The Lost Executioner by Nic Dunlop

 This one I picked after reading the news of death of Duch in September.

I was not aware of such a trial earlier, and when this news came to public I looked for something about him or Cambodia in general, and ended up with this.

I read this, and this left the same impression of anger and despair. This book largely covers the Cambodian situation during Khmer but it is largely focused on the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. 20,000 people entered it, and nobody left alive. The mass graves were found later, and they were found when nobody was looking for them. Like they were having some sort of solitary existence of their own until an outsider disturbed them.

The details of torture and the common condition of prisoners is difficult to go through. It also tries to recreate the situations how the guards, and the people working there handled it. The worst part is how they treated the children just for the sake of saving themselves some trouble.

Duch was always of the opinion that he did wrong but he was merely following the order. This was not surprising as this is the most common line of defence in such cases. The narration always gets shifted from the crime to helplessness of the perpetrators of these crimes. The whole thing is projected as a doing of an organisation where anyone caught is innocent.

Survival is the most basic of the instincts because it is same in animal and human. This is one of the most quoted point to describe animal behaviour from migration, food chain, to be alpha, marking the territory or even monopolising the whole chain of offsprings. However, when it comes to human a lot of these are considered to be off limit. There is a whole cognition in process which defines how we behave. No doubt humans are also genetically designed to have that survival instinct but what separates us from the animals is that cognitive ability to assess the consequences of our actions.

If we're talking about the kind of execution that happened in Tuol Sleng, than you can argue that you were just the cog in the wheel. But unfortunately, you're cog of a wrong wheel and bear the same responsibility as wheel. And, by any definition Duch was not just a cog.

Peace