Man or Monster?: The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer by Alexander Laban Hinton (review)

Thirty years after the fall of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, the commandant of the notorious S-21 torture center and prison stood trial. In his sixty-six years, Kaing Guek Eav had been many things: math teacher, zealous revolutionary, husband, father, torture instructor, refugee from the law, born-again Christian, and, ultimately, prisoner. In Man or Monster?, anthropologist Alexander Laban Hinton deconstructs the trial and examines the many facets of the titular question.

In 1976, Khmer Rouge leaders instructed Kaing Guek Eav, who has gone down in history under his Khmer revolutionary name Duch, to oversee interrogations at S-21. Members of the country’s highest-ranking cadre were sent here, including Duch’s own former comrades, as were his prerevolution teachers. Because the Khmer Rouge believed in its own infallibility, inmates were assumed to be guilty. The point was to get a full confession—by whatever means necessary—before “smashing” the enemies—that is, killing them and throwing them in mass graves. Techniques included electrical torture, beating, and forcing prisoners to eat feces and pay homage to pictures of dogs. Interrogators guided prisoners toward the desired confession—a necessity, considering many had never heard of the CIA or KGB, organizations to which they were manipulated into confessing fealty. Of the more than 12,000 prisoners who entered S-21, there are only fourteen known survivors.

Nobody, including Duch, disputes his position at S-21 or the incredible number of people killed. But since the mandate of the court was to punish the “senior leaders and those most responsible” for the Khmer Rouge genocide, debates revolved around how much agency Duch had. Was he a sadistic leader who enjoyed his work? A cog in the machine? A man who disliked his work but feared for his own life and that of his wife and family if he did not go along with his orders?

Man versus monster is one of several striking dichotomies that come up repeatedly in Hinton’s work. He contrasts Khmer culture with well-meaning foreigners who fall into “Oriental” stereotypes: “The ‘savage’ plays a central role in this discursive formation as the ‘civilized’ in its various permutations (such as ‘the international community’ or ‘humanitarians’) is placed in the dominant position of the ‘savior’ who comes to the rescue—preventing, intervening, assisting, donating and uplifting a backward society by bringing democracy, justice, the rule of law and human rights” (263). Even Hinton himself—the founding director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights and a Cambodia expert—sometimes seems out of place in his own book, a foreign distraction to readers caught up in Duch’s drama of mass torture and death.

Another glaring dichotomy is the difference between Duch’s judging of S-21’s inhabitants and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)’s judging of Duch. (The ECCC is a hybrid of Cambodian and international judges and laws. At Duch’s trial, five judges—three Cambodian, one French, one from New Zealand—sat on a raised dais under both the United Nations and Cambodian flags. The legal teams for the defense and the prosecution also included both Cambodian and foreign lawyers.) At S-21, interrogators spent months developing the guilty confessions of innocent prisoners; the ECCC spent months considering mitigating circumstances that might partially excuse Duch from his culpability in more than 12,000 deaths. In a country full of anonymous mass graves, the attention given to the nuances of one man’s crimes is startling and ultimately unsatisfying, at least to this Western reader. At the end of 296 pages, Duch still seems distant and unknowable.

The most fascinating characters in Hinton’s book, though, are the survivors of S-21—only “useful” prisoners were allowed to live. Bou Meng, an artist, survived S-21 by painting propaganda; Chum Mey, a mechanic, maintained machinery. Both were civil parties in Duch...