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Re: New Book: The Gate

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: January 12, 2003

"Tales of everyday torture

Bitterness propelled François Bizot to write an intense, dignified memoir of his time as a captive of the Khmer Rouge, The Gate

Robert MacFarlane
Sunday January 12, 2003
The Observer

The Gate
by François Bizot
Harvill £16.99, pp288

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge came to full power in Cambodia and began systematically to eliminate whole classes of society. The Cambodian genocide was among the grossest and most thorough of all the purges carried out by Left on Right or vice-versa in the years after 1945. The methods employed by the executioners in The Killing Fields, and by the torture teams in the interrogation complex at Tuol Sleng, had an abominable tang of inventiveness about them: the use of palm-leaf fibres to decapitate counter-revolutionaries, for instance, or the cages full of spiders and scorpions with which the torturers extracted meaningless confessions from their internees.

In the face of such horror, survivors on both sides have often preferred to keep their silence. 'Dig a hole and bury the past,' the current Prime Minister of the country, Hun Sen, has publicly suggested. For 30 years, silence was also the response of François Bizot, a French anthropologist who in 1971 was captured by the Khmer Rouge and detained for 90 days in a jungle camp.

Finally, however, Bizot has tried to come to terms with his experiences, and The Gate - a memoir of his time in captivity - is the result. Distinguished by its intense dignity, by its unexpected attention to beauty, and by a discretion which never shades into coyness, The Gate should immediately be numbered among the great post-Second World-War memoirs of incarceration, alongside Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai and Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradling. In particular, it provides one of the finest accounts of the strange intimacy which can flourish between prisoner and interrogator.

At the time of his capture, Bizot was a young French anthropologist who had been drawn to Indochina by the 'mysteries of the far East', and had settled in northern Cambodia, in order to research Buddhist practices associated with trance states. In that area, however, Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge troops were fighting a sporadic guerrilla war against American and South Vietnamese forces, and Bizot was taken prisoner on suspicion of being a CIA agent posing as an academic.

For three months, Bizot was kept chained to a post in the jungle, with no idea of what his fate would be. Each day he was interrogated by a Khmer cadre known only as 'Douch', who was trying to discern if he really were a scholar and not a spy. Eventually, and without explanation, Bizot was released.

After 1988, Bizot returned to Cambodia. He learnt then that it was Douch who, convinced of the authenticity of Bizot's story, and keen to uphold revolutionary law, had negotiated with the Khmer Rouge leaders for his release. He also discovered, however, that in 1976 Douch had become the head torturer at Tuol Sleng - personally responsible for the slow and atrocious deaths of tens of thousands of Cambodians.

This is the crux which the book so painfully explores: that it was Douch's idealism which saved Bizot's life, and that it was Douch's idealism which also led to the death of so many people at Tuol Sleng. 'This terrible man,' writes Bizot of Douch, 'was not duplicitous. All he had were principles and convictions: he was a pure, fervent idealist.'

Bizot observes early on that he wrote his book out of 'a bitterness which knows no limit'. The bitterness which propels his memoir is a bitterness at the ideology which propelled the supporters of the Khmer Rouge: the zealous utopianism which so cheapened their regard for human life, and cauterised their compassion. Bizot reserves his greatest contempt for those Western intellectuals who expressed their approval of the Khmer Rouge, and whose high-profile fellow-travelling was in part responsible for the West's failure to intervene in the Cambodian genocide once it had begun. These were the people, Bizot suggests, who should have known so much better.

In his rapturous, elegant introduction to this edition, John Le Carré passes a fine judgment on The Gate. 'Now and then you read a book,' he observes, 'and, as you put it down, you realise that you envy everybody who hasn't read it, simply because, unlike you, they will have the experience before them.' This is such a book.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003"