Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (23 page)

Similarly, only six former workers at the prison—Duch, three guards, a photographer, and the man who was in charge of the documentation unit—have been interviewed in depth in recent years. Only one of them, the former guard Him Huy, has admitted killing people. He says that he was not a torturer. No one who has admitted torturing prisoners has come forward, and although some ex-workers at the prison, like Huy, were arrested and “reeducated” in the 1980s for their activities at the prison, none of them has ever spoken at length about their activities, and none has gone on trial.
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The scarcity of survivors and the dearth of oral testimony or transcribed memories of prison life contrasts sharply with the voluminous literature and numerous survivors from such comparable institutions as the Soviet and Chinese gulags and the Nazi concentration camps, or with materials dealing with torture and cruelty in other countries. The work of Christopher Browning, Daniel Goldhagen, Raul Hilberg, and Gitta Sereny concerning German perpetrators of the Holocaust, for example, would be impossible to duplicate for S-21. So would the memoirs of Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Jacobo Timerman, or E. Valentine Daniel’s haunting study of Sri Lanka, which is based in part on interviews with former torturers and victims. To study torture at S-21, we are thrown back onto documents that were extracted from tortured men and women now dead, or confessions that reflect the boastful, evasive, or exculpatory views of the torturers themselves. Without corroboration from other sources, it is impossible to say whether these documents exaggerate or play down what was happening at the prison. My guess, after years of immersion in the archive,

is that innumerable random cruelties and hundreds of instances of torture went unrecorded. What we can read are faint traces of what was going on, and they give only an inkling of the mayhem perpetrated at the prison every day.
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In spite of these obstacles, torture and violence are central to S-21 and to our ability to understand prison. We need to establish the dynamics by which the confessions were extracted. We need to penetrate the thinking of the prison administrators and to understand the rationale they used for torture. Most important, as Alexander Hinton has suggested, we need to “rehumanize” the victims by bearing witness to their suffering.
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What is striking about the imposition of torture
(tearunikam)
at the prison, however, is not its brutality—although the tortures inflicted were severe—but its use within a graduated, supposedly rational process. The coolness with which torture is chosen, infl and written about is unnerving. We can easily understand outbursts of cruelty in ourselves or others, but we tend to back away from cruelty that is so carefully meted out. One explanation for this coolness, as Darius Rejali observes in his study of torture in Iran, is that torture is not so much a fruitful means of obtaining valid evidence and confessions, nor a form of unchecked sadism, as an instrument that serves to display and rationalize the power of those inflicting it, especially when they are representatives of the state. Other writers on torture have presented similar views.
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With Rejali’s formulation in mind, we can see that torture at S-21 was not simply a matter of young men and women infl their will on defenseless prisoners, although they often did so, nor was it a straight-forward extension of prerevolutionary police procedures, although elements of these, such as mug shots, thumbprinting, and the preliminary pummeling known in French argot as a
passage à tabac
were also part of S-21 routine. Instead, most of the tortures at S-21 were purposive and constrained. The beatings and tortures inflicted were merciless, but torture usually required the permission of superiors, which was sometimes withheld. Interrogators who used “excessive” torture (torture that killed prisoners before they completed their confessions) criticized themselves at livelihood meetings and were occasionally punished for the offense. In eight confession texts—all from the closing months of 1978—the interrogator noted that the confession had been extracted without the prisoner in question being beaten or tortured at all.
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By that time, the prison was operating more smoothly and “rationally” than it had in 1976, when most of the staff were new recruits and when the Party Center had found it necessary to request “less beating” at the prison.
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In 1977 and 1978 individual interrogators, except when they got out of hand, applied torture selectively at the outset of some interrogations, again when they encountered resistance, and more intensely in “difficult” cases. Torture was a tool, a means to an end, an integral part of what Foucault has called the “authoritarian search for truth.” Interrogators who tortured people found it easy to obey the people who ordered them to do it, especially when their own lives were constantly at risk. As far as we can tell, they harbored few regrets.

Limitations on torture at the prison were imposed not out of respect for the victims or because administrators found the practice unpleasant but rather because it was always linked to the other aspect of interrogation, “doing politics”
(tvoeu nayobay),
which meant, ideally, explaining the Party’s policies to the prisoners and extracting confessions. A calibrated mixture of torture, inspiration, and propaganda, it was thought, could illustrate the power relations in effect and could also produce the memories, accusations, and documents that the Party needed. Excessive torture would obstruct or delay the production of these necessary texts.

“Imposing Torture” and “Doing Politics”

The tensions that developed between doing torture and doing politics are set out in the interrogator’s study notebook prepared at the prison in 1976 and in two notebooks written by senior interrogators in 1977 and 1978. Some of the tensions sprang from the fact that while all the interrogators were encouraged to use violence, very few of them had any training in politics or interrogation. The 1976 notebook stated that torture was “secondary, subsidiary, and supplementary” to politics, but added that “doing politics” alone was insufficient. Violence was always needed. As the notebook puts it: “Take politics as the basis. Keep track of the answers, in a comparative way, and then use torture.” Two years later, the chief interrogator’s notebook asserted that “insults” were part of doing politics and added that while beating alone was “insufficient,” “beating + politics = important.”
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Prisoners at S-21 were dehumanized from the moment they arrived. Blindfolded and shackled, they were bundled out of trucks, usually at night. They were kicked, shoved, and beaten as they were taken inside to be documented and photographed. They had arrived, as Vann Nath said later, in “a place many times worse than hell.”

