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Review [published December 2005]
Nic Dunlop: The Lost Executioner
Chris Mitchell
The Lost Executioner is my Book of the Year. Like my
pick for last year, Emma Larkin’s Secret Histories:
Finding George Orwell In A Burmese Teashop, The
Lost Executioner is a personal travelogue into a country
that tries to understand its recent, disastrous politics.
Where Secret Histories documents Burma’s slide into
a real-life Orwellian nightmare, The Lost Executioner
chronicles photographer Nic Dunlop’s obsessive hunt
for Comrade Duch, the man who presided over the
deaths of thousands as the commandant of Tuol Sleng,
Cambodia’s notorious interrogation centre, during the
genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge.
Between 1975 when the Khmer Rouge came to power
in Cambodia until 1979 when they were displaced by
the invading Vietnamese, the ultra-leftist party instituted
a Year Zero policy which was even more extreme
than China’s Cultural Revolution and resulted in the
murder of an estimated two million people – a quarter
of the country’s population.
Duch, like every other major figure in the Khmer
Rouge regime, successfully disappeared into Cambodia’s
jungles when the Vietnamese arrived and, like
BUY Nic Dunlop books online from and
the rest of the regime’s leaders, successfully avoided
prosecution. To date, 25 years after Cambodia’s autogenocide,
none of the key proponents have been brought
to trial. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge’s leader, died of old
age in 1998.
For Dunlop, seeing a photo of Comrade Duch set
something off inside him that made him want to find
the former commandant. This search provides the
engine for his book, fusing the detective work necessary
to finding Duch with the travelogue of exploring
modern day Cambodia. Dunlop interweaves details of
Cambodia’s awful recent history within his journey,
providing a powerful narrative that avoids the dryness
of traditional historical analysis but does not hold back
on dealing with the vast complexities of how the Khmer
Rouge came to power and the fallout of their overthrow.
Both John Pilger and David Chandler, Cambodia’s preeminent
Western historian, are given major credit in
the Acknowledgements for helping Dunlop refine the
historical accuracy of his text and this, for me, is vital
as a demonstration of Dunlop’s attempt to write more
than a simple, observational travel book.
207
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