Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (24 page)

A shortcoming of Peters’s absorbing study is its failure to take up Asian examples of judicial torture in any detail. Both judicial and penal torture were widespread in classical China, Japan, and Vietnam, especially in interrogating prisoners of war or when confessions or the names of a prisoner’s associates were required. A Chinese term,
kao wen,
breaks down into the characters for “interrogate” and “beat,” while the Vietnamese term,
tra tan,
uses the verbs “to examine” and “to question” without implying violence. The notion of blending torture with interrogations to produce confessions—missing from the word
tearunikam
—seems to have been a Sino-Vietnamese concept as well as a European one, but it was not familiar in the Theravada Buddhist parts of Southeast Asia. Evidence for its arrival in Cambodia before DK is lacking
.
¹⁹

Even with this neglect of Asia, what Peters writes about judicial torture in Europe prior to 1800 is applicable to S-21. With the rise of Christianity, he tells us, judicial torture became integral to heresy cases. It was justifi partly because “heresy was a shared offense [and] besides the salvation of the heretic’s soul, inquisitors needed the names of fellow-heretics.” Under torture, the suspected heretic produced the names of people who were subsequently tortured and who then produced more names, in widening spirals similar to those constructed centuries later at Tuol Sleng. In a perceptive paper about medieval torture, Talal Asad has suggested that “since the crime of holding heretical views could not be confi independently of a confession by the accused, [torture] had to be tried before the existence of the crime could be established. Since the crime itself was deliberately hidden, the hunt for the truth had to employ its own game of deadly secrets.”
²⁰
In most of these cases, as at S-21, defendants were assumed from the start to be

guilty, were allowed