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Framing the Duch Trial

In 2011, I sat in the public gallery during the initial hearings in the case against the then four surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). On the first day, the gallery with its 482 seats was filled to the brim with members of the Cambodian public alongside a few non-Cambodians. The trial had been long coming and there was a sense of anticipation in the air. As the accused persons entered the courtroom, there was a gasp in the gallery. This gasp, which in my mind seemed to say something about the desire for justice, is not recorded anywhere. Although the trial is filmed, there are, to my knowledge, no recordings of the public or how they react during the trial, since all cameras are turned to what occurs in the trial chamber proper. Moreover, even though there are several cameras in the chamber, the only recording that is saved for the future is that which is aired. In other words, everything that goes on during trial proceedings but is outside of the main action— the muttering, the glances, the stressed searches through documents, the yawning (I am pretty sure the late Jacques Vergès who acted as lawyer for Khieu Samphan fell asleep during at least one session)—all of this is lost for the future. What remains, in addition to the official recording, are the notes and recordings of those who were there. It is in this way, among several others, that Alexander Laban Hinton’s ethnography Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer is so valuable. Hinton provides a record of the trial that far exceeds any official one. Additionally, in providing accounts of the trial and of Duch, Hinton seeks to prompt us to take note of and to question the frames through which accounts like these are given. Man or Monster? is two books in one. One concerns Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, former chairperson of Khmer Rouge security centre S-21, and is animated by a critique of the framing devices on which we base what Hinton calls “our everyday thinking” (p. 31). The second gives an account of the trial at the ECCC, which after seventy-nine days of hearings convicted Duch in 2010 of war crimes and crimes against humanity for the torture and killings of some eighteen thousand persons at S-21. Hinton is not the first to take on either of these topics, but Man or Monster? brings to these existing works a description that through its combination of the two topics demonstrates how the significance of trials lies not only in their role as stepping stones to a finding of guilt or non-guilt, but also in being independent processes through which conflicting representations of individuals and events are presented and negotiated. At the start of his book, Laban poses a question: “What sort of a person runs a place like S-21?” (p. 4). Similar questions have been asked before, perhaps most famously by Hannah Arendt in her study of Adolf Eichmann and his trial held in Jerusalem in 1961. During the