Duch thought he’d have been killed, eh? Well, he’s right, they would have strapped him down on the electrified bedframe just like he did to hundreds if not thousands of his victims. Then a 9 mile ride down to Choeng Ek, “The Killing Fields”.
The thing is, the KR was absolutely as brutal if nor moreso to its own “leaders”. As recently as 1998 Pol Pot ordered the murder of Son Sen - “Brother Number 4”, IIRC - for collaborating to end the KR’s 18 years in the jungles of Anglong Veng near Thailand. Oh, don’t forget to kill his entire family too. And once you’ve done that, throw their bodies into the middle of the main road and run them over with a 1/4 ton truck, until their remains are made one with the dirt (”smashing” being a KR pastime and also one of Duch’s favorite terms). That’s the KR way, right up to the bitter end. “To have you is no benefit, to lose you is no loss.”
And after all that, Pol Pot’s cronies injected him in the heart with poison, fearing that he might be angry at his own toppling from the KR throne and spill the beans on everyone else. They called his murder “a heart attack”, but a guard confessed to the injection a year after Pol Pot’s death.
So now we have Duch, one of the more notorious but not the only genocidal murderer in Cambodia, and he’s crying “they made me do it.” Well, maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. But S-21 was a pretty darned effective and efficient abatoire for someone under such pressure.
A sane person might wonder how Duch could go three years, killing 18 thousand innocents in the process, and live with himself for even one brief moment after the KR was run out of town. But maybe he’s lying, and maybe he embraced the torture and the killing as much as his 12 and 14 year old executioners down at The Killing Fields. Maybe he liked it.
But he became a “Christian missionary” in his later years, and lived in obscurity working for various church groups. You might think that would cleanse him of any blaming or minimization of his unspeakable crimes against his fellow Cambodians (by the way, hs is of Chinese and not Khmer descent). Not so. Like all good KR, he remains blameless: “someone else did it”. Like Brother Number 3, Khieu Samphan, who’s still alive and under amnesty, and who snickers and snorts when asked about the atrocities, “they never happened”. In 1998 Pol Pot himself said “there were excesses”, but nothing like the 2 to 3 million murdered, starved, and worked to death. Nope, it’s a big exaggeration (despite hundreds and thousands of other Killing Fields all across Cambodia, some excavated, some not).
Personally I think Duch should be sentenced to excavate every single last bone and tooth and strip of clothing still on and in the ground down at Choeng Ek. Make him work there, live there, eat there, and sleep there, among the souls of his 18 thousand victims. And don’t let him leave the site for even one single minute until his dying day.
The man deserves execution, but it seems too quick and too trivial, and it couldn’t possibly be made any more gruesome than what he did to his own prisoners, at least by any half-civilized society.
That does seem appropriate.