Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (10 page)

remained at large, although soon after the explosion Koy Thuon was summoned to Phnom Penh, ostensibly to take charge of the nation’s foreign trade but also to be questioned about alleged sexual miscon-duct. On 8 April 1976, less than a week after the explosions in Phnom Penh, Koy Thuon was placed in protective custody in a “special building”
(sala pises)
near the Royal Palace, not far from the heavily guarded buildings occupied by the “upper brothers.” In May and June, the sec-ond wave of purges began in earnest.
²³

In presenting the sequence of these purges, using data drawn to a large extent from successive confessions, I have taken no position on the truth of the texts or on the prisoners’ innocence or guilt. Because these decisions may disappoint readers looking for a reliable history of opposition to DK, my rationale needs to be spelled out.
²⁴

First, without corroboration from other sources, very few of the “facts” contained in the confessions, aside from strictly autobiographical ones, can be taken at face value. Whether prisoners told the truth under torture, said what they were told to say, said what they thought their interrogators wanted to hear, or produced a mélange of truth, half-truth, and fantasy is impossible to determine. It is safe to assume, however, not only that in their broad outlines most confessions were fabricated to suit what S-21 officials assumed to be the wishes of the Party Center but also that strands of genuine conspiratorial narrative, and actual angry conversations are sometimes woven into the confessions.
²⁵
Second, very few documents have survived about the decisions made by the Party Center regarding “enemies.” We can seldom determine why prisoners were arrested, aside from tracing their associations with others already arrested or with units that had performed badly and had come under suspicion. For low-ranking prisoners, the essence of their “crimes” was often the company they kept. Higher-ranking prisoners, on the other hand, were made to confess to planning to overthrow or sabotage the revolution by forming rival parties, plotting to assassinate the Party’s leaders, or openly criticizing the Party Center’s policies.

Whether these conspiracies were genuine, or the conspirators accurately named, is impossible to determine.

Although there were no courts or judges in Democratic Kampuchea, the confessions resemble briefs for the prosecution, or more precisely the kinds of evidence assembled for an examining magistrate under the French system of justice practiced in prerevolutionary Cambodia. The confessions were prepared at S-21 for the invisible “judges” in the Party Center. Because of the infallibility asserted by the Party Center and the

secrecy surrounding S-21, the possibilities of error, innocence, and release were all foreclosed.

Moreover, using the words “guilty” or “innocent” to describe the prisoners at S-21 is misleading. Using these words lends judicial legitimacy to a macabre project whereby all the prisoners, regardless of their actions and before they started talking, were condemned to death. Procedures followed at S-21 indeed sometimes seem to have been inspired by the Red Queen in
Alice in Wonderland
or by Kafka’s
The Trial.
At another level, those prisoners genuinely “guilty” of opposing DK might well deserve to be seen—in hindsight, to be sure—as heroes, while those victims who were “innocent” of opposition and thus com-plicit in the regime’s guiding ideas and practices should not necessarily be honored as law-abiding citizens of a humane regime, swept up in error by a responsive judicial system. In the topsy-turvy world of DK, as in the French Revolution and in occupied Europe in World War II, guilt and innocence were always affected by the ebb and flow of power at the top.

The diverse responses of French citizens to the German occupation in World War II provide a useful parallel to what happened in Cambodia, with diverse meanings opening up for “selfishness,” “nationalism,” and “betrayal” depending on who was involved in politics as well as where, when, and to what extent. To extend the comparison, it certainly occurred to a number of CPK cadres after 1977, or even earlier, that some form of foreign, (Vietnamese) patronage or even a more “Vietnamese” style of revolution would be preferable to the ongoing depredations, endemic poverty, and apparently random, open-ended violence of DK. By 1978 thousands of Cambodians were cutting their losses, drawn to the greater power of the Vietnamese and the possibility of new patrons. None of them, it seems, had judged DK as evil from the start. Similarly, very few French citizens had opposed Pétain in 1940, whereas many had come to do so by 1943. In DK in 1977 and 1978, however, the defectors from DK, like latter-day Gaullistes, became guilty, from the government’s perspective, of choosing what turned out to be the winning side. The purges of the Eastern Zone in Cambodia in 1978, which aimed to stamp out resistance and prevent more people from fleeing to Vietnam, had the unintended effect of generating opposition among survivors. Those who escaped these purges, including such post-1979 Cambodian luminaries as Heng Samrin, Chea Sim, and Sar Kheng, joined surviving “Hanoi Khmers” and some earlier defectors to form the regime that took office after the Vietnamese invasion.

Finally, the awesome cruelty of the DK regime toward its citizens, so vividly documented in the archive of S-21, does not foreclose the possibility that Pol Pot and his associates in some cases (but which ones?) had evidence about real conspiracies to overthrow them. As Steve Heder has suggested, many of the confessions ring true, even without corroboration, and it would be wrong to label all the prisoners at S-21 “innocent” of involvement in conspiracy because their confessions contain absurdities, because the regime was evil, or because they were all so cruelly treated.

Rationale for the Archive

Putting questions of justice, truth, innocence, and guilt aside, we still need to ask why the S-21 archive was so voluminous and why it was maintained at all when its contents were kept secret, so much of the material was untrue, and all the prisoners were killed.

