The Gate

"Bizot was a Frenchmen living in Cambodia and he was taken prisoner by the Khmer Rouge. He was just a hapless academic in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the Khmer Rouge were obviously a very paranoid regime and thought that he was a CIA spy and wanted to execute him. Bizot spoke fluent Khmer and he developed a relationship with his prison guard, Duch, who went on to head Tuol Sleng (or S-21), one of Pol Pot’s secret prisons. Duch has just been sentenced in a UN-backed war crimes tribunal to 35 years for his crimes against humanity, though it was reduced to 19 years. Bizot was the only foreigner who was caught by the Khmer Rouge and released alive. Basically, the reason why he wasn’t murdered was because of the relationship he built up with Duch. Duch himself was a young, very ideological Khmer Rouge cadre who believed in the revolution and a wonderful agrarian utopia. Bizot’s book chronicles his rising disgust at Duch’s ideology. And much of his book deals with his contempt for the foreign academics who facilitated the emergence of the Khmer Rouge by propagating these ideas of ‘purity’ and ‘year zero’ – these concepts of an end state were very Marxist and the ends were thought to justify the means. Many leaders of the Khmer Rouge had studied in France and had been highly influenced by such ideas put forth by French academics. Bizot was released after three months of captivity in 1971, but many academics wouldn’t listen to him when he tried to tell them about the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge regime. Although Bizot wasn’t held in Tuol Sleng prison, it is worth visiting such prisons today (and there are hundreds throughout Cambodia) because it will help you to understand where Cambodia has come from. Cambodians are still very much traumatised by what happened to their nation and it’s only just being introduced into the school curriculum. Visiting the prisons is both sobering and shocking."