Is Khmer Rouge jailer Duch just a nobody?

Comrade Duch, now a born-again Christian lay preacher, admitted to the Cambodian missionary responsible for his conversion, Christopher LaPel, that he "did a lot of bad things in his life", deeds for which he was not sure he could be forgiven.

Comrade Duch (pronounced Doik) has been on trial in Cambodia since February 2009 for supervising the torture and killings of some 16,000 men, women and children at the notorious Khmer Rouge prison known as S-21 between 1975 and 1979.

Today, at the end of the hearings, the prosecution called for a "lengthy jail term" following evidence that Duch was guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

A devoted member of the Khmer Rouge, Duch's defence is that he was following orders from higher-ups in the regime and it would have been fatal to disobey.
 
Watching clips of Duch's testimony in court, what is so chilling is that this 66-year-old former maths teacher, who was responsible for atrocities on such a massive scale, appears to be so ordinary. A wiry man, with a lined face and crooked teeth, Duch joins the ranks of "ordinary" men who in the last century were the conduits for mass exterminations under orders from oppressive political regimes.
 
The judges conducting the Khmer Rouge trials have limited the prosecution to the four most senior surviving party members in addition to Kaing Guek Eav, aka Comrade Duch, who is the least senior officer on trial.

We want to categorise those who commit evil deeds as either "bad" or "mad"

His testimony has been chosen first because out of the five he is the only one to admit responsibility for his actions and the only one to express remorse and to cooperate with the prosecution. The four more senior officers claim that their subordinates carried out the killings without their knowledge and out of over-zealous loyalty to the party.
 
There are striking parallels with the Khmer Rouge trials and Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Hugh Trevor-Roper in the Times compared the experience of witnessing Eichmann's trial to the Nuremberg trials, describing it as "a trial for shrunken puppets hiding behind a master who had disappeared".

Hannah Arendt, in her groundbreaking work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in 1961, argued that Eichmann, along with countless other Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, was not motivated to commit the atrocities of the Nazi regime through hatred and malevolence but rather through lack of thought, imagination and memory. These are the basic ingredients found in what Arendt describes as the "nobodies" who commit evil. Just as Eichmann was described as a loving family man, there are similarly stories of Duch's kindness and his sense of humour.
 
We tend to want to categorise people who commit evil deeds as either "bad" or "mad". This way we can feel that evil-doers are "other" than us and we can disassociate ourselves from them. The trouble with Eichmann and now Duch is that they are neither "bad" nor "mad" and it is just their ordinariness that makes their deeds so very disturbing. They challenge our belief that we would act differently in their place.
 
Arendt writes: "In granting pardon, it is the person and not the crime that is forgiven; in rootless evil there is no person left whom one could ever forgive."

She introduces the idea that neither remorse nor guilt can be experienced by the sort of "nobody" who has chosen to follow orders within a regime and has abnegated his thinking entirely to a higher authority. Remorse and guilt rely on some degree of self-reflection and an inner dialogue that allows for the questioning and assessment of one's actions in relation to others ­ as well as the act of remembering what has been done.

Arendt thought that the reason Eichmann was able to oversee such atrocities was because he lacked the imagination to understand emotionally the consequences of his actions and to empathise with his victims' suffering.

This is only possible when there is no self-reflection or inner dialogue ­ when a person is in reality a "nobody" not a "somebody".
 
In his preliminary hearing last February, Duch emphasised the blind loyalty that was required in Pol Pot's regime to the point that its members would not flinch at denouncing their relatives and closest loved ones. Duch justified the tortures he conducted and ordered on the basis of his devotion to the revolution and its cause. Torture was also the best means of eliciting confessions and unearthing subversives who would undermine the regime.
 
This is horribly reminiscent of US policy on the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. "When we have rid our country of the vermin that infect people's minds," Duch explained, "when we have liberated it from this army of cowards and traitors who debase the people, then we will rebuild a Cambodia of solidarity, united by genuine bonds of fraternity and equality."

Having justified torture as necessary for the protection of the regime, Duch later admitted that "he was, from an early time, sceptical of the veracity of the confessions" and that "even the Standing Committee, in my opinion, did not really believe in it".

It is clear that the torture and subsequent killing of all the prisoners were excuses intended "to eliminate those who represented obstacles". In addition to this, it was an effective way of controlling party members through fear.  
 
Co-prosecutor Chea Leang argues that Duch was "indifferent to the suffering of the victims" at S-21. As the key intelligence operative of the Khmer Rouge, Duch was, in Leang's words, "the trusted man to identify supposed plots against the revolution and to root out enemies".
 
In his defence, Duch claims that he had no choice but to comply with the cruelties of the regime within which he operated: "When I was forced to supervise (the prison), I became both an actor in criminal acts and also a hostage of the regime." The indictment concluded that Duch was "paralysed by fear for his life, wondering when it would be his turn".
 
While Duch accepts his responsibility for what he did, his testimony raises the question as to how any of us would behave under such a regime? If one is trapped within a regime that itself is primarily committed to establishing total power and lacks imagination and a space for self-reflection, is it possible to remain a "somebody"?

When a person is treated as a "nobody", which can happen even within the regime of a tyrannical family, then behaving as a "nobody" - wiping out any internal thought processes that might question what is going on - may be the only way to survive.
 
The court is expected to sentence Duch in March 2010. ·