Nic Dunlop's The Lost Executioner and Jean Hatzfeld's Machete Season
Stansell, Christine
THE LOST EXECUTIONER: A STORY OF THE KHMER ROUGE by Nic Dunlop Bloomsbury, 2005 326 pp $24 MACHETE SEASON: THE KILLERS IN RWANDA SPEAK By Jean Hatzfeld, trans. Linda Coverdale Farrar, Straus,...
...He stopped in a town near the Thai border, in ex-KR territory, and strolled across the street to chat with some amputees...
...Instead, he surfaced quickly in the KR zone on the Thai border, the shadow military operation run with U.S...
...It was, for a moment, life for the taking...
...Hatzfeld, to his credit, does not offer any solution...
...This fearful mystery is now the country's brutal political challenge...
...There is a small stream of returning exiles and immigrants to help, but not many...
...Duch's pastor, himself a survivor of a KR camp, insists that Duch's full confession allowed him to be born again with God's grace...
...Hatzfeld presents a scenario that is much tougher to explain: There was no direct coercion, no military command structure, and, he notes, no record in this area of any man being killed for refusing to go...
...They offer their apologies in more or less loud voices to survivors who are free to hear, accept, or refuse them—rather the way one says "Sorry" to somebody who has just been jostled on a sidewalk...
...Dunlop is 100 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 not an ethicist, but he struggles for a platform for his visceral objections to this theological dispensation...
...This is why so little is known about the people, usually men, sometimes women, who take on the job of killing an entire population...
...CHRISTINE STANSELL is Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University...
...WHAT HOLOCAUST scholars are now calling "property transfer'—ordinary greed, not primordial hatred— played a large part...
...Killing with a gun is a game compared to the machete," offered a man who was once a soldier...
...But the foot soldiers who killed millions, all told, in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia are seen as collectivities, not individuals, so that one would think that allegorical figures of ethnic hatred or nationalism-gonewrong, not real people, did the killing...
...A rough equality of labor and just deserts reigned...
...The Lost Executioner reconstructs Duch's back story...
...So how could they hack people to death...
...He was probably the only person in Cambodia to carry a copy of a snapshot of Duch in his pocket and thus was uniquely equipped to identify the man, if he was still alive...
...Duch is interesting because he started out from such modest origins, a classic petit-bourgeois nationalist who came to the Communist Party by virtue of brains, study groups, and upward mobility...
...Soldiers in Vietnam, torturers in Algeria and Argentina, Serbian soldiers in Bosnia—"it was not impossible to obtain sincere and detailed accounts" from some of these perpetrators of atrocities...
...Ten thousand were murdered immediately in two churches where they sought sanctuary...
...We talked no more among ourselves about farming...
...Released on a commuted sentence, back with their families, killers, even if they had confessed, fell into the "litanies recited by all the families on the hills": "It wasn't me, it was the others...
...Yes, they did it, but they speak of their murderous selves in a politically correct way—regretfully, but distantly, as if the men who tromped through the marshes and swilled beer at the end of the day were not really themselves...
...We got up rich, we went to bed with full bellies, we lived a life of plenty...
...fewer than a dozen survived...
...Hatzfeld is interested in "how...
...Cows, goats, clothes, and household effects were up for grabs...
...Veteran war reporter Jean Hatzfeld's Machete Season is an astonishing investigation of a band of genocidaires in the Rwandan countryside, nine men who spent a month hunting and killing their Tutsi neighbors, soccer mates, fellow church members, and relatives...
...We overflowed with life for this new job," recalled Adalbert, who up to that time was the town choirmaster...
...I tried to save her...
...But of all the forms of savage killing, genocide confers a singular lightness of being...
...Hatzfeld is a modest writer, and he subtitles the book "A Report" because it proceeds as a pastiche of interviews...
...If you go by the numbers of known killers, you would think that millions of people died at the hands of a few miscreants...
...As the KR lost ground after the 1994 elections, Duch made his jump from the party into humanitarian aid work, once again landing on his feet, this time as a crack relief worker, energetic, diligent, and thorough...
...In this, and in other respects, they resemble the "passionless killers" in the post-war Polish pogroms whom Jan Gross describes in his recently published Fear, more than the hardened cadre of the KR or the German SS...
...The killers never allow themselves to be overwhelmed by anything...
...No one evokes Hutu Power ideology, but everyone remembers the satisfaction of a difficult job completed...
...Compared to the seizure of Jewish businesses and land, the stakes in Rwanda were very low, the tiny accumulations of a poor rural society, but prizes nonetheless...
