command. But it was in M-13 that he spent most of his time.
Amleang was considered a cradle of the revolution, ideal for Duch to begin the task of ridding Khmer Rouge ranks of ‘enemies’. It was remote, sparsely populated and far from the prying eyes of the distrusted North Vietnamese. Here he operated with his two deputies, Comrade Chan, whom Duch had been imprisoned with, and Comrade Pon; the same leadership that would later run Tuol Sleng. He ran his camp like a strict abbot of a forest monastery. His subordinates both feared and respected him. Many of them were from the surrounding villages. The area was populated by ‘base people’, considered by the Khmer Rouge the backbone of their revolution. Many of the staff were related to one another, and many were children.
How many people were killed in M-13 and M-99 will never be known. It is likely that the final death toll for both reached somewhere in the region of 20,000. It could be more. Duch kept a few prisoners alive to work in the service of the prison and several managed to escape. And at least another dozen survived their ordeal. One of them was Ham In.
Sokheang and I travelled from Phnom Penh and found his home not far from Amleang in nearby Kompong Speu province. Sokheang accompanied me on numerous trips to trace Duch’s life and with his background in human-rights investigations he proved invaluable. He would help me frame my questions more obliquely; direct questioning could put people on their guard. He knew how to put people at ease and win their trust.
Ham In was lying on a small rattan bed in front of his house when we arrived. The house, little more than a hut, was spotless and shaded by several sugar and coconut palms. He pulled himself up with slow movements that seemed to require an enormous effort. Sitting upright in a crisp white shirt and black fisherman’s trousers, he greeted us with a sompeah and motioned for us to sit next to him. The whites of his penetrating eyes glowed yellow against his dark skin. His fingers were like the twigs of an apple tree. He had malaria, he told us, a faint smile passing across his handsome face.
Ham In had joined the Khmer Rouge in 1971 as part of a mobile theatre group that toured the area, rallying the troops with patriotic songs and stories. As a musician he played the Khmer violin with his cousin, who was chief of the group. Two years later the group was disbanded, because all healthy young men were now needed at the front. He was then sent with his cousin to ‘the Special Zone’ that surrounded Phnom Penh, where he joined an artillery unit. One day, in 1973, as he was delivering ammunition, he found four soldiers with AK-47s slung over their shoulders, waiting. They grabbed his hands and tied them behind his back then led him away. ‘They told me that I was a spy,’ he said.
He was taken with six others, including a cousin and two women. Ham In was sick at the time and couldn’t walk fast. ‘But,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t afraid because I hadn’t done anything wrong.’ He began to fear for his life when the soldiers threatened and beat him to hurry him up. Clouded by malaria, he wracked his brain trying to remember what he had done.
After a day and a night they arrived at a riverbank. The soldiers radioed ahead. They sat and waited. Then four armed guards appeared dressed in black, carrying carbines, grenades and AK-47s. The prisoners were handed over to them and they continued their journey. The following morning, just before midday, they arrived at M-13.
The camp was a series of thatch huts surrounded by a fence of bamboo. Duch was there when Ham In and the others were brought in. ‘What have I done wrong? Why have I been arrested?’ pleaded In. Duch ignored him and walked away. That was the first time that he met him.
Then, without warning, the young guards seized him from behind and tied his hands to a length of rope. They dragged him over to an iron bar and hoisted him up by his hands. His feet were 10cm from the ground. ‘It was agony,’ he said. ‘If you cried they’d hit you with the barrels of their guns.’ Most people were suspended for a day, sometimes two. But Ham In was lucky; his ordeal only lasted an hour. He was cut down and tied by his ankle to a post in the open and left there. He lifted his trouser leg and showed me the dark rings around his shins and his wrists. That night the rains came and he sat in the downpour, shivering. From his post he watched as Duch walked around the camp inspecting the prisoners.
Some, like Ham In, were tied to posts, others shackled together in bunkers covered with a roof of leaves. An armed guard sat nearby. There were also individual foxholes. In the larger ones the prisoners, who had been stripped, were linked together by a pole of bamboo.
