Kang Kek lew (Comrade Duch), former controller of Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge’s interrogation centre in Phnom Penh, feared for his family’s life if he did not follow the orders of his political masters.  Dame Silvia Cartwright, and other judges presiding at a joint Cambodian/UN court, rejected his classic Nuremberg defence and sentenced him to 30 years prison.

No-one disputes that this former teacher had oversight of brutal torture and he freely admits to being solely and individually responsible for the deaths of 12,380 of his fellow Cambodians.  It’s almost obligatory to be outraged at these crimes but you and I are almost certain to have acted in alarmingly similar ways if we had been in Duch’s shoes.

After Nuremberg and as the trial of Adolf Eichmann was unfolding, Stanley Milgram embarked on psychological experiments to try and understand whether there had been mutual intent, or a mutual sense of morality among Holocaust offenders.   His findings were, and continue to be terrifying about our human potential to persecute others under the right conditions.

Milgram found that ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, could without any particular hostility on their part, become agents in a terribly destructive process.  Even when they could see that they were hurting or destroying others, relatively few people were able to resist authority figures telling them to continue even though it violated their deepest moral beliefs.

The law has its place but we cannot allow it to be the only way to right the wrongs of humanity.  In the Cambodian situation, this symbolic and educational court has been constructed through political wheeling and dealing to preside over a selected number of scapegoats.  By buying into this model we are obeying authority in the way that Milgram found we would, even though we know that supporting the punishment of the penitent man in the dock is a rather gauche way of pretending we wouldn’t have done what he did.

At a closed hearing after being led to the site of his crimes, Kang Kek lew asked for forgiveness.  According to Francoiz Bizot, who had been Duch’s prisoner in 1971, the anguished cry of the former executioner betrayed such suffering that one of the few survivors of Tuol Sleng was moved to scream that these were the words they had longed to hear for 30 years.  That was the moment for the law to recognise its limits; to step aside and allow a process of human reconciliation to unfold.

Kang Kek lew, an ordinary man who had himself been tortured by a previous regime, has a right to forgiveness and we have a responsibility, knowing what we do about the human condition, to give it.   Until we learn how to forgive ourselves and others, we remain trapped in a tangled web of legal retribution that is incapable of bringing peace to any human heart.

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2 Comments

Karen Holland
Aug 11, 2010 10:53

nick b
Aug 30, 2010 23:41