The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge
by Nic Dunlop
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nic DunlopEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-02-07
ISBN: 0802714722
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Walker & Company
Book Reviews of The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge
Book Review: Portrait of a mass murderer
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge
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.Cambodia Books
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