...The child of a clerk and a market woman, he was an excellent student who climbed up the educational ladder to graduate as a teacher in 1965...
...Only speaking to the men in a group, while they were in prison, gave him access to detail, incident, and revelation...
...Briefly, this is why I think Constance Morrill's view of the trials as presented in the Summer 2006 issue of this journal as calculated opportunism is wrong and fails to address the complicated problems of the aftermath...
...We all agreed about the new activities, we decided on the spot where we would go to work, we helped one another out like comrades...
...We like to think that our efforts force them to come to terms with their crimes, but no...
...Pillaging is more worthwhile than harvesting, because it profits everyone equally...
...the desire for prosecution, not the evasion of the truth, is the stumbling block to reconciliation...
...I would have been killed...
...But it is much more than a set of transcriptions...
...They were hardworking family men, not the drugged-up, crazed teenagers one sees rampaging in Hotel Rwanda...
...Sold new and used, it has a high commercial value, so high that the Hutu hauled the looted roofs with them or buried them in their fields...
...The fact is downplayed by those who push a particular brand of reconciliation...
...The Cambodians and Rwandans, in particular, are safely hidden in the shadows of the "heart of darkness" the West loves to invoke to explain away slaughters in third world countries...
...For a month, the world turned upside down into a grotesque carnival: as a wife of one of the men put it memorably "simply seeking brought finding...
...in fact, their memories of their first victims are vague...
...Only in Rwanda do the victims have to live in a sea of people whose involvement was direct, palpable, and widely recognized...
...Tuol Sleng was an infernal place, and it is difficult to understand how the man who devised its torments could go on living, let alone thrive...
...What insights we have come from scholarship on the Holocaust...
...Victims and killers alike were smallholders living close to subsistence...
...Mostly they recall getting into the routine: the rhythms of the day (start out at 9:30, short lunch break, knock off at 4:30, loot on the way home), the thrill of the chase, the gang's close bonds, the discovery of how easy it was to kill a helpless person...
...We liked being in our gang...
...One man does mention a "push" from behind, but there was more than enough pull to keep things rolling...
...In occupied Europe, many people, not just Nazis, had a stake in getting rid of the Jews from whom they stole...
...no one was paralyzed mid-swing...
...When the KR took power in April 1975, he was the obvious candidate to turn Tuol Sleng, an elementary school, into the nerve center of the regime...
...In the wake of a genocide, the evasion of the ordinary killers and their families passes understanding, and it cannot BOO KS be explained simply by fear of reprisal...
...Sheets of corrugated metal stretched out between the bivouacs and the refugee columns as far as the eye could see...
...But at some point in the 1990s, he deviated from the party line by converting to Christianity...
...civil war ; a populace run amok in the absence of international intervention...
...By now, the "why" of the genocide is wellestablished— ethnic hatred, drummed up by the ruling party...
...True, many returned to the villages to live beside their victims...
...Shopkeepers, even if they were Hutu, were so cowed that they handed over whatever customers demanded...
...His nine protagonists are longtime friends and neighbors, among thousands from the area crammed into jail, awaiting the disposition of their cases, when Hatzfeld found them and interviewed them in 2000...
...Like everyone there, foreign and Cambodian, he was obsessed with the past...
...And if we turned lucky at work, we became happy" No one farmed, neither the men nor the women, who were busy looting their dead neighbors' homes and stripping the corpses...
...We are again, intellectually and philosophically, "at the mind's limits"—the Holocaust survivor Jean Amery's phrase...
...Hatzfeld, like Dunlop, finds in his subjects an appalling moral obliqueness...
...The people who were tortured to prolong their anguish or whose limbs were hacked off in the middle of town for entertainment—these were sometimes those with a little more, but they were just as likely to be ordinary people who irritated the killers by eluding them too long...
...With a steady gaze—the book is free of melodrama—Hatzfeld takes us through their early killing days, as they learned the skills of hunting people in the marshes, organized themselves, and enjoyed the first spoils of looting...
...One brilliant chapter, "Some Thoughts on Corrugated Metal," explains the perpetrators' lust for the sheet metal roofs of the dead, a mystery Hatzfeld first encountered when he came over the Burundi border in July 1994, pushing against the tide of Hutu fleeing the country...
...Linda Coverdale Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2005 253 pp $24 GENOCIDES, ONCE OVER, have a way of turning into crimes without criminals...
...It's a kind of biographical detective story, the whodunit being the mystery of human beginnings, inhuman ends, that drives any study of a bloody fanatic...
...Nor do the interviews support the argument DISSENT / Fall 2006 n I OI BOOKS that the genocidaires operated under duress from the top...
...After the Vietnamese rout in 1979, he effectively disappeared and was assumed to be dead...
...What kept them going...
...Europe was more politically divided to begin with and the mobilization of killers less extensive...
...No one vomited or retched...
...But "there is no one on the hill who can say to God, eyes closed in prayer, that he never went hunting," insists Pancrace, a confessed participant and now a free man...
...AMAN LIKE Duch has magic: you have to have magic, as Mark Helprin observed of one of his criminal characters, to see a baby in a mother's arms and want to kill them both...
...The teaching career didn't last long—in his first job, he was already agitating against the monarchy and for the wonders of the Cultural Revolution, the KR's new model of national purity...
...Worries let go of us...
...She is writing about post-catastrophic societies and is also at work on a book on feminism...
...The organization was a bit casual, but it was respectful and conscientious...
...A man who killed two children the first day found it "almost pleasantly easy...
...Meanwhile, few, except the survivors, notice that the murderers themselves are disappearing: into thin air (the Turks), into the maquis (the Khmer Rouge), into the refugee camps (the Rwandans), or into their postwar lives as solid citizens (the Nazis...
...Corrugated metal, a godsend against the rains, is the only element of a house that villagers can't make themselves...
...Traveling in Rwanda this summer, I caught a hint of this irritation with survivors, although in the repressive political atmosphere the criticism can't be voiced openly...
...No other post-catastrophic society has faced this problem...
...They all speak of the satisfaction of cooperating in a difficult task...
...He mulls over the different views of forgiveness...
...Hatzfeld asks toward the end, warding off the implications of the dreadful insight...
...It's Duch's own moral equilibrium that he can't bear...
...His particular fixation was the photographs in Tuol Sleng, a gruesome trove the KR left behind of thousands of mug shots of doomed prisoners as well as portraits and candids of the prison staff...
...In 1999, traveling on assignment, he got lucky...
...the rest were get-along guys who lived in various degrees of civility and friendliness with their Tutsi neighbors, soccer mates, fellow church members, and kin...
...The notorious identity papers designating Tutsi or Hutu played no role because everyone knew everyone else...
...Hatzfeld's starting point is Nyamata, a shambling market town in marshy, inhospitable farming country south of Kigali, near the Burundi border...
...When the government cracked down on the rebels in 1966, Duch went underground and soon began his new job, running the party's main prison/torture operation in the jungle...
...Is this possible...
...The Lost Executioner is photo-journalist Nic Dunlop's account of tracking down the infamous Brother Duch, once the head of the Khmer Rouge torture/interrogation center Tuol Sleng...
...In Machete Season and his previous book on the Rwandan survivors, In the Quick of Life, Hatzfeld is developing a kind of phenomenology of mass murder: he wants to understand the complex, interlocked structures of logic, ratiocination, and ideology that turned the act of killing neighbors into an honest day's work, "sweaty, hard and stimulating," as one of the men describes it...
...I saw nothing...
...The genocidaires played out old rural grudges— the most bitter concerned cows trampling fields—but they also acted without any animosity at all...
...I say "partially," because although thousands of people have been accused and jailed, the killers still have a way of dematerializing, morphing into aggrieved innocents...
...It was not, however, a war of poor against rich, or of "peasants" against "landholders"— that well-worn and somehow comforting paradigm I heard an old Marxist friend casually invoke when she heard me talking about the genocide...
...Encouraged by an evangelical preacher from California, Duch embraced Jesus with the fervor he had once given to Democratic Kampuchea...
...But they were also carousers and hotheads, prone to boasting and bravado, heavy drinking and brawls, and partial to hard words and inflamed views...
...DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 103...
...Because confessions bring reduced sentences, there is no lack of professed murderers, but few writers have talked with any of them, and no one has done so with Hatzfeld's fluency as a listener and his exquisite attentiveness to language...
...In the aftermath the Jewish survivors fled, leaving the fascists, collaborators, resistants, and occupiers to work out a basis for reconstruction...
...For myself, if I were dividing up applicants for the afterlife, I'd assign Duch to the Buddhists, not the Christians: not cleansed of his sins and spiffed up to join the heavenly throng, but bound to the wheel of life, facing an eternity's worth of penances in myriad reincarnations still sopping with his despicable karma...
...the rest fled to the marshes and forest, where they were hunted down by bands of "disciplined, sober, singing killers," armed with machetes, spears, and clubs...
...Here, over four weeks in April and May 1994 (when the Tutsi rebels arrived), some fifty thousand Tutsis out of a population of fifty-nine thousand died...
...The one zealot was the schoolteacher, a functionary of the ruling party who served as the Hutu extremists' local organizer and ideologue...
