Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (13 page)

Koy Thuon’s confinement coincided with a serious uprising against the regime that had broken out in Chikreng, near Siem Reap, in March. Refugees escaping to Thailand later reported widespread unrest in the Northern Zone and the replacement of local cadres there by cadres from the Southwest. Suspects from the Northern Zone and the military forces associated with it—Divisions 310 and 450—were heavily purged. The S-21 archive contains over three hundred confessions from people associated with these units, and an 1178-page dossier amalga-mates references to soldiers in Division 310 mentioned in all the confessions. In March 1977 alone, some 1,059 people arrived at S-21, straining its capacity. An overwhelming number of them had Northern Zone connections.
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In questioning Koy Thuon, interrogators sought out or created multiple connections with people already purged. The prisoner also confessed to meetings with two American CIA agents whom he identifi as “Furkley” and “Cerutti,” with Vietnamese “agents,” and with non-Communist Cambodian colleagues from the 1960s during the civil war.
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Koy Thuon brought out the worst in his interrogators. On 2 March Duch wrote him an ominously deferential letter which closed by asking

why your faith was so strong, given that the CIA, Vietnam and the Khmer Serei all have stinking reputations and given that their concrete forces have disintegrated under attack to an extent you had not imagined? On this question you have not yet reported correctly. This is the question you are avoiding.

Two days later, Koy Thuon wrote an abject response to these demands. For another month, before he was killed, he doled out hundreds of names and detailed narratives of his own and other people’s treasonous behavior.

His confession was a mirror image of the Party’s triumphal narrative. At every turn, his feckless “plans” to assassinate Pol Pot, to “gather forces,” to form rival parties, to assemble Thai, American, and Vietnamese patronage and support, to demoralize his own troops, and to “produce confusion” by reinstituting private property came to nothing. His “treasonous activities,” which should have been sufficient to unnerve or smash any incumbent regime, had no effect on DK. Instead, his powerlessness and his abject confession provided further evidence of the Party’s clairvoyance.

Echoing the passage in the
Tung Padevat
article, study sessions at S-21 at this time concluded that Koy Thuon’s arrest and the data in his confession had dramatically reduced tensions in the country. The senior interrogator Tuy wrote in his study notebook:

In the old Northern Zone before the problem of Khuon’s “strings” or “networks” was solved there were problems of defense and construction and problems affecting people’s livelihood. After the contemptible Khuon’s “strings” were clear, the movement was able to leap along in every aspect.
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Two weeks after Koy Thuon’s arrest, Doeun was brought into S-21. Doeun had worked closely with Thuon in the civil war and had replaced him briefl as commerce secretary. In 1975 he became the administrative officer of Office 870, the CPK’s Central Committee. He visited Koy Thuon often in 1976 and 1977 to discuss commerce ministry affairs. The visits had certainly been approved by higher-ups beforehand, but by the time of Doeun’s arrest, they had become occasions for conspiratorial talk. While the “offenses” of both men may have been woven together from the suspicions of the Party Center, the possibility of a genuine conspiracy between these two old friends, one close to the Party Center and the other maintaining extensive “strings” of loyal people in the countryside, cannot be discounted.
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Rummaging in his memory for offenses, Doeun claimed that he had shirked combat in the civil war, encouraged subordinates to “lose faith

in the revolution,” and planted fruit trees without permission. He also confessed to extensive dealings with Vietnamese cadres (normal practice at that stage of the civil war) and to plotting outright against DK. Of the prisoners arrested so far, with the possible exception of Ney Saran, Doeun was the closest to the Party Center, and the importance of his position in Office 870 is confirmed by the fact that he was replaced by Khieu Samphan, DK’s ostensible chief of state. It is possible, as Heder has argued, that Khieu Samphan played a key role in Doeun’s

downfall. He was certainly the major beneficiary.
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Koy Thuon’s confession also implicated Hu Nim (alias Phoas), DK’s minister of information and propaganda and a longtime associate of Khieu Samphan, who was arrested in April 1977.
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Born into a poor peasant family in Kompong Cham in 1930, Hu Nim had overlapped with Khieu Samphan (and missed overlapping with Saloth Sar) at school in Kompong Cham. He studied in France from 1955 to 1957, while Khieu Samphan was there, before taking up a government position in Phnom Penh. Along with Samphan and Hou Youn, Hu Nim had served in Sihanouk’s National Assembly until he had attracted the prince’s wrath for his outspoken pro-Chinese views. Threatened with arrest in 1967, Hu Nim fl the capital. Hou Youn and Khieu Samphan had preceded him. For several years, nothing was heard of the three men. Their supporters assumed that they were dead, and they came to be known as the “three ghosts.”

Soon after the March 1970 coup d’état, the ghosts reappeared via a radio broadcast recruiting people into the resistance. During the civil war, they occupied “cabinet” positions in the United Front government, forming a façade that concealed those who held genuine power in the Party Center.

Hu Nim was a dedicated revolutionary. Even at S-21, it seems, he was still prepared to accept the rulings of the Party. In his own handwriting he spelled out a lifetime of counterrevolutionary activity, but because his revolutionary career was so well known, much of the treason that he was made to adduce had to be subjective and related to unspoken “bourgeois” attitudes.