He never saw Duch give any orders. The guards knew exactly what to do. The prison was well organised and the guards disciplined. Many of them were children of twelve or thirteen, some as young as seven. They were considered more trustworthy than their elders, unpolluted by the old ways. These children had been forcibly separated from their parents and the Organisation became their only family. They became fanatical, blind leaders of the revolution, following every order to the letter, no matter how absurd or brutal. Here in M-13 they were put to deadly effect. The younger Khmer Rouge routinely abused the prisoners with sticks and stones and kicked them as they passed by. When prisoners confessed it was usually the children who did the beating, Ham In said. Occasionally Duch stood nearby, looking on impassively. They gave little food to the prisoners, usually very small amounts of rice porridge, twice a day, but never enough to drink. On his first day they gave him nothing.
‘Day and night we heard crying and screams,’ Ham In said. There were many prisoners and many forms of torture. They used a mallet to beat people on the shins, on the back, on the throat. Sometimes they would take the resin from a torch and put the flame near and drip it on to the body. The denials of accusations infuriated the guards and they often beat prisoners until they were unconscious. In saw them mix prahoc, fish sauce, and detergent in water and force it down prisoners’ throats. There was one particular torture called ‘the Victory pole’ where four people would be tied together, their backs to the pole, facing opposite directions. Then a guard would shoot one in the head covering the others in blood and brains.
At this point Sokheang had to break for a moment. Even with his extensive experience investigating abuse in prisons he found it difficult to listen to Ham In’s recollections.
Duch never received any training for his work. Vorn Vet, Duch’s superior, had given him some vague instructions on the use of plastic bags over people’s heads, but said he wasn’t experienced in such matters and told Duch that it was up to him how best to extract confessions. Although a rigorous discipline was in place in M-13, there was no exact science to the torture. It was an experimental school of brutality. Much of the time Duch could be seen inspecting his prison, observing the methods employed by his subordinates.
After more than a month at the prison camp, it was Ham In’s turn for interrogation. By now he was petrified. Duch walked over and began by asking him when he was born. 1954, he replied, ‘The year of the horse.’
‘Oh, so was I,’ replied Duch. ‘People born in this year were destined to spend time in jail.’ He smiled. He told Ham In that if he spied on the other prisoners for him that he would release him. Ham In agreed. It was another two years before Ham In was finally free, only to walk out into the Democratic Kampuchea of Pol Pot.
In all the time Ham In was captive he was never beaten. He was known to many of the guards and this is probably what saved him. They had grown up in the same village not far away and the Khmer Rouge didn’t want the locals to turn against them. After all it was in the name of the ‘base people’ that the revolution was being made. Duch understood this. After three months Ham In was put to work. They took off his handcuffs and sent him to the rice fields for a season. ‘That’s how I could see what was going on.’
Much of what Ham In learned during his captivity came from overhearing snippets of conversation. Sometimes he was told directly by the guards. He overheard the self-criticism sessions where the guards ‘confessed’ their flaws in front of the group. The child comrades were ordered to execute two people a day and were often criticised if they failed to meet their quota.
There were five guards at the execution sites. Two guards tied the rope, two took them to the pit, and one carried out the execution. ‘One night,’ Ham In told me, ‘they killed 200 people. They blindfolded them and tied rope around their necks and tightened it and used the bayonet to cut their arteries.’ He pointed a stiff finger to his neck. It was hard work, he said. The guards had to stop to rest, eating their meals feet away from their victims’ bodies. ‘It took two days and one night continuously,’ Ham In said.
Duch was always busy, always rushing about, said Ham In. He hardly ever slept. In never saw Duch kill anyone himself. But he did see him beat people. Duch often sent him to fetch his favourite dessert with eggs and sugar. It was made by the wife of Duch’s deputy, Comrade Chan.
By April 1975, the camp was dismantled and the area abandoned. Ham In was sent beneath the mountains to work in M-99 with two others. To this day Ham In still has no idea why he was arrested. Under Duch’s orders a hundred remaining prisoners at M-13 were then forced to dig their own graves and executed.
Sokheang and I turned off Route 5 and proceeded along a wide rusty laterite road due west toward the Cardamom Mountains. On either side we passed neatly mapped fields ringed with sugar palms and islets of bamboo as far as the eye could see. Beside the road, in between the open stretches, clusters of houses sat in the shade, blankets of white and pink bougainvillea crept along the fences. The cultivated land gradually gave way to wilder terrain of Keluak trees and Lontar palms and eventually we came to the village of Thmar Kep. Sokheang parked the car beside a house under which an old man sat in the shade.