...But they learned quickly...
...Here, again, I believe that Morrill simplified the political complexity of justice in the aftermath...
...Dunlop covered Cambodia in the 1990s...
...It was a massive, popular mobilization—unequaled, one could argue, even by the Nazis...
...The broad support made this "low tech" genocide amazingly efficient (more so than the Holocaust: here eight hundred thousand were murdered in a hundred days...
...In Nyamata, 102 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 people say that the first thing certain prisoners do, after they've been released from the penitentiary in Rilima, is to dig, on a moonless night, for their hoards of corrugated zinc...
...At the start, none had killed anything larger than a goat...
...As for this life, he's now in prison awaiting his trial in the "Extraordinary Chambers," the hybrid Cambodian/international court for KR leaders that is supposed to begin work next year...
...Dunlop immediately recognized Duch, now reincarnated as a humanitarian relief worker...
...Nor was there the frenzy of war...
...Along with bundles of clothes, sacks of grain, chairs, and buckets, the refugees were hauling metal...
...It is Hatzfeld's discovery that it's not the killers but the survivors who bear the burden of anguish...
...For all its quiet tone, the book is actually a gripping study of moral psychology on the dark side...
...funds and complicity out of the UN refugee camps...
...IN RWANDA, the genocidal disappearing act has been partially thwarted by the Kagame government's determination to prosecute the masses of perpetrators, not only the leaders...
...Dunlop travels through the country to rustle up family, friends, former classmates, and the handful of men who survived DISSENT / Fall 2006 • 9 9 BOOKS his regime at Tuol Sleng...
...Shaking my hand he politely introduced himself in perfect English...
...At the onset, units of interahamwe—the BOOKS government's paramilitary—were bused in to kick things off...
...In 1994, they had been in their twenties and thirties, all farmers, except for one civil servant and a teacher...
...But it was local Hutus who kept the massacre going at a steady pace...
...The world likes to let bygones be bygones, and the evangelical Christians concur...
...For someone who has spent this life teaching the humanities, as I have, such criminals are a fearful mystery," a Tutsi survivor who is a teacher tells Hatzfeld...
...It is the survivor who can never slide into another life, who must live with the implacable memories of suffering flesh...
...The murderers' habit of going to ground makes them difficult to locate, let alone study...
...A new nation must be created out of a huge population implicated in the genocide and a tiny remnant of survivors...
...They ask for pardon with the certainty that this request, because it is humiliating and expresses sympathy, deserves in itself a positive response...
...Exactly one Nazi, the commander of Auschwitz, admitted to murdering Jews...
...We abandoned the crops, the hoes...
...In Cambodia, the killers hid out in the KR zone and resurfaced much later...
...Machete Season is a different kind of book, not about geniuses of genocide but regular guys...
...In the aftermath, the corpses pile up, denunciations, recriminations, and chants of "never again" fill the air, and the historians, political scientists, and genocide specialists set to work...
...We were not afraid of wearing ourselves out running around in the swamps...
...But the message he delivers is even grimmer, because it comes from more intimacy with the killers, and because it's born of broader knowledge of the relevant comparisons...
...but there, despite the country's continuing misery and paralyzed search for justice, Duch and his killers constitute a minority...
...Some fourteen thousand men, women, infants, toddlers, and children entered the prison over the next three years, all accused of crimes against the Revolution...
...The tax collector didn't appear...
...The genocide was an occasion for excitement, spending every day with pals, a huge break from the monotonous solitude of working the fields...
...0 F ALL THE perpetrators of war crimes, the genocidal murderer seems to be the least troubled, which is one reason why he can dissolve and disappear...
...It follows, I think, that when the pressure gets high for reconciliation, it is the survivor, not the killer, who is the "problem...
...There is no support in Machete Season for the view sometimes advanced that it was fear of the Tutsi rebels that motivated the killers...
...Answering requires getting below the macro-level of social groups to peer into an everyday rural world where people got up, took a pee, and ate their breakfasts before they killed—and where they longed to take naps in the middle of the day...
...Despite the savagery they felt overtake them in the marshes, their relations with each other were kindly and supportive: "If someone presented a little excuse, we would offer to take on his part of the job that one time...
...These two remarkable books are the first full-length studies of the "ordinary men" who were the shock troops in Cambodia and Rwanda...
...As for reconciliation, they expect it will come automatically, like a soda from a vending machine once they insert the coin of an apology...
...A short, wiry man appeared wearing a white T-shirt emblazoned with the initials ARC (American Refugee Committee...
Vol. 53 • September 2006 • No. 4
