Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (17 page)

The opening and closing pairs of suggestions recall police procedures anywhere, but problems arise with suggestions 2 through 5. The difference between “political propaganda” and “insults” and the borderline between “pressure” and “torture” are not defi The dehumanization of the prisoners, the lopsided power relations at S-21, the permissiveness of its culture, and the urgency with which the interrogations were carried out encouraged widespread violence. Long before torture was applied, interrogations were routinely accompanied by kicks and punches. The former guard Kok Sros has recalled that prisoners were often “covered with blood” when they were taken back to their cells, an observation corroborated by the S-21 survivor Pha Thachan, and mug shots of many prisoners show signs of recent beatings.
²¹

As far as “doing politics” is concerned, a parallel from Vietnam in the 1950s is instructive. In the land-reform campaign launched by the newly installed Communist government, what were called
truy buc
methods were used to extract confessions from alleged “landlords” in the countryside.
Truy buc,
which has been translated as “the constant repetition of demands and questions over a long period,” aptly describes the procedures used in “doing politics” at S-21 and in other interrogation facilities.
²²

The forms of verbal pressures used are difficult to recapture. In nearly all the confessions the interrogator’s questions have been removed. The kind of interrogation dialogue so vividly depicted by Artur London, Solzhenitsyn, Jacobo Timerman, and others is missing. Moreover, no interrogators have been interviewed so far, and none of the survivors of S-21 was interrogated for very long, whereas we know that some senior figures were questioned at S-21 on dozens of occasions over several months. Over this length of time, relationships between interrogators and prisoners and patterns of questioning were bound to develop, as a few key confessions, like Ney Saran’s, make clear, but these relationships are missing from the archive. An exception proving the rule is the confession of Thong Vann, a Party member arrested in September 1977. Describing his interrogation, Thong wrote:

When I first arrived [at S-21] a representative of the security office came and questioned me. He accused me of being CIA on the basis of the accusations of others who had said that I was CIA. At that point I lost mastery completely and said, “Negative.” He said, “If [you say] ‘negative’ [there would be] a beating [that] would lead to our getting clear information.”

To start off with, I wrote a detailed summary of my revolutionary activities to date. When I had written it, the representative of the security office said, “How come I don’t see any treacherous story [here]?”

“Because I’ve done no treacherous activities,” I replied.

And the representative said, “If your answer is negative, you will be beaten.” I asked if I could write the truth.

“If you write about treacherous activities, that would be good.”

I knew that I could not withstand torture, so I decided to write a made-up story about my treasonous activities. I wrote that I had been a traitor since 1970 and about my connections with Non Suon when we were together in . . . Oural.

I listed all the comrades who had carried out revolutionary activities with me in 1976. After I did this the security representative asked me to clarify my story: “What about treasonous activities when you were in the city?” he said.

I answered, “[There were] none.”

The security representative said, “If you say ‘none’ you get beaten with an electric cord.”

When I heard about torture, my body began to shake. I began to write a made-up story.
²³

Several months earlier, Siet Chhe (alias Tum) wrote a memorandum to
santebal
that offers another glimpse of a prisoner’s psychology in the early stages of interrogation and torture (see chapter 3). Siet Chhe believed that he had been falsely accused and that Duch should allow him to communicate directly with the “upper brothers”—a proposal that Duch repeatedly brushed aside. His memorandum of 8 May revealed his oscillating, unsteady state of mind.
²⁴

On the evening of 7–8 May 1977 [i.e., tonight] my state of mind has been unstable in a way I cannot describe. I can’t see any road to the future. I beg the Party to show pity on its child at this time.

[These are] developments in my state of mind: Stage 1. The period after the Organization first arrested me until 4 May 77 was one of report writing on every point that the Organization wanted explained. Using those reports, I hoped that the Organization would inquire and investigate at the bases where I had been involved and would [thereby] verify my statements. I had hoped that the
santebal
ministry, as the responsible ministry, would follow up and validate these documents and submit summaries of them to the Organization. Make a foundation for any of my large and small mistakes and care for me.

Stage 2. From the evening of 4 May until [today] I underwent all kinds of torture according to
santebal
’s procedures.
Santebal
’s perception [so far] has been that I am a 100 percent traitor and that there is no way at all that I am not a traitor.

So, given their stance, the level of torture has gradually been increased so that as I face this situation my feelings fluctuate wildly. I do not see any way to get out. [Tonight] my feelings are as follows:

1. If I admitted to being a traitor when I was not, I would not know how to report any [genuine] activities with collaborators in a reasonable, continuous way. This is one thing. Moreover if I did that, considering my stance toward the Party since 26 May 59 and toward Brother Number 1 [Pol Pot], who brought me up all along, and wrote according to torture, well, I could not do that!
   
2. Weighing this back and forth, I see the best way out as death . . . sud-den death to escape the pain . . . and be with the Party until the end. But there is no possibility of sudden death. Again, no way out . . . I fear torture and death. If I was connected with any traitors, I would immediately tell the Organization and I would be free from this torture immediately.
   