The distinction between beating
(vay)
and torture
(tearunikam)
lay in the use of weapons, contraptions, or humiliating ceremonies (such as the torture involving obeisance to the image of Ho Chi Minh with the body of a dog, known as
sompeah
or
thvay bongkum rup chkae
), but beatings during interrogation could also be classifi as torture, and many documents use the terms
vay
and
tearunikam
interchangeably. Once an interrogation had begun, outside controls were rare, and, as Sofsky points out with regard to German concentration camps, the “transition from torture intended to extract a confession to pure, pur-poseless torture was fl The welfare of the prisoners was never a consideration unless they died before confessing.
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Violence and Sadism

Interrogations could be stopped, intensified, or interrupted at the whim of the interrogation team leader. The torturer—usually a different per-son—could resume using his hands, take up a new weapon, or return the prisoner to his cell. If a confession could be obtained merely by beating or by asking questions, so much the better. If none was forthcoming after extensive torture, so much the worse. Some prisoners were tortured on a daily basis. Ten Chan, a survivor, recalls being beaten and occasionally tortured for twenty-six days in a row.
¹⁴

The victims of torture often died. The prison authorities were unconcerned if death occurred after a confession had been obtained, but if a prisoner died beforehand the interrogator was often suspected of sabotage. Several interrogators imprisoned at S-21 confessed to killing prisoners under interrogation, and so did two of the guards, but in most cases it is unclear whether this crime was the one for which they had been arrested or whether it reflected their own assessment of punishable actions in their recent past. In any case, sadistic emotions occasionally spilled over, as the former guard Son Moeun wrote in his confession:

After I was assigned to guard this prisoner [in the “special prison” south of Tuol Sleng] I saw the [interrogators] beating him, and when the interrogators were gone I stole inside and beat him too, pushing, kicking, and punch-ing him freely, until the prisoner said, “What are you doing? You’ll kill me this way!”

Soon afterwards, the prisoner in question, Bun Than, died from the injuries inflicted by the interrogators and the guard. His confession is incomplete.
¹⁵

In any case, locked inside a total institution that was cross-cut by the competing demands of permissiveness and “discipline,” empowerment and mistrust, violence and propaganda, interrogators always walked a fi line between too little and too much. They usually erred in the direction of excess, which was seldom punished, rather than discretion, which was never rewarded.

Like their counterparts in the Nazi death camps, they became callous. Cruelty at the prison, if we can judge from the documents that survive, was often what Randall Collins has called “cruelty without passion,” in which “the subject of the violence is simply an instrument or an obstacle, and his suffering is merely an incidental (usually ignored) feature of some other intention.”
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A vivid example of cruelty without passion at S-21 is a note sent by senior interrogator Pon to Duch following a day of vigorous interrogation. The prisoner in question was Keo Meas, a former member of the Party’s Central Committee. Pon wrote:

On the night of 26 September 1976, after threatening [the prisoner] with a few words, I had him remove his shirt and shackled his arms behind him, to be removed only at meals. [I thus] deprived him of sleep and let mosquitoes bite.
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Penal and Judicial Torture

The phenomena of torture and violence at S-21 need to be placed in a historical context. Did they have roots in prerevolutionary Cambodian practices, or were they new phenomena traceable to the needs of the Khmer Rouge and less firmly to specific foreign models?

Etymology sheds some light on the issue of torture itself. The Cambodian word for torture,
tearunikam,
shared with Thai, derives from the Sanskrit
daruna,
meaning “fierce” or “savage,” and the Pali
kamm,
meaning “action.” According to the definitive Khmer dictionary published by the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh in the 1960s, its secondary meanings, like those of its Thai counterpart, are “savagery,” “cruelty,” and “barbarism.” The illustrative sentence for
tearunikam
in the Buddhist Institute dictionary reads: “Don’t ever torture [i.e., inflict cruelty on] people or animals.”
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Torture in its Khmer linguistic context, then, implies mere cruelty, carries moral opprobrium, and is not associated with the administration of justice. The phrase
dak tearunikam,
“to impose torture,” suggests a cruel ordeal, or what Foucault and Rejali have referred to as

penal
torture, embodying what Foucault has called “the revenge of the sovereign,” rather than what Edward Peters has referred to as
judicial
torture, which has been connected throughout history with gathering evidence and obtaining confessions.

Peters’s magisterial study traces the practice of judicial torture from Greece in the fifth century
B
.
C
., where it was practiced only on slaves, through its development under Roman law and its revival in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
A
.
D
. Peters goes on to describe what he calls the “regularizing” of judicial torture that occurred between the thirteenth century and the eighteenth, when the practice came under sustained attack. He closes his book by discussing the revival of judicial torture on a global scale in recent times.