The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge

by Nic Dunlop

Book Overview

In Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979, some two million people died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Twenty years later, nobody had been held accountable. Haunted by an image of Comrade Duch, Pol Pot's... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802714722
• ISBN13: 9780802714725
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: Walker & Company
• Length: 326 Pages
• Weight: 1.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.8" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Portrait of a mass murderer

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-

Ordinary people can commit demonic acts (R.K. Lifton)

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'.

an eduction we all should have

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!

Comrade Duch unmasked

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.

The most important human rights book of the year?

It takes a special writer to bring light to an issue of seemingly impenetrable horror. A young Irish photographer has done it in this superb debut. Pol Pot's frenzied demolition of Cambodia in 1975-79 has been documented from within(The Stones Cry Out, Stay Alive My Son) and by outsiders (Year Zero, S 21). What more could be said? "The Lost Executioner" takes the form of a terrifying detective narrative. The young author with a picture in his pocket has an obsession - to find Cambodia's Himmler in the chaos of the country he helped to terrorize. In striking prose that reveals the photographer behind the pen (his descriptive powers are at their best rendering faces and images of rural life) the writer takes us deep into the heart and mind of Cambodia, its paralyzing paradoxes, and the west's policy swings between breathtaking cynicism and incompetent pity. Like Shelley's mariner, Nic Dunlop fixes us with an amazing tale and sets our sights clearly on what should be done. To read his book is to be challenged anew of our obligations to the family of man. Like the best books, Nic Dunlp's "The Lost Executioner" relates much of what is known but makes us see it in a new light This splendid and courageous book just might help re-awaken international opinion to re-consider our obligations to Cambodia.