3. After considering this back and forth, and fi no way out, this morning I struggle to write to let the Organization know about the development of my feelings and pity me. This last request is to ask the Organization to kindly delay my torture and to reconsider the three traitors’ testimony
   

that accused me. These enemies made this up. I know there must be contradictions in some important points.

Prisoners were encouraged to corroborate previous confessions and to incriminate people who had already been arrested and killed, and it is possible that higher-ranking prisoners were given other confessions to read. In other words, if prisoner A confessed to taking part in a conspiracy, his confession seemed to ring truer if he admitted conspiring in the past with C, P, and G, who had been arrested and executed months before. Thus Baen Chhae, interrogated in the Eastern Zone in June 1977 before being brought to S-21, was encouraged to name “anyone the Organization has [already] arrested.” The interrogators, he continued, “further said that anyone I could think of who had been arrested in any sector or zone I should say that they were all my connections.”
²⁵
“Doing politics” was always more difficult for workers at S-21 than beating up the prisoners. For one thing, the “upper brothers” to whom the confessions were routed were impossible to consult. Moreover, the interrogators were poorly trained and poorly informed. The prisoners were always frightened but seldom helpful. Indeed, an entry in Tuy and Pon’s notebook suggests that the relations between prisoners and interrogators often came to an ominous, unpromising halt when violence was called for. “In the matter of questioning enemies their strong point is that we don’t know their story, so they can say anything they want,” the entry

read, adding: “Their weak point is that they are in our hands.”
²⁶
Everyone at the prison was also handicapped by the volatility of the

Party’s stance toward “enemies.” As the 1976 study notebook declared:

The Party changes frequently. The Party changes the prisoners to be interrogated in no fi pattern. The Party goes from one group to another and sometimes changes our duties. The Party also changes its methods for mak-ing documents, for interrogation, for doing politics, for propaganda, for torture. We must adjust ourselves to the situation, leaping along with the movement of three tonnes [of rice] per hectare [a slogan from DK’s Utopian Four-Year Plan].
²⁷

Interrogators at S-21 were often whipsawed by instructions of this kind. How could any of them feel safe or competent when they were told to “[leap] along with the movement of three tonnes per hectare”? Sau Kang, the former secretary of Sector 37 in the Western Zone, put the point succinctly in his confession when he complained that “if the higher-ups keep modifying things back and forth suddenly like this, those lower down will be unable to keep up.”
²⁸

The Party’s insistence that practice overshadowed theory had the effect of ignoring inconvenient precedents and legitimizing anything that the Party Center did or had in mind. Only the leaders were free from blame and free to change direction. A Khmer Rouge cadre, interviewed on the Thai border in 1980, told Steve Heder:

[The cadres] blame everything on others. They say everything depends on the concrete situation, but they’re the ones who conclude what the concrete situation is and even sometimes create the concrete situation.
²⁹

In a similar fashion, the 1976 study notebook told interrogators to “root out the stance” of believing or disbelieving what enemies confessed, but to continue “believing completely in the Party as far as enemies . . . are concerned”—an impossible proposition, when the Party Center’s position “as far as enemies are concerned” was normally concealed. Interrogators were also told to approach what the prisoners said “from a progressive standpoint and from a nonprogressive one, from a revolutionary standpoint and from one that is not revolutionary at all”—a rat’s nest of positions that left the interrogators’ superiors free to maneuver and the interrogators open to rebuke. They were urged to use torture and propaganda in “proper” proportions that were not made clear.

On some occasions even Son Sen and Duch were uncertain how to proceed. Writing to Duch in October 1977, for example, Son Sen suggested that prisoners left to their own devices might “implicate all kinds of people.” He added:

In any case, each and every response must be carefully reviewed, because some [of the prisoners] attack us (i.e., high-ranking functionaries). Some of them attack consciously. Some are frightened and merely talk.
³⁰

To make things worse for the interrogators, a study notebook from S-21 compiled in 1978 suggested that a large number of enemies were embedded inside the facility itself:

The task of searching out and purging
(somrit somrang)
enemies inside Office S-21 has not been resolved among either combatants or cadres. Our soldiers study the teachings of the Party, but when they emerge from studies, nothing has changed in their outlooks. They are still subservient to their elders
(bong).
When they are frightened they stop being relaxed and they stop smiling. Although there are enemies all around them they do nothing to seek them out.
³¹

The menacing contradictions in this passage must have unsettled any-one who read or overheard it. How could the workers at S-21 be independent, insubordinate, or suspicious, after all, while cleaving unquestioningly to their superiors’ commands? What would happen to them if they “relaxed” or “smiled”? Were attacks on Duch, Pon, and Chan really to be the order of the day? Where precisely were the ubiquitous enemies to be found?

Workers at S-21 were thrown off balance by documents like this and by the uncertainty of daily life, encapsulated by the disappearance, from time to time, of friends, relatives, and coworkers. As Kok Sros told Douglas Niven: