Book description
In 1971, Francois Bizot was kept prisoner for three months in the
Cambodian jungle, accused of being a CIA spy. His Khmer Rouge captor,
Comrade Duch, eventually had him freed and it took Bizot decades to
realize he owed his life to a man who, later in the Killing Fields
regime, was to become one of Pol Pot's most infamous henchmen. As the
head of the Tuol Sleng S-21 jail, Duch personally oversaw the
detention, systematic torture and execution of more than 16,000 detainees.
Duch's trial as a war criminal ended in July 2010 amid a blaze of
publicity. He was sentenced to a controversial 35 years imprisonment.
In the tradition of Gitta Sereny, who sat with Speer in the Nuremberg
trials, Bizot attended Duch's court case and spent time with him in
prison, trying to unearth whatever humanity Duch had left.
'It would be all too easy,' says Bizot, 'if this man was a monster,
not a member of the human race. We could use the slogan 'never again'
and move on. But the deep horror is that this man is normal...Through
his very qualities he became a mass murderer. Does that exonerate him
from the crimes? Certainly not. But it does force us to question
ourselves in a way that is deeply unsettling.'
At once a personal essay, a historical and philosophical meditation,
and an eye-witness account, Facing the Torturer will join a
very short list of important books about man's personal responsibility
in collective crimes.
Francois Bizot is an ethnologist who has spent the greater part of
his career studying Buddhism. He is the Director of Studies at Ecole
Pratique des Hautes-Etudes and holds the chair in Southeast Asian
Buddhism at the Sorbonne. He lives in Paris.