Yes, he said, he remembered Duch. He then offered to take us to the site, further south. We followed him out into the bush, leaving the village behind us.
In silence we walked in Indian file, the old man leading the way, Sokheang after him and me behind. It was a fresh morning in the cool season and the heat had yet to penetrate the breeze. We crossed a number of dried-up streams and clearings, above us a spotless sky of deep blue. The trees were young and straight. Sweat trickled down my brow, soaking my hair. My pulse throbbed in my ears. The old man’s pace never faltered; he knew exactly where he was going.
Eventually we came to the meeting of two cart tracks in the stony ground. We sat in the shade of a thicket and drank the water from our bottles as the bamboo groaned and creaked above us. This was Duch’s first prison, M-13.
It was an obvious location, among the ‘base people’ and far from the towns and cities. Save the occasional air attack it was sufficiently behind the lines for the establishment of a prison. It was here that Comrade Duch met a local woman who became his wife. Chhim Sophal, or Rom, had been a dressmaker from a village not far away. She later worked in a hospital in Phnom Penh and bore him four children, one girl and three boys. Unlike Duch, she was from real Khmer peasant stock.
Many cadres married ethnic Khmers from what they called the ‘old’ or ‘base people’, especially those, like Duch, who were of mixed parentage. It served to bolster their revolutionary credentials, demonstrating their dedication to the cause, and forged a closer link with the peasants in the area.
Ahead of us was the chhlik tree, its large torso surrounded by elephant grass that swayed in the wind. The old man showed me the broken bark from a plane attack from nearly thirty years ago. It was here in 1971 that the French scholar François Bizot was taken with his two Khmer assistants when he was captured by the Khmer Rouge. He was held for three months and interrogated by Comrade Duch. It had been under this tree that Bizot had been held, chained to a post.
The farmer, now with his faded krama on his head, told us that no-one had been allowed to come near here at the time. The whole area had been completely overrun by the Khmer Rouge by 1974.
Back at the village we sat with him under his house in the shade and had lunch. Sokheang said it was quite possible that the people here had been involved in the prison. I looked around. The houses were solid structures of hard wood and roofed with tiles, some thatched. Many of them had survived the war.
In 1973, M-13 had moved to a location further north of the road, known as Trapeang Chrab. It was the second location to which Ham In had been taken. We drove down a cart track through the bamboo. Having parked the car in the shade we walked down to the river’s edge and waded through the clear waters. On the other bank we clambered up to some fields where farmers were harvesting their rice. They stopped and stood upright, smiling as we passed. A toddler playing with the stalks took one look at me, froze in terror and then ran to bury his face in his mother’s legs. We carried on to the cluster of trees that lined the banks of the river at the end of the golden fields, passing a tall sugar palm that stood bolt upright like a pillar in the middle of a dyke. And then, at the wood’s edge, the old man stopped.
Here the prisoners were held in holes in the ground, he told us, shackled together with no shelter from the elements. The large bamboo fence that had surrounded the prison had been three metres high. He pointed out a hollow where the earth had sunk, filled with thin, tall grass. It was a grave. There were several mass graves around us. We squatted down on the edge of one near the riverbank.
During a particularly heavy monsoon downpour the river had burst its banks and flooded the hole where several prisoners had been shackled. They drowned. The Khmer Rouge simply filled it in. Sokheang pointed out that the grass still grew higher in these areas. Passing thickets of large bamboo, I clambered down to the water’s edge. It was quiet as the river meandered lazily past; clear waters rippled and flicked light on to the sandy bed. The stippled water spread out before me in a carpet of shade that disappeared with the current into a tunnel of leaves.
Returning I asked how, if this was a secret prison, did the old man know of its existence. ‘The pigs found it,’ he replied. ‘The smell of the bodies was bad. They were eating them.’ After that people were too afraid to come near, believing that it was haunted by the spirits of those who had died here. We gazed into the sandy earth below. I imagined the bones of the people still shackled together resting beneath us as we sat at the edge of the sunken hollow.
While Duch was weeding out enemies and perfecting methods of interrogation, in the winter of 1971 Sokheang had arrived in Paris. He enrolled in a postgraduate course in agricultural development at the Institut de Développement Economique et Social at the University of Paris.
