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In the tradition of Gitta Sereny and Hannah Arendt, an encounter with Duch, the most infamous mass-murderer alive today by the author of The Gate.
In March 2009, behind the walls of the high security tribunal in Phnom Penh, the first Cambodian leader accused in the genocide trial will face his judges. The man, Duch, with his narrow angular face, is now known to the world as one of the most famous war criminal in the Cambodian tragedy: as the head of the Tuol Sleng S-21 jail during Pol Pot's deathly rule, Duch personally oversaw the detention, systematic torture and execution of thousands of detainees caught in the "killing machine" of a paranoid regime.
Another man will be sitting in that courtroom, one who holds a questionable privilege: that of being the only prisoner to survive detention in Duch's hands. Back in 1971, as he recalled in his internationally acclaimed book The Gate, French ethnologist François Bizot was kept prisoner for three months in the jungle under accusation by the Cambodians of being a CIA spy. But Duch eventually had him freed - and it took Bizot years, decades even, to realize that he owed his life to this man who had killed so many.
Since Duch's capture, Bizot has met with Duch. Although Bizot doesn't consider himself a victim, he shares with the dead and their families a deeply-rooted sense of horror at the crimes Duch committed. He finds them unforgivable - beyond anything human justice can repair - and at the same time, he can't help recalling the long conversations he had with Duch, the then young and smart school-teacher who dreamed of a better world, and who aspired to a society freed from injustice and oppression.
In the tradition of Gitta Sereny, who sat with the commander in Treblinka in his jail, and Hannah Arendt's reports from Eichmann's trial, Bizot will attend Duch's trial and, once the torturer has been sentenced (a capital execution is impossible according to the rules of the tribunal), Bizot will sit with him, trying to unearth whatever humanity is left within him. If Duch will talk to anyone, it is Bizot, whom still he calls his "friend".
"It would be all too easy", Bizot says, "if this man was a monster, not a member of the human race. We could use the slogan "never again" and move on. But the deep horror is that this man is normal, that in other circumstances he could have been an effective and well-liked manager, an honest and incorruptible civil servant. Through his very qualities he became a mass criminal.
"Does that exonerate him from the crimes? Certainly not. But it does force us to question ourselves in a way that is deeply unsettling." At once a personal essay, a historical and philosophical meditation, and an eye-witness account, Facing the Torturer will join a very short list of important books about man's personal responsibility in collective crimes.
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ANZ: HarperCollins
France: Flammarion
UK: Rider
US: Knopf
Vietnam: Nha Nam
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