BY ADAM PARKER
"Facing the Torturer," by Francois Bizot. Knopf. 224 pages. $25.
As a young man fascinated with the world beyond his native
France, Francois Bizot studied ethnology and Buddhism and became engrossed in
the cultures of Cambodia. He went there to study the Khmer in 1971 — when the
country was embroiled in brutal conflict and Communist guerrillas were waging a
nasty campaign against the government, backed by the U.S. and South Vietnam.
In his thoughtful and sometimes interesting book, “Facing
the Torturer,” Bizot fails to explain why he chose this particular moment to
live in Cambodia, other than to say he loved the place and its people.
Some of its people, the Khmer Rouge, arrested him and two of
his native assistants one day and kept them prisoner in a jungle encampment
where Bizot found himself face to face with Comrade Duch, a
teacher-turned-torturer.
It didn’t take long for Duch to decide that the Frenchman
was innocent, but it took his superiors three months to agree to release Bizot.
During that period, Bizot remained shackled but unharmed, left to contemplate
the nature of man, the character of Duch and the atrocities he knew were being
committed all around him.
On Christmas Day 1971, he was let go — alone, despite pleas to
release his two colleagues (they were later killed). Many years later, Bizot
would recount the ordeal in his book “The Gate.” The current volume is a
follow-up, prompted by the capture and 2009 trial of Duch in the Extraordinary
Courts of Cambodia in Phnom Penh.
Duch was a midlevel operative, but powerful in his way,
answerable to Pol Pot himself and the upper echelon of Khmer Rouge leaders. But
he was also a human being, not a monster, despite his confessed guilt, insists
Bizot.
This determination to reject simple labeling — and thus to
separate people like Duch from the rest of humanity — became Bizot’s obsession
in the years since his Cambodian imprisonment. In his book, he refers
repeatedly to the mirror into which he gazed when talking with Duch, to the
fundamental capacity for evil that lay within all men, and he warns against the
tendency for easy vilification.
The first part of “Facing the Torturer” is, unfortunately, a
lot of French philosophizing, and although Bizot’s ideas are significant and
worth considering, they are not terribly original. It reads as if Bizot is on a
long train trip lost in thought, the ideas swirling about in generalized
clusters but never coalescing into a proper moral tale.
The second part of the book is much more perfunctory, and
much more interesting. After “The Gate” was published, Bizot gave a copy to
Duch and asked him for feedback. His written response is published in
“Torturer,” and it’s illuminating. Duch is remorseful, honest and indeed very
human, a fact difficult to reconcile with his known atrocities.
Next comes a transcript of Bizot’s deposition during the
trial, also fascinating, both for its content and for the light it sheds on the
process.
The nationalistic Khmer Rouge began as an opposition
movement but became an agent of genocide after it gained power. Its operatives
arrested, tortured and executed anyone deemed subversive, especially ethnic
Vietnamese and other foreigners, professionals and intellectuals, economic
saboteurs and those associated with the old regime. By the end of the civil
war, something like 2 million people were dead, maybe more — killed by
execution, disease or starvation.
Bizot is acutely aware of this history, of course, though he
mysteriously avoids discussing it in any detail. His objective descriptions are
too vague, his subjective analysis too thick. He is focused exclusively on Duch
and the philosophical discoveries made in contemplating this man.
In the end, the reader is left with the impression he sat
through a long session between Bizot and his therapist. The good thing is that
it leaves him feeling, well, human.