As the Dutch scholar R. A. Burgler has suggested, there are hints in Hu Nim’s confession that he had some genuine objections to CPK pol-icy and had heard objections from others. According to Kiernan, Hu Nim had suggested reintroducing money into DK.
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In his confession, Hu Nim said that Nhem Ros, the secretary of the Northwestern Zone, had criticized the Party Center’s policy of “self reliance, using the labor force as the basis and using very little machinery.” Hu Nim stated that

Sao Phim shared similarly subversive views. Nhem Ros had also complained, accurately enough, that armed struggle in the northwest in the 1960s, beginning with the quasi-spontaneous Samlaut uprising of 1967, which had been savagely repressed, had been ignored in the Party history. Hu Nim promised to produce sympathetic propaganda materials about the northwest that would defy the Party Center’s reading of history.
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Hu Nim’s confession foreshadowed the arrests that soon swept through the Northwestern Zone. The purges in fact responded to the food crisis affecting the zone, where thousands of “new people” evacuated from the cities had already died of malnutrition and overwork and where unrealistic grain quotas set by the Party and enshrined in the Four-Year Plan had not been met, resulting in famine. The purges constituted a classic case of scapegoating by the Party Center, whose programs could fail only if they had been betrayed. As Nhem Ros put it, quoted in Hu Nim’s confession:

“Now for the year 1976, the Party has assigned us the task of achieving three tons [of paddy] per hectare. As for the northwest . . . the Party has assigned us four tons per hectare. . . . How can we [fulfill the Plan] if there is no solution to the problem of machinery? We cannot. This is not my fault, it’s the fault of the Standing Committee.”
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For Hu Nim to write the last sentence in this passage, even placing it in the mouth of someone else, took extraordinary courage. On 28 May 1977, he wrote in his last confession that

over the twenty–five years that have passed [1952–1977] I gave myself over very cheaply into the service of the enemy’s activities. Strong private property habits, imposed on me by the feudal and capitalist classes and the imperialists, suppressed me and made me become an enemy agent. I served the . . . CIA and the American imperialists who have now been shamefully defeated, and I have received my present fate. Over the past month and a half I have received a lot of education from the Party. I have nothing to depend on, only the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Would the Party please show clemency toward me. My life is completely dependent on the Party.

In late April 1977, Hu Nim was followed into S-21 by Siet Chhe (alias Tum), who had replaced Chan Chakrei on the military general staff in 1976 after serving as secretary of Sector 22 in the Eastern Zone. There, as a known protégé of Pol Pot, he may have been expected to keep tabs on Sao Phim and other cadres. Siet Chhe had studied under Saloth Sar at the Chamraon Vichea middle school in the 1950s. He had been

brought into the Communist movement by Saloth Sar and his wife, Khieu Ponnary. He had accompanied Sar to Office 100 in 1963 and had nursed him through bouts of malaria and other ailments. By 1977, however, probably because of his association with the Eastern Zone and with intellectuals of his generation in the Party then being purged, Siet Chhe’s credit had run out. Perhaps, as he suggested in his confession, other Party members were jealous of his high status. His arrest was a clear indication that loyalty in the CPK was never a two-way street. Indeed, because Siet Chhe was thought to have betrayed his trust—or perhaps, as he claimed, because he was innocent and still hoped for intercession from Pol Pot—his interrogations were particularly severe. Moreover, just before his arrest he had been working closely with Son Sen. His former mentor, to avoid being implicated himself, was probably zealous in pushing for a confession.

Like Keo Meas, Siet Chhe tried to send private memoranda to the “upper brothers” from S-21. The fact that these documents survive in the archive suggests that they never left the prison. Siet Chhe’s high sta-tus, however, probably kept Duch and his colleagues from destroying them. They are worth quoting in detail.
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In the first of them, written a week after his arrest, Siet Chhe denied the charges leveled against him. Three days later, he wrote to “Brother 89,” Son Sen:

I am suffering horribly, brother! Never in my life have I run into anything like this! When my daughter was in the enemies’ [Lon Nol’s] prison, I thought it was a normal thing—a struggle between the enemy and us! Now that I’m con-fi in the revolution’s prison
(kuk padevat)
on the other hand, I can’t understand it, it’s enormously confusing, but in the end I can see clearly that it was the CIA group, the Vietnamese consumers of territory, and people working for the KGB who have dropped me into the revolution’s prison.

Siet Chhe told Son Sen that “three traitors” had slandered him. He claimed to have reported everything about the issue “to the Organization in detail through S-21.” By communicating directly with the “upper brothers” he hoped to negotiate his fate. Later in the memorandum, however, he noted that “I have always understood without any fi knowledge [of the place] that once entering S-21, very few leave; that is, there’s only entering; leaving never happens. Brother, if this is the case, I have no way out.”

His appeal for mercy is rendered more poignant by what seems to be its transparent honesty, its breathlessness, and, as we shall see, by the

brutality of Duch’s response. Siet Chhe was terrified. He knew that he was about to be tortured. He wrote:

At S-21 for a week now, the staff have not used any methods at all against my body. I have only been shackled. The staff have taken good care of me. According to the people responsible for me, after five to seven days I would enter stage 2, that is, the stage of being tortured.

Beloved brother! I know I am finished! No matter how the comrades take me and beat me, break my bones to bits, there will be nothing new to report. It is certain that there will be only the flow of blood and feces, or death.

Please rescue me in time, brother. No matter how I die, I will be loyal to the Party to the end.

If you don’t rescue your younger brother, he will certainly die! And I will agree to die by my own hand, not allowing the Party Security
(santesuk pak)
to smash me [and thus] saving the honor of Party Security for smashing of [genuine] enemies . . .

This is the final time. . . . Brother, please rescue your younger brother in time. I would be happy to grow rice with my wife and children on a collective farm. I don’t need to have any official position. You need not think of that. . . . Please save me, just let me live.