A powerful warning

5 April 2012

One cloudless afternoon in June 1970 I was bowling along in a minibus crowded with farmers and their families near the small town of Svay Rieng in eastern Cambodia, headed for the capital, Phnom Penh, not long after it had been taken over by the pro-American general Lon Nol. The peaceful road, green-enamelled ricefields, small boys riding mud-caked water buffaloes made, I noted, a refreshing change from the sandbags, barbed wire and watchtowers I had temporarily left behind in Vietnam. War reporting, I thought, has its peaceful moments.

Suddenly two young men in black pyjamas, sandals and straw hats waved the bus down with businesslike AK47 assault rifles, peered inside and said to me in barely intelligible French: "The commandant wants to talk to you."

"I'd love to talk to him, too, but I have to be in Phnom Penh before dark," I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage. A young guerilla waved his gun impatiently. I got out and followed him to a nearby house on stilts, under which the commandant, perhaps 25, was waiting with more black-clad young men, all with guns.

Once over the idea that I would be shot on the spot - 16 journalists went missing in Cambodia about that time - the talk became more relaxed. I explained that I was British (actually I'm Australian, but Britain had no troops in Indochina) unarmed, and a reporter eager to get their viewpoint out to the world.

The commandant said they belonged to the Khmer Serei ("Free Cambodians") fighting the foreigners of all kinds, Americans, Vietnamese or Thais invading their country.

I said I could understand, and the commandant gave me a business card identifying him as a teacher of French in Svay Rieng. "Well, I have to be getting along now," I said, after a twitchy interval. "Been nice meeting you and your fine lads."

Back on the road I grabbed the blessed first bus and made it back to war-torn Vietnam. I have often recalled the encounter with a quiet shudder. What happened to the commandant, I wondered?

Could he and his smiling, polite boys be among those who had tortured and murdered a million or more of their own people, a good fifth of Cambodia's population, one of the worst war crimes of the blood-soaked 20th century?

Now, 30 years on, I know. Yes, indeed, they could, and probably did. In their place, admits Francois Bizot, perhaps he might have been a good torturer, too.

Bizot is something of a Cambodian paradox himself.

His lifelong interest is not war or politics, but religion (he is professor of Southeast Asian Buddhism at the Sorbonne in Paris).

Soon after I was picked up he was out scouting temples for ancient manuscripts near Oudong, on the other side of Phnom Penh, when he was stopped on the road by an armed group of Khmer Rouge, the derisory nickname given to the military wing of the Cambodian Communist Party which later absorbed my own friends the Khmer Serei.

His captors took him to a prison camp in a jungle clearing where he spent the next 10 weeks chained to a post, being endlessly interrogated by a Khmer Rouge officer named Ta ("Grandfather" - actually he was in his twenties) Douch. As the only Westerner known to have survived a debate with, let alone capture and torture by, the Khmer Rouge, Bizot's experience was unique and this account is well told, original, and fascinating.

Grandfather Douch, later known as one of the worst Khmer Rouge killers, turned out to be, like my own commandant, a former schoolmaster educated in French schools and the college for teachers in Phnom Penh.

Apart from a few stock references to American imperialism, Douch showed no influence of Marx or Mao, but was obsessed by the French Revolution and particularly by the Reign of Terror in which thousands went to the guillotine, hailed by Douch as the most glorious era in French history.

"The extent of the sacrifice matters little," Douch declaimed to his captive hearer. "What matters is the greatness of the goal!"

"You are dreaming of a system intended to make man happy in spite of himself," Bizot replied. "When will we stop allowing men to die in the name of Man?"

But Douch was unconvinced, says Bizot, who nevertheless calls his interrogator "one of those pure, fervent idealists who yearned above all for the truth". Bizot found something much older than French philosophy in the murderous doctrines of the Khmer Rouge.

Since ancient times every Cambodian youth has spent time in a monastery, begging his food and rejecting the temptations of this sinful world.

Jungle execution camps were the militarised monasteries of the Cambodian revolution's bizarre blend of Buddha and Robespierre. The whole modern world was their enemy, all those who belonged to it traitors. "The people don't know what's good for them," said Douch.

"What more can anyone want from life than a watch, a bicycle and a transistor radio?" But, Bizot notes, all the Khmer Rouge leaders were city-bred intellectuals like Douch and the appalling Pol Pot, the Paris engineering dropout, whom Bizot credits with sparing his life.

This book is a powerful warning. Our world is awash with weapons, full of restless young people looking for explanations for their poverty and helplessness, and not short of half-educated prophets pointing to some future paradise across seas of innocent blood.

Pol Pot and Douch are both dead. We shall be lucky not to see their likes again.

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