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"Ukraine has provided us with, I think, the most striking, the most rapid, the most swift and complete legal offensive or lawfare strategy that has ever been implemented."In this episode
ALEX GILLY is a writer and translator and who was born in New York City and has lived in Australia, Canada, France, California, and the UK. One of his translations, Thierry Cruvellier's THE MASTER OF CONFESSIONS, was longlisted for the 2015 PEN Translation Prize. Alex holds an MA in Translation and Interpreting Studies and a BA in Linguistics and Spanish and Latin American Studies, both from the University of New South Wales. He lives in Sydney with his wife and children.Death Rattle - When Carmen Vega's boyfriend tries to kill her, she hands over all her savings to a smuggler and sets out from Tijuana in a small, leaky boat. Within sight of the California coast, the boat starts to sink, and its passengers have to be rescued by marine interdiction agents.Soon, Carmen turns up dead in a privately-operated migrant detention center. Neither Nick Finn, the agent who saved Carmen from drowning, nor his wife, migrants-rights lawyer Mona Jimenez, are satisfied with the prison's account of what happened to Carmen.Trouble is, the company that runs the prison is on the verge of signing a billion-dollar procurement contract with Homeland Security. And there are people in this world for whom a billion dollars is worth a whole lot more than one human life. Or even three.
This talk was given as part of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) Seminar Series. Thierry Cruvellier, journalist and author, is the editor of JusticeInfo.net and an Op-ed contributor to The New York Times. For more than twenty years, he has been covering war crimes trials before international tribunals for Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Bosnia and Cambodia, as well as national justice efforts in Colombia and the Balkans. More recently he has covered the trial of Hissène Habré before the Extraordinary African Chambers, in Senegal.
What is justice for a man who supervised the interrogation and killing of thousands? Especially a man who now claims to be a Christian and to be, at least in some ways and cases, repentant for his crimes? Thierry Cruvellier has written a fascinating book about the trial of ‘Duch’ the director of the S-21 prison and interrogation center in Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Cruvellier watched virtually the entire trial and interviewed many of the participants and observers. The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer of Rouge Torturer (Ecco, 2014) is both history and philosophy, a deeply moving attempt to understand Duch and his actions. Cruvellier offers the reader an finely crafted narrative of S-21, of the life of Duch and of the place Duch occupied in a genocidal structure. But he also wrestles with deeply philosophical questions about our ability to really understand other people’s actions, about the nature of justice in the aftermath of mass violence, and about the role of courts and trials. It’s a book that gets under your skin in the best kind of way. A journalist, Cruvellier earlier wrote a similar account of witnessing the trial of perpetrators from the Rwandan genocide. As we discuss in the interview, the experience of listening to accounts of atrocities day after day has taken a toll on him, as it would on anyone. But the book that resulted is profoundly moving and unsettling. I hope our discussion offers a taste of the ideas and understanding his book offers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What is justice for a man who supervised the interrogation and killing of thousands? Especially a man who now claims to be a Christian and to be, at least in some ways and cases, repentant for his crimes? Thierry Cruvellier has written a fascinating book about the trial of ‘Duch’ the director of the S-21 prison and interrogation center in Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Cruvellier watched virtually the entire trial and interviewed many of the participants and observers. The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer of Rouge Torturer (Ecco, 2014) is both history and philosophy, a deeply moving attempt to understand Duch and his actions. Cruvellier offers the reader an finely crafted narrative of S-21, of the life of Duch and of the place Duch occupied in a genocidal structure. But he also wrestles with deeply philosophical questions about our ability to really understand other people’s actions, about the nature of justice in the aftermath of mass violence, and about the role of courts and trials. It’s a book that gets under your skin in the best kind of way. A journalist, Cruvellier earlier wrote a similar account of witnessing the trial of perpetrators from the Rwandan genocide. As we discuss in the interview, the experience of listening to accounts of atrocities day after day has taken a toll on him, as it would on anyone. But the book that resulted is profoundly moving and unsettling. I hope our discussion offers a taste of the ideas and understanding his book offers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What is justice for a man who supervised the interrogation and killing of thousands? Especially a man who now claims to be a Christian and to be, at least in some ways and cases, repentant for his crimes? Thierry Cruvellier has written a fascinating book about the trial of ‘Duch’ the director of the S-21 prison and interrogation center in Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Cruvellier watched virtually the entire trial and interviewed many of the participants and observers. The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer of Rouge Torturer (Ecco, 2014) is both history and philosophy, a deeply moving attempt to understand Duch and his actions. Cruvellier offers the reader an finely crafted narrative of S-21, of the life of Duch and of the place Duch occupied in a genocidal structure. But he also wrestles with deeply philosophical questions about our ability to really understand other people’s actions, about the nature of justice in the aftermath of mass violence, and about the role of courts and trials. It’s a book that gets under your skin in the best kind of way. A journalist, Cruvellier earlier wrote a similar account of witnessing the trial of perpetrators from the Rwandan genocide. As we discuss in the interview, the experience of listening to accounts of atrocities day after day has taken a toll on him, as it would on anyone. But the book that resulted is profoundly moving and unsettling. I hope our discussion offers a taste of the ideas and understanding his book offers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What is justice for a man who supervised the interrogation and killing of thousands? Especially a man who now claims to be a Christian and to be, at least in some ways and cases, repentant for his crimes? Thierry Cruvellier has written a fascinating book about the trial of ‘Duch’ the director of the S-21 prison and interrogation center in Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Cruvellier watched virtually the entire trial and interviewed many of the participants and observers. The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer of Rouge Torturer (Ecco, 2014) is both history and philosophy, a deeply moving attempt to understand Duch and his actions. Cruvellier offers the reader an finely crafted narrative of S-21, of the life of Duch and of the place Duch occupied in a genocidal structure. But he also wrestles with deeply philosophical questions about our ability to really understand other people’s actions, about the nature of justice in the aftermath of mass violence, and about the role of courts and trials. It’s a book that gets under your skin in the best kind of way. A journalist, Cruvellier earlier wrote a similar account of witnessing the trial of perpetrators from the Rwandan genocide. As we discuss in the interview, the experience of listening to accounts of atrocities day after day has taken a toll on him, as it would on anyone. But the book that resulted is profoundly moving and unsettling. I hope our discussion offers a taste of the ideas and understanding his book offers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The task of bearing witness to war and terror, even for a journalist, is not to reduce events to our own understanding, but by acknowledging and reporting them, to serve both the dead and the living. Thierry Cruvellier has done this as one of the only journalists to have attended the trials of all of our contemporary international war crimes tribunals. Yet few such trials are more powerful than that of a mild mannered math teacher who was one of the principal executioners of the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the 70’s. He tells that story in his new book The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer.My conversation with Thierry Cruvellier: