Is Khmer Rouge jailer Duch just a nobody?

Comrade Duch, now a born-again Christian lay preacher, admitted to the Cambodian missionary responsible for his conversion, Christopher LaPel, that he "did a lot of bad things in his life", deeds for which he was not sure he could be forgiven.

Comrade Duch (pronounced Doik) has been on trial in Cambodia since February 2009 for supervising the torture and killings of some 16,000 men, women and children at the notorious Khmer Rouge prison known as S-21 between 1975 and 1979.

Today, at the end of the hearings, the prosecution called for a "lengthy jail term" following evidence that Duch was guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

A devoted member of the Khmer Rouge, Duch's defence is that he was following orders from higher-ups in the regime and it would have been fatal to disobey.

Watching clips of Duch's testimony in court, what is so chilling is that this 66-year-old former maths teacher, who was responsible for atrocities on such a massive scale, appears to be so ordinary. A wiry man, with a lined face and crooked teeth, Duch joins the ranks of "ordinary" men who in the last century were the conduits for mass exterminations under orders from oppressive political regimes.

The judges conducting the Khmer Rouge trials have limited the prosecution to the four most senior surviving party members in addition to Kaing Guek Eav, aka Comrade Duch, who is the least senior officer on trial.

We want to categorise those who commit evil deeds as either "bad" or "mad"

His testimony has been chosen first because out of the five he is the only one to admit responsibility for his actions and the only one to express remorse and to cooperate with the prosecution. The four more senior officers claim that their subordinates carried out the killings without their knowledge and out of over-zealous loyalty to the party.

There are striking parallels with the Khmer Rouge trials and Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Hugh Trevor-Roper in the Times compared the experience of witnessing Eichmann's trial to the Nuremberg trials, describing it as "a trial for shrunken puppets hiding behind a master who had disappeared".

Hannah Arendt, in her groundbreaking work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in 1961, argued that Eichmann, along with countless other Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, was not motivated to commit the atrocities of the Nazi regime through hatred and malevolence but rather through lack of thought, imagination and memory. These are the basic ingredients found in what Arendt describes as the "nobodies" who commit evil. Just as Eichmann was described as a loving family man, there are similarly stories of Duch's kindness and his sense of humour.

We tend to want to categorise people who commit evil deeds as either "bad" or "mad". This way we can feel that evil-doers are "other" than us and we can disassociate ourselves from them. The trouble with Eichmann and now Duch is that they are neither