NewScientist (15 July 2017, paywall) has a fascinating interview with Françoise Sironi, a psychologist with a specialization that puts her in a field with few peers – assessment of those accused of war crimes and genocide. This may seem prosaic:
What kind of person becomes a perpetrator?
Many have grown up in a violent family, or experienced humiliation early in life. Then when they are recruited, their identity is often broken down in some way. This might involve a traumatic initiation process: children who are forced to become soldiers may be required to kill members of their family, for example. They can no longer return to their families or villages and they become dependent on the new group – their fellow child killers – and in particular, on the commander of that group.
This may help to explain one of the most troubling scenarios, which is medics who facilitate torture – advising interrogators when to turn the electricity off, for example, so that the victim’s heart doesn’t give out too soon. They no longer belong to a group whose identity is defined by doing no harm.
But this is a bit of a gut wrencher:
In 2008, you assessed Duch, the Khmer Rouge leader who tortured and killed thousands at the notorious S-21 prison. What did you conclude?
Duch is an example of what I call a man-system – someone who has relinquished their own identity and adopted that of the ideological system they grew up in. The same is true of Pascal Simbikangwa, who I also assessed and who is in prison for his role in the Rwandan genocide. They don’t fit any known psychiatric category. Their behaviour can only be understood in the geopolitical or historical context in which it arose.
What are the main characteristics of such individuals?
A strong sense of group belonging and duty, and an ability to compartmentalise. Duch was capable of talking normally about his family one minute and discussing his “work” at S-21 the next. It wasn’t easy for him to torture, he told us, yet he trained youngsters to do it. When he expressed regret, it was on behalf of the Khmer Rouge, not himself. At one point I asked, “What happened to your conscience?” He replied he didn’t understand the question.
That last statement’s implications set me back on my heels. Taken in isolation, without acknowledging his work, this devotion to group may be taken to be a high moral attainment.
And what was its use? Horrific torture.
It’s hard not to draw parallels between Duch and the Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada, as they inflicted agony & death on victims who did not conform to some group requirement. I suppose to an anthropologist, trained to abstractly examine human culture, this is no surprise, but for me it’s a startling descent into the amoral enterprise of group competition, where failure often means extinguishment.
And yet, the existence of such torture, and the inevitable public knowledge of same, must inevitably tear upon the nerves of the public. Because of the perception – false that it may be – of the high efficacy of torture, the knowledge that it may be turned on members of the group, rather than outsiders and apostates, its use is inevitable in intra-group situations. And why? While someone like Duch may have managed to submerge self & ego to the greater entity of the group, most others do not. Human ambition will exist, and the stronger it may be, the more likely it will use those tools that come to hand to achieve a superior position.
Thus, the group’s tool may rip that group apart.
Still, I find Duch’s statement unsettling.
