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Pol Pot's Willing Executioner? Criminal Accountability at the Khmer Rouge 

Tribunal  

Review by Richard A. Wilson 

 

Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer  

by Alexander Laban Hinton 

Duke University Press 2016 

 

Alexander Laban Hinton has written a highly engaging and experimental ethnography of international 

justice that narrates the criminal trial of Kaing Guek Eav (aka “Duch”), a central figure in the “killing 

fields’ of 1970s Cambodia. Man or Monster? interrogates the enterprise of pursuing accountability for 

some of worst instances of human rights violations in the twentieth century, exploring the limits of both 

law and literature to comprehend mass atrocities. Hinton finds the Manichean dualism posed in the title 

of his book both inadequate, haunting and generative, and he illustrates how all accounts of one 

individuals’ role in past crimes are partial and incomplete or, in his words, “redacted.” 

 

Hinton’s style of writing and analysis of an international criminal trial is original and represents a 

significant contribution to the growing literature on the anthropology of post-conflict justice that 

includes recent studies by Anders (2011), Clarke (2009, 2010), Eltringham (2013), Kesselring (2016), 

Theidon (2013) and Wilson (2011, 2017). Hinton complements, and, in imaginative ways, extends this 

existing anthropological literature. His is a “performative ethnography” that is episodic, polyphonic, 

experimental, and includes poetry, the dreams of the ethnographer and other literary techniques. For 

Hinton, the international criminal trial of Duch is less about accountability and challenging impunity 

than it is a “performance of a liberal order” (p.241), a quasi-religious quest for the grounds of 

redemption of the accused so that he might be returned to the fold of humanity. Law, according to 

Hinton, is quite unsuited to this latter task, given its epistemological framing of events, and its winner-



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takes-all quest for truth that leads to a subsequent attribution of guilt. 

 

From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge rule of “Democratic Kampuchea” constituted one of the more 

brutal and bloody regimes of the twentieth century. Its Maoist leader, Pol Pot, famously pursued a 

policy of devastating the cities and pastoralizing the country in the ideological belief that the peasantry 

was the only true and pure revolutionary vanguard. Roughly 2 million of Cambodia’s eight million 

people died as a result of Pol Pot’s policies, nearly a quarter of the country’s population. The Khmer 

Rouge purged all considered actual or potential opponents, and, as part of its program of mass killing, it 

established 196 prisons across the country where tens of thousands were interrogated, tortured and 

murdered. One of the most infamous of these prisons was S-21 (or “Tuol Sleng”) a former high school 

in Phnom Penh run by “Comrade Duch” the alias of a former mathematics teacher and fervent Maoist 

revolutionary, Kaing Guek Eav. After the fall of Phnom Penh to the Vietnamese army in 1979, Tuol 

Sleng Genocide Museum became “Cambodia’s Auschwitz,” the site of memory most often visited by 

foreigners and Cambodians. 

 

After a hiatus of nearly thirty years, Duch was arrested and brought to trial at the Extraordinary 

Chamber for the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a hybrid international tribunal integrating national and 

international criminal law and personnel. The ECCC’s prosecution team, led by a Cambodian National 

co-prosecutor Chea Leang, and Canadian co-prosecutor Robert Petit, charged the accused Duch with 

criminal responsibility for the killing of over 12,000 men, women and children, a crime against 

humanity. The prosecution’s case drew heavily on documents, many of them signed orders to execute 

prisoners by Duch himself, and portrayed the accused as a willing executioner, a zealot for an 

ideological crusade, and an enthusiastic enforcer of a sadistic regime. In addition to the documentary 

evidence, former prisoners of S-21 testified to its appalling conditions and unimaginable brutality, 

where thuggish guards (young peasant men who were selected and trained by Duch) raped and tortured 

prisoners and killed small children by smashing their heads against a designated tree. Finally, there was 

the confession of Duch himself, who admitted to, and in fleeting moments, expressed remorse for these 

atrocities. The prosecution built a compelling case that Duch was a “monster,” the personification of 

evil, a view fulsomely endorsed by his victims and their families who were party to the trial, as well as 

by ordinary Cambodians who graffitied their reactions on the walls of the exhibition at Tuol Sleng. 

 

Hinton gives ample consideration to the defense case, which began with the jurisdictional argument 



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that Duch should not be on trial at the ECCC at all, given that the ECCC’s Statute mandated the court 

to only pursue those “most responsible” for international crimes. Duch was merely a cog in the 

machine, following orders that came down from more senior officials who were truly responsible for 

the mass crimes. Duch himself was terrorized by these officials and so his compliance was borne of 

self-preservation, not ideological fervor. Furthermore, none of the heads of the nearly 200 other prisons 

were charged by the ECCC for any crimes, thus violating Duch’s right to equality before the 

Cambodian Constitution. Finally, there was the human aspect; in the years since the events, Duch had 

converted to Christianity, had become a teacher again and openly expressed remorse for his past 

crimes. He apologized several times during the trial, and quoted French poetry. At these moments, the 

event was less a criminal trial and more a ritualized purification ritual directed at the forgiveness and 

redemption of the accused. 

 

Hinton poses the same poignant questions again and again throughout this narrative. What explains the 

Cambodian genocide? Was Duch a man, or a monster? A zealous and ruthless revolutionary or a 

quietly-spoken former mathematics teacher who quoted French romantic poetry in his trial? Ultimately, 

Hinton opts for the time-honored “perpetrator-in-all-of-us” interpretation that, “under tragic 

circumstances, anyone can end up like Duch (p. 82).” For Hinton, the Cambodian genocide cannot be 

grasped by the politically-inclined explanations that have been advanced thus far, such as the mass 

indoctrination of the population by a small Maoist clique led by Pol Pot, or by the violence of 

decolonization and its aftermath. Instead, Hinton identifies the cause of the genocide in “the banality of 

everyday thought (p. 35).” By this, Hinton means the quotidian social categories through which persons 

simplify, frame and ultimately erase others. In short, “social cognition” (although Hinton does not use 

this term) provides the causal mechanism for mass murder. Here, Hinton extends historian David 

Chandler’s thesis that to understand S-21, we need to look no further than ourselves and our inherent 

tendency to obey authority. 

 

How might we evaluate the claim that mass atrocities arise from everyday forms of social 

classification? One might start by acknowledging that social cognition is ubiquitous in all known 

human societies, and that genocide is always accompanied by rigid forms of social categorizing. At the 

same time, we need to distinguish carefully between necessary and sufficient conditions, in that social 

categorization may be a necessary condition for genocide, but it is not sufficient, and much, much more 

is needed.  



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There is a second potential objection to the “Je Suis Duch” thesis that is based in an anthropological 

theory of agency. All of us are indeed partially the product of our time, place and culture, but we also 

exercise a degree of choice and agency, even in the most extreme and inauspicious conditions. While 

all humans may possess an abstract capacity for violence, it does not follow that all persons, even given 

a certain upbringing, are in practice willing and able to smash in the brains of small children against a 

tree. This observation is borne out by the history and ethnography of warfare and genocide. The 

Erdemović trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia illustrated the 

recalcitrance and mental anguish of a hapless young soldier compelled to participate in the genocide at 

Srebrenica, Bosnia-Hercegovina. Browning’s (1998) classic historical account Ordinary Men, for 

instance, noted that 20% of firing squads at the Józefów massacre in Poland refused to shoot.  This 

response was so widespread that the entire edifice of the inhuman, bureaucratic-industrial machine of 

the Holocaust was created because the German High Command could not rely on ordinary soldiers to 

execute the program of exterminating Jews. 

 

Hinton may be right, that “we” may need look no further than ourselves to understand the Cambodian 

genocide, but for different reasons than the ones he emphasizes. Hinton never tells us who his “we” 

actually refers to, but by “we,” I mean “we Americans whose military waged war and dropped over 2 

million tons of ordnance on Cambodia and Indochina between about 1964 and 1974.” Culpability lies 

not in cognition, but in politics. 

 

References 

 

Anders, Gerhard. 2011. “Testifying about ‘Uncivilized Events’: Problematic Representations of Africa 

in the Trial Against Charles Taylor.” Leiden Journal of International Law 24 (4): 937–59. 

doi:10.1017/S0922156511000446. 

 

Browning, Christopher. 1998. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in 

Poland. New York: HarperCollins. First published 1992. 

 

Clarke, Kamari. 2009. Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal 

Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 



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———. 2010. “Rethinking Africa through Its Exclusions: The Politics of Naming Criminal 

Responsibility.” Anthropological Quarterly 83 (3): 625–52. 

 

Eltringham, Nigel. 2013 “‘Illuminating the Broader Context’: Anthropological and Historical 

Knowledge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological 

Institute 19 (2): 338–55. 

 

Kesselring, Rita. 2016. Bodies of truth: law, memory, and emancipation in post-apartheid South Africa. 

Stanford: Stanford University Press. 

 

Theidon, Kimberly. 2013. Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru. Philadelphia: 

University of Pennsylvania Press. 

 

Wilson, Richard Ashby. 2011. Writing History in International Criminal Trials. Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press. 

-----------------------------2017. Incitement on Trial: Prosecuting International Speech Crimes. 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

 

Richard A. Wilson is the Gladstein Distinguished Chair of Human Rights and Professor of Law and 

Anthropology at UConn School of Law, and founding director of the Human Rights Institute at UConn. 

Wilson is a scholar of transitional justice who currently teaches courses on post-conflict justice, law 

and society, and an interdisciplinary graduate level course on the anthropology, history, law and 

philosophy of human rights. He is the author or editor of 10 books on international human rights, 

humanitarianism, truth and reconciliation commissions and international criminal tribunals. His 

book Writing History in International Criminal Trials was selected by Choice in 2012 as an 

“Outstanding Academic Title” in the law category. His forthcoming book, Incitement On Trial: 

Prosecuting International Speech Crimes (Cambridge University Press, 2017), explains why 

international criminal tribunals struggle to convict individuals for inciting speech and proposes a new 

model of prevention and punishment. 

 

 

© 2017 Richard A. Wilson 


