They met in darkness. Pastor Christopher LaPel was tending to his tiny, ramshackle church in a remote part of Cambodia on a sweltering night in 1996 when he was approached by a man in his 50s with a soft, barely audible voice.
The man, who seemed profoundly depressed, introduced himself as Hang Pin, a high school math teacher. He seemed so small and meek, it was hard to imagine he would have anything out of the ordinary to say. But shaken, he told the pastor that his wife had been brutally murdered by intruders months before, and the attackers had bayoneted him in the back to try to kill him. Now, he said, he had to find God.
The next day, LaPel—a serious man who divides his time between his native Cambodia and a church in Los Angeles that is part of the Purpose
Driven network of churches—stood in the middle of the Sangker River and baptized Hang Pin in the muddy runoff from upstream clothing factories.
Hang Pin embraced his new life. “He was the most astute Bible student I have ever had,” LaPel remembers. Soon Hang Pin was a lay pastor.
Four years passed. In the middle of the night, back in Los Angeles, LaPel got a phone call from a man he had never heard of. The man’s message was simple: “Hang Pin is Comrade Duch.”
LaPel fell to his knees in shock.
“I hit myself in the head,” he says.
He had recalled instantly that Duch—the nickname of Kaing Guek Eav—was the warden of the Khmer Rouge’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison. The meek, depressed man who had become a diligent minister was one of the bloodiest mass murderers the world has known.
In July 2008, I arrive in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, to trace the making and redemption of Comrade Duch, a man personally responsible for 17,000 killings. I am searching for victims and villains caught up in the murderous regime that all but destroyed Cambodian society in the 1970s as more than one and a half million people perished. I want to know what made Duch kill so many, why he repented, and to reach some conclusions about his sincerity—and God’s power to forgive. I am also prepared to hear challenges to an underpinning of theological belief—that someone as evil as Duch can indeed find redemption. Who was this man? Who is he now? Does he represent a sham or salvation? Evil itself or everlasting redemption?
I’m in Phnom Penh as the Royal Government of Cambodia and the United Nations are finally preparing to prosecute senior members of the Khmer Rouge nearly 30 years after the genocide of the Killing Fields. Duch is to be the first of them tried. His notoriety is so significant that hundreds of Cambodians have volunteered to work with the chief investigator, Youk Chhang, to assemble evidence against him.
I meet Youk at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which is located behind a wall on a tree-lined street in the city center. He is a cheery man with salt-and-pepper hair, a joyous smile, but—like the hundreds who have come forward to help him—he is haunted by bloody memories.
Youk tells me he has reviewed all the documents from the Tuol Sleng torture manual. Duch, he says, was very precise. He detailed exactly how he wanted his guards to inflict pain on the prisoners. “He took notes every day, every hour, every minute.” Among his favorite tortures was hanging prisoners upside down and plunging their heads into tubs of urine and feces to make them talk. He was particularly brutal to babies. He ordered his soldiers to grab them by their feet and bash their heads against trees until they died.
“He was an angry man, and he wanted to be somebody,” Youk says. “I can feel the anger in his handwriting. He would use red to show it. He would use words like ‘dogs,’ a curse word. For the Khmer people, to be called such names is worse than being killed.”
Duch would order interrogations and confessions, each of which he would sign off on. “He was very cold-blooded, and his handwriting is on almost every single confession,” Youk says. “The documents are the smoking gun. They will be the first line of evidence against him.”
But is the man going on trial now the same one who killed and tortured? He has confessed his own guilt, has been ministering to others in jail, and has agreed to testify against them in court. Has Duch’s faith earned him redemption or even a measure of mercy? Has faith changed him?
Youk Chhang has his doubts.
Photo: Nic Dunlop/Panos Pictures
Slideshow Photos: Sarah Caron/Polaris Images
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