We now know that DK was far more heavily documented than observers had thought likely in the 1980s, when hardly any DK documents except those from Tuol Sleng were accessible to outsiders. Impressed at the time by the sheer bulk of the S-21 archive and the supposedly primitive character of the regime, many of us believed that other documentation from DK, if it existed, would not alter the general picture that was emerging from survivors’ descriptions.
²⁶
Since 1994, however, hundreds of thousands of pages of DK materials, including thousands more dealing with S-21, have come to light. Most of these were released by the Cambodian government to the Cambodia Genocide Program managed by Yale University. Others were discovered at S-21 itself after the microfi of the archive was completed in 1993.
²⁷
Many of these recently discovered documents are typed; some survive in several carbon copies. The clatter of typewriters in derelict buildings, indeed, was probably one of the few sounds of human activity in Phnom Penh. Moreover, we know that the mountain of DK material now accessible to scholars represents only a fraction of what was produced. Sizable collections of DK documents still closed to outsiders are

known to exist in Cambodia and Vietnam.
²⁸

The S-21 archive, therefore, is not unusual in its volume or its technical sophistication, but why it was maintained? Why were such lengthy and detailed confessions extracted from people already condemned to death and kept on file after the prisoners had been killed? An obvious, perhaps overriding answer is that workers at S-21 wanted

at all costs to avoid the wrath of their superiors. Playing it safe, they processed the regime’s “enemies” as thoroughly as they could and maintained the voluminous files as proof of their hard work. Another likelihood is that the administrators of the prison, every one a true believer, were genuinely curious about betrayals of their “beloved Party” and hoped, by documenting what the prisoners confessed, to plumb the depths of counterrevolutionary schemes. A third possibility is that prisoners hoped by spinning out their confessions to avoid or postpone torture and execution. Finally, its seems clear that Son Sen and the other former schoolteachers running the prison wanted to administer a mod-ern, meticulously documented security operation, worthy of an interna-tionally recognized Communist regime and pleasing to themselves.

These explanations are helpful, but a more fruitful one was suggested to me some time ago by Steve Heder, who argued that the archive was assembled to provide the Party Center with raw material for a massive, unwritten history of the Party.
²⁹
Detailed accounts of so many conspiracies would have assuaged the curiosity of Pol Pot and his colleagues— lifelong conspirators themselves—about what was going on behind their backs while they were underground in the 1950s, in hiding in the 1960s, and on the move during the civil war. Moreover, because everyone held at S-21 was eventually “smashed,” their confessions would testify not only to their crimes but also to the Party’s power and omni-science. As induced historical texts, they provided the Party’s leaders with intriguingly dark areas that threw the triumphal history of the Party into sharp relief. The model that Pol Pot and his colleagues were following, it seems, was the
History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
as published in 1939—a document with which several of them had probably become familiar during their time in France. This document tells the story of Stalin’s triumph over the Party’s internal enemies.
³⁰

At a psychological level, reading confessions and execution reports and looking at photographs of their executed enemies must have made the “upper brothers” feel temporarily secure. Like many authoritarian leaders, Pol Pot and his colleagues believed that they were surrounded by enemies conspiring to overthrow them. The prisoners at S-21 objectified these fantasies and brought their dreams to life just long enough for the dreamers to know that their enemies were being subdued. Rul-ing the country by terror, the DK leaders seem to have been terrifi themselves, echoing what Engels had observed to Marx in September 1870, during the siege of Paris: “We take the reign of Terror to mean

the rule of people who inspire terror. On the contrary, it is the rule of people who are themselves terror-stricken.
La Terreur
implies mostly needless cruelties perpetuated by terrified men.”
³¹

The interrogators at S-21 also acted like poorly trained therapists excavating the buried “memories” of their prisoners just as therapists examine the manias of their patients. The patients in question were not the prisoners, as one might expect, although the interrogations included elements of Chinese-style thought reform. Instead, the patients, or at least the benefi of the therapy, were those in the Party Center whose anxieties and resentments were embodied by the prisoners and in the crimes that the prisoners were encouraged to “remember” and confess. As ring after ring of enemies was smashed at S-21, the leaders of DK may have felt vindicated and reassured. In the meantime, however, another ring of enemies had sprung to life.

The interrogation procedures followed at S-21 bear some rudimentary and fortuitous resemblances to psychoanalytic practices. As sources for an unwritten Party history and as tools of therapy beneficial to the Party Center, the interrogations and the confessions provided the Party Center with what the psychiatrist Donald Spence has called the “narrative truth” that they needed to function as political leaders and perhaps as human beings.
³²
The relation of the confessions to Spence’s contrasting notion of “historical truth,” however, cannot be clarifi until more DK archival materials come to light or more former party members speak their minds. In the meantime, reading the confessions takes us inside the thought processes of a schizophrenic regime that was at once terrified and terrifying, clairvoyant and delusional, omnipotent and perpetually under threat. The confessions provide a narrative of the Party Center’s evolving fears and obsessions as these beleaguered, vin-dictive, visionary men and women struggled to maintain the nation on a war footing, impose collectivization, achieve economic independence, stifle dissent, and centralize their control.

The Events of April 1976

On 30 March 1976, at a meeting convened by the Party Center, procedures were established “to smash [people] inside and outside the ranks.” These delegated control over “smashing” enemies to appropriate bodies so as “to strengthen our state power”; the bodies in question were to be accountable to the Party Center. The gnomic reference is as close as researchers have yet come to a smoking gun that implicates the

leaders of DK in the mass killings perpetrated under their regime. The meeting also dealt with such questions as pushing Sihanouk aside as chief of state, tearing down the Catholic cathedral in Phnom Penh, Party history, economic planning, official holidays, and government organization. Reading it today, one senses the helter-skelter enthusiasm of the newly empowered regime, whose leaders were looking forward to extending their victory of April 1975 “over the United States” to Cambodian society as a whole.
³³