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The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge
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Manufacturer: Walker & Company
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 959.6042
EAN: 9780802714725
ISBN: 0802714722
Label: Walker & Company
Manufacturer: Walker & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2006-02-07
Publisher: Walker & Company
Release Date: 2006-02-07
Studio: Walker & Company
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Editorial Reviews:
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In Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979, nearly two million people died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. As head of the Khmer Rouge secret police, Comrade Duch was responsible for the murder of more than 20,000 people considered enemies of the revolution. Twenty years later, not one member of the Khmer Rouge had been held accountable for what happened. Like so many others, Comrade Duch had disappeared. Over a decade of working in Cambodia, photographer Nic Dunlop became obsessed with the idea of finding Duch. As the commandant of "S-21" prison, Duch could shed light on a secret and brutal world that had been sealed off to outsiders. Then, by chance, he came face to face with him. The Lost Executioner describes a personal journey to the heart of the Khmer Rouge. It is an attempt to find out what actually happened in Pol Pot's Cambodia and why; to understand how a seemingly peaceful nation could give birth to one of the most bloodthirsty revolutions in modern history.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Summary: Portrait of a mass murderer
Comment: There are few more chilling places in the world than the apparently innocuous buildings of Tuol Sleng, the school on the outskirts of Phnomn Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Low buildings surround a central courtyard or playing field on three sides; the design is a common one throughout southeast Asia. But while today's visitors to Tuol Sleng arrive in daylight and are able to walk out when the horror within the walls of the former classrooms becomes unbearable, the thousands who entered in the middle of the night during the nightmarish rule of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, only seven adults would live to tell the truth about the horrors they endured.
Photojournalist Nic Dunlop has done something even more valuable than preserve the story of this horrific institution and the regime and individuals who administered it, however. His imagination captured by images he has not created -- the endless array of head-and-shoulders photos of the doomed prisoners staring defiantly or despairingly into the camera on the day of their arrival -- he finds himself haunted by Tuol Sleng and the evils committed there, returning time after time when he is in Cambodia. Ultimately, he focuses on the story of one man, the cadre who became Pol Pot's chief executioner and the head of Tuol Sleng, Comrade Duch.
The story that Dunlop relates could almost be a work of great detective fiction, as he follows a chain of clues that ultimately lead him to the village where Duch -- a former schoolteacher who has returned to his profession while also working with international relief agency World Vision -- is living an ordinary life. Dunlop, already horrified by the way in which former Khmer Rouge leaders such as Khieu Samphan had been able to return publicly to Cambodia with only perfunctory apologies, instead recounts how he was able to extract a confession from Duch, which he and journalist Nate Thayer published and which led directly to Duch's arrest.
However outraged Dunlop is by what occurred at Tuol Sleng some two or three decades earlier, he never loses sight of the moral ambiguities that linger in today's Cambodia, a fact that transforms his narrative from a straightforward tale to something on altogether a higher plane. Land mines continue to kill Cambodians today, including those born long after the conflict ended. Ordinary men and women who survived the "Pol Pot time" have had to find a way to live side by side with their former torturers and oppressors, simply because there was no provision for delivering justice to the latter: rocking the boat was foolish and impractical. The paradoxes even extended to the activities of the global relief organizations like World Vision; any help delivered to the communities around the borders of Thailand or elsewhere inevitably assisted the former Khmer Rouge who controlled many of those regions. Even when Dunlop discovers Duch in the community of Samlaut, he finds some in the area who openly refer to the executioner by his nom-de-guerre rather than by his alias, Hang Pin.
Dunlop seamlessly and authoritatively weaves together an array of narrative strands in this important book, beginning with Duch's background growing up in a tiny village dominatned by the Buddhist wat or temple, to his growing politicization and radicalization as he moved to the city to pursue his studies. Simultaneously, Cambodia was being swept up in an endless series of wars in Indochina, culminating in the American bombings of Cambodian territory. Dunlop is keenly aware and knowledgeable of even the most esoteric aspects of his story, from the distinctions between Khmer of Chinese extraction and those of 'pure' blood to the role of Buddhism within Khmer society and the details of the Khmer Rouge's ostensible effort to create a purer and more perfect society. He has perused Tuol Sleng's horrifying archives and interviewed survivors, as well as followed in Duch's footsteps as the later re-immersed himself in village life after Cambodia returned to relative stability in the 1990s. Dunlop is a presence throughout the book, but never makes the most fundamental mistake of such narratives of making himself the story.
The result is one of the most solid and valuable works of political reportage I have ever read.
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Summary: Ordinary people can commit demonic acts (R.K. Lifton)
Comment: Nic Dunlop poses the all important questions of how a vision of a better world can turn into bottomless evil, and how seemingly ordinary men can become mass murderers.
The ideological fundamentalists at the very top of the Red Khmer movement had a vision and a plan for the creation of heaven on earth (`the envy of the world'), but only for the 'good' soldiers. All the 'bad' ones, even (pregnant) women, children and babies, had to be simply murdered. Their utopia was a world of self-sacrifice, with no traces of individuality, no individual thought, no love (segregation of men and women), no foreign things, no towns, no money, no schools, no holidays.
The mass murdering was considered as an act of purification. It turned into a terrible real nightmare for the good and the bad. Everybody came to live in constant fear for their lives, acted in panic, told only what people wanted to hear and did what they were told to do. It was a system of paranoia, terror, constant surveillance and lies.
The Tuol Sleng prison became the heart of the movement, the centre of security, a symbol for a whole society as a slaughterhouse. Under torture people named names of innocent `spies', who in their turn named names, until ... `If the Organization arrests everybody, who will be left to make a revolution?'
After 4 years, the suspicions of conspiracies had killed more than three-quarters of the original Central Committee.
The answer to Nic Dunlop's question is Duch, the Commander of the S-21 prison, a fundamentalist, a cold executioner of the orders of his superiors, a good father for his children, but living in constant fear for his own life, obsessed by the 'enemies' within, behaving irrationally, but enjoying his role as `butcher' for the creation of utopia.
As D. Chandler quotes at the end of his moving book `Voices from S-21', `ordinary people can commit demonic acts'. This potential is in all of us.
External facts
We should not forget the sometimes disturbing factors behind the rise to power, the violence and the stability of the Red Khmer regime.
Its Kampuchean enemies of the Lon Nol dictatorship were themselves extremely violent: 'Villages were burned and thousands were killed. Heads were mounted on stakes.'
Red Khmer guerillas were trained by British secret services.
The US secretly bombed Kampuchea during the Vietnam War driving the peasants into the arms of the Red Khmers.
And ultimately, nearly all governments of the world, the US, China, the Soviet Union, Great-Britain, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, made of Kampuchea the front line of the Cold War.
Nic Dunlop wrote a frightening book, which shows what human beings are capable of doing with other members of their species.
I also highly recommend the works of D. Chandler and the documentary by Rithy Panh `S-21'.
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Summary: Bringing down a monster........
Comment: This is a fine example of how ordinary people are capable of doing extraordanary things, in this case not only did Nick Dunlop write an incredible book but along with Nate Thayer was responsible for bringing enough attention to this bloody tyrant forcing the Govt. to finally incarcerate him. whether Duch ever goes on trial is anyboby's guess but without this book Duch would probably still be playing the role of missionary worker.
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Summary: an eduction we all should have
Comment: This is one of those books that you won't want to put down until the last word has been read. He is a great writer and has given me quite an education. I highly recommend it!
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Summary: Comrade Duch unmasked
Comment: Nic Dunlop's first-rate detective story on the trail of Pol Pot's chief executioner, the notorious Comrade Duch, is a fascinating journey into Cambodia's recent bloody history. Through a series of testimonies by Duch's family members and people who knew him, Dunlop builds up a compelling picture of this former teacher turned mass murderer, whilst also giving us a running commentary on the development of the Khmer Rouge organisation through the eyes of former cadre such as Sokheang, now a human rights investigator though formerly a Khmer Rouge sympathiser.
The Lost Executioner is Dunlop's first book; he's primarily a photographer who became obsessed with S-21, known to many as Tuol Sleng, and its commandant, Comrade Duch. He even kept a photo of Duch in his pocket. By an astonishing stroke of luck, Dunlop met the man responsible for the deaths of more than 20,000 people, in Samlaut, a small town in northwest Cambodia in 1999 and exposed him with the help of Nate Thayer and the Far Eastern Economic Review, leading to his arrest and detention, awaiting trial. Dunlop's subsequent investigations and interviews now provide us with a great wealth of detail about Duch's life before, during and after the Khmer Rouge reign of terror though ultimately the reason for Duch's transformation into a brutal killer remains an unexplained puzzle. In a perverse twist, Duch converted to Christianity, had worked for an American charity, was living under a new identity and had returned to teaching before his unmasking. The book is written in an easy to follow though powerful narrative and I recommend The Lost Executioner to anyone seeking to delve into the morass that is Cambodia's recent past. It's a remarkable and revealing story.
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