Khmer Rouge: beyond good and evil

4 March / 14:00 / Alhambra / Co-presented with the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights

Is the executioner an ordinary man or a monster? This deeply troubling question was at the heart of the trial of one of the Khmer Rouge years' most zealous "technicians" of torture. Duch, ex-director of the S21 prison, was responsible for the horrible suffering and execution of 12,272 men, women and children between 1975 and 1979. On the 3rd of February, the UN-sponsored Phnom Penh Tribunal sentenced Duch to life imprisonment.

"Neither an ordinary man nor a devil but an educated organizer, an executioner who talks, forgets, lies, explains, constructs his legend," is how Cambodian film-maker Rithy Panh describes him. In his latest documentary, Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell, Panh confronts the former torturer and demonstrates clearly that the man with the piercing little eyes wasn't only a link in a hellish chain but someone whose knowledge, zeal and obsession for perfection fed the death machine. This former maths teacher built a sophisticated system of interrogation to extort "confessions" from his prisoners.

And yet, throughout Duch's 2009-2011 trial, his lawyers, invoking Hannah Arendt's concept of the ordinariness of evil, never stopped referring to their client's servile obedience and submission to a regime of secrecy and terror. "To find the source of the evil perpetrated every day in S21, no need to go further than ourselves," affirmed co-lawyer François Roux, citing Khmer Rouge historical specialist David Chandler.

Can a person who has committed the vilest crimes against humanity be brought back into the human fold? An unacceptable question for the victims, who simply cannot imagine that the executioner might remain unpunished. What about the new, post-Khmer Rouge generation? A debate that presents all these viewpoints will project us into a grey zone where it becomes difficult to distinguish between good and evil, between lies and the truth.

Introduction by Kamelia Kamileva, of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights (ADH), Projects Manager and Liaison Officer to the FDFA.