The Khmer students in Paris were split between those who supported the US-backed regime in Phnom Penh and those who supported Sihanouk’s resistance, the Khmer Rouge. France had not officially recognised Sihanouk’s resistance, or FUNK (Front d’Union Nationale du Kampuchea), but had allowed a mission to be set up whilst still maintaining full diplomatic relations with the regime in Phnom Penh. The two groups vied for supporters among the new arrivals. ‘The resistance was very kind to us, they helped us as though we were family,’ said Sokheang. Several of them were old friends from Cambodia.
The supporters of the resistance realised that Sokheang was sympathetic and did their best to recruit him and his friends. It didn’t prove too difficult. ‘At that time you couldn’t be neutral,’ he said. It was here that he met Ong Thong Houeng or Ho, who had arrived in 1965. Ho was now working for the mission of FUNK and Sokheang began to make regular visits. They forged a friendship that was to last more than thirty years.
Sokheang was popular among his contemporaries and his room had become an informal meeting place for students sympathetic to the cause. There they cooked and ate together, debating politics well into the small hours. They would often wake late in the day before trawling the secondhand bookshops of Paris in search of bargains. They were les révolutionnaires de salon, bourgeois revolutionaries. ‘We were bons vivants, we discussed with each other, we went out to Chinese restaurants, which were expensive at that time, we went to the cinema,’ he said. During the summer holidays they went to the beach at Mont-Saint-Michel or to Ile d’Eurée on the Mediterranean, they visited the Louvre and the Musée de l’Homme. ‘But our minds were always with the struggle against American imperialism.’
They saw themselves as intellectuels engagés and believed that they were there to put their minds to practical use. ‘We talked about our desire to have a just Cambodia for everyone, for all people to be treated with the same consideration regardless of rank.’ They organised meetings, conferences and distributed propaganda, always on the lookout for support for their cause. ‘Without declaring it, I had become a de facto member of FUNK–I was never asked to sign any paper,’ he explained, ‘but they always considered me their own.’
Day by day, the situation in Cambodia was worsening. Through the few letters Sokheang received from his family and the reports in the papers and on the radio, he knew security in the capital was degenerating and conditions were very hard. The corruption had reached mammoth proportions and the repression had become more heavy-handed than before. In Phnom Penh student demonstrations against Lon Nol’s regime continued. Grenades were lobbed in public places by supporters of the revolution, in cinemas and markets, killing and maiming dozens. Sokheang and his friends viewed the situation with a helpless horror.
One cold January night in 1973, the war came to Paris. The polarisation of political belief had reached its peak at the Pavilion du Cambodge, where all the Khmer students were housed. A supporter of the resistance was denounced as a spy for the other side and told to leave the group. He refused to go. Word got around quickly and violence broke out between supporters of the resistance and supporters of Lon Nol. Then one student was accidentally killed and the Pavilion erupted.
Sokheang heard screams and shouts from his room on the second floor. There he stayed with his friends as the sounds of fighting echoed down the corridors. It had been a minority that had been involved in the violence, those students that were, Sokheang said drily, ‘the real fighters, the real guerrillas’.
Meanwhile, outside in the dark, riot police had surrounded the grounds. They waited for daybreak before storming the building. They broke down Sokheang’s door and threw him against the wall, hitting him with a baton. He was then dragged outside with hundreds of others, bundled into a police van and rushed through the sleepy streets of Paris, sirens blaring.
Sokheang never did finish his studies. His application for a second scholarship was turned down. His political affiliations were well known and Lon Nol’s embassy in Paris had almost certainly informed Phnom Penh. ‘I was afraid to return to Phnom Penh–I was sure I would be in trouble,’ he said, blaming government spies. Without a scholarship to support him he was forced to work in a Chinese restaurant washing dishes.
Sokheang pondered his options. China had just opened the door to foreign students. He was becoming increasingly restless. ‘I began to dream of returning to Phnom Penh, to be with my family . . . serve the country.’ Seeing it as the first step towards returning home, he applied to study in Beijing. On Christmas Eve, 1973, he boarded a plane with twelve other Cambodian students and left for Beijing, where he would spend just over a year.
On arrival in Beijing Sokheang and the others were received by the FUNK or Khmer Rouge embassy staff and sent to the Foreign Language Institute. Sokheang joined the FUNK embassy, working in the department of information and propaganda. All the time he was thinking about his homeland and when he might return.
