ABSTRACT
Much has been written about Hu Nim and his forced confessions.2 David Chandler, for example, maintains that Hu Nim’s confession foreshadowed a series of arrests and purges that occurred in Democratic Kampuchea throughout 1977 and 1978. His confession, and the subsequent purges, “constituted a classic case of scapegoating by the Party Center.”3 My interest, however, deviates from that of Chandler and others, in that I am struck by Hu Nim’s admission of a “false identity.” Who was Hu Nim? Or, more broadly, who was anyone under the Khmer Rouge?