The decision to return home was for many Khmer students a fatal mistake. Many were taken directly to Tuol Sleng. Later, quite by accident, I came across a photograph of a group of Cambodians in China in the early seventies. There at the back of the group was Sokheang, a Mao cap pulled over his head and a krama tucked tightly around his neck. Unlike most formal group portraits, particularly from China, many of them were smiling at the camera. It was clearly cold. There were no leaves on the trees and everyone was wrapped up. When I showed it to him he looked intently at the people that stared back. ‘Where did you get this?’ he asked. As he looked a smile crept across his face. Then almost as soon as it had appeared, it was gone. He pointed out Keat Chhon, now the Minister of Economics and Finance in the current government.
Out of the thirty-six in the photograph only nine had survived.
To most Khmer Rouge the existence of the Communist Party was still a closely guarded secret. Many believed that they were fighting to restore Sihanouk to his rightful seat of power, something that was reinforced when Sihanouk made a much-publicised visit to the liberated zones.
There was Sihanouk in the photographs, dressed in immaculate Khmer Rouge garb, posing next to the leaders of the movement. It was the first time that people had caught a glimpse of the resistance leaders, all dressed in black with their chequered krama and Ho Chi Minh sandals. They treated Sihanouk like a long-lost brother. Several years before, Khieu Samphan a left-wing MP and minister, had been attacked and stripped by Sihanouk’s police in the streets of Phnom Penh. It was widely believed that the Prince had had him murdered. Now he was pictured embracing a grinning Khieu Samphan.
Sihanouk saw the Khmer Rouge as a way back to head his country. However, the Khmer Rouge had other plans for him. They knew the value of this propaganda coup and had no intention of placing him in a position of power. What lay behind the smiles and the hugs of these erst-while enemies was impossible to gauge.
Life in the liberated zones was something of a mystery. Rumours abounded of brutality away from the battlefield, of executions, mass reorganisations and forced marriages. No journalist had survived an encounter with the Khmer Rouge and what went on behind the front lines in the liberated zones was the subject of much fevered speculation.
What little information did trickle out depicted a hard and regimented life, subject to regular attacks from the air. When the Khmer Rouge captured Oudong, the old royal capital, they destroyed what was left of the town, evacuated the population and executed all those associated with the government. The future did not bode well for Cambodia.
Atrocities were commonplace and there were reports of ritualised cannibalism among soldiers of both sides. Some Cambodians believe that to cut out and eat the liver of a dead opponent gives them the strength of the enemy and renders soldiers impervious to harm. They wore protective amulets, magical tattoos and scarves full of Buddha images and charms to protect them against harm. Some were believed to be bullet-proof.
The fighting was heavy. The peasants fought a well equipped, US-backed army with little more than small arms, mortars and artillery. With the photographs of their prince on their side, they were assured of the justice of their cause.
By April 1975 refugees had swollen Phnom Penh’s population from just under 600,000 to some two million. The city was being kept alive with a life support of river convoys of aid and food from the Americans as rockets screamed into the suburbs. The Khmer Rouge were now only a few kilometres outside the city.
Him Huy was a young peasant boy of sixteen when he was forced to ‘volunteer’ to fight in the Khmer Rouge. Huy was from a small village south-east of the capital and had been recruited for the Special Zone which surrounded Phnom Penh. Like most recruits, he had little understanding of the world beyond his village when he was sent to fight. Although his village was just a two-hour drive from the capital, he had only ever seen cars from a distance and he had no experience of war. ‘I was terrified, I had no idea what bullets were,’ he said. At the beginning of the 1975 dry season, he took part in the final assault on Phnom Penh.
The troops crossed the Tonle Bati River downstream from the capital and went along the abandoned villages that lined the banks. They were close to the enemy and the bombardment had been heavy. Artillery still rumbled ahead of them as planes dived and circled. They were ordered to dismantle the abandoned houses and retrieve the wood to make trenches. The soil was hard and they spent the whole night digging. There were three people per trench and when the attack began, they rarely saw who they were firing at and fired wildly over their heads.
Young and inexperienced, Huy moved slowly with the others towards the capital, where he joined a reconnaissance unit. They sustained heavy losses and the fighting became so concentrated that within three battles they had lost practically everyone. ‘They died one after another,’ he said. As one of the few survivors Huy rose through the ranks of his team quickly.
Eventually they arrived on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The fighting became intense as Lon Nol’s troops dug in to hold back the advance of the Khmer Rouge for as long as they could. Eventually they broke through and the remaining government soldiers fled.
Phnom Penh was now totally cut off. The supply convoys could no longer get through and the airport had been overrun. On 12 April the Americans evacuated their embassy staff by helicopter. Lon Nol fled to Hawaii, abandoning the country he had committed to war. The city was now heaving with refugees cowering from the bombardment and rocket attacks. Food was rapidly becoming scarce and malnutrition and dysentery were widespread. In a desperate attempt to prevent the inevitable, more and more children were handed weapons and sent to fight.
16 April was a day of heavy shelling. There were explosions all over the city as rockets flew overhead. The orange flames of fires licked the thick black smoke that poured into the sky like ink in water. That evening Huy and his men were cautiously making their way through the abandoned streets when they were suddenly attacked from above. They scattered. Grenades were being lobbed at them and there was a hail of bullets from the buildings. Huy saw several of his comrades cut in two by gunfire. He himself was hit in the leg. He managed to crawl under a small house nearby. Early the following morning more Khmer Rouge units came forward and found him lying in a pool of his own blood. They sent him off to a field hospital. ‘I only just escaped with my life,’ he said.
In April 1975, Sokheang finally had his chance to return home. ‘Victory was imminent, but we weren’t sure when,’ he said. They were warned that the situation was still very unpredictable and dangerous and told to prepare for the worst. This didn’t deter him in the least–he was too excited at the prospect of seeing his family to consider the potential dangers. He was to be sent with a Chinese aid convoy for the resistance along with three of his comrades, first by train to the Vietnamese border and then by truck for the remainder of the journey. At the border they were met by a colonel in the North Vietnamese army. They then began the long arduous journey into Laos and down the Ho Chi Minh trail to Cambodia.
There were more than 200 trucks in the convoy. In the forests of Laos it was hot and the roads were dusty. They skirted the edge of ravines and forded rivers. There were Vietnamese soldiers everywhere and occasionally they passed the wreckage of military vehicles. One particularly hot day they stopped for a break in the forest in the early afternoon. Sokheang clambered down with a small radio he had picked up in Beijing and, squatting at the side of the track, listened for the news. He tuned into Khmer Rouge radio and heard the announcement: Phnom Penh had been liberated. It was 17 April 1975.
Five days later, having lumbered over mountain passes and through jungle devastated by B-52’s, they arrived at the Cambodian frontier, but it was too late to cross. That night, barely able to contain his excitement, Sokheang found it difficult to sleep. There it was, on the other side of a small river, so tantalisingly close: the homeland he had left four years before.
In April of 1975, Comrade Duch and his men followed on the heels of the revolutionary forces to Phnom Penh. There Duch helped clear the capital of soldiers of the defeated Lon Nol government.
For several months the Santebal, or secret police, came under the code name Office 15, with prisons throughout the abandoned capital, from the national police headquarters south of the new market to Prey Sar prison outside the city to Ta Khmau in the south. At Ta Khmau, Cambodia’s only psychiatric hospital was taken over and used as a prison. When the Khmer Rouge advanced on their final push to take Phnom Penh, they burst into the hospital, shooting open the doors and dispersing the patients.
Following the Khmer Rouge victory, Comrade Duch visited his home while on his way to Siem Reap. He arrived in a small Honda car with a few Khmer Rouge bodyguards, all of them teenagers dressed in black carrying AK-47s. He stayed just one night. Word soon spread and there was much excitement among the people when they heard of his arrival. That evening, they gathered around him as he told the assembled neighbours that a new era had dawned and that the future held great promise. ‘Soon, we will have schools and hospitals in the cooperative of our commune,’ he said. ‘It will be easy for us.’ He talked of a better life under the Khmer Rouge. They sat and listened attentively. One neighbour and friend of the family had talked with him afterwards and told him that life had been quite hard for them. Duch told him not to worry, that soon the Organisation would provide them with all their needs.
There was nothing that revealed his new role as Pol Pot’s chief executioner. And he gave no indication of the horrors that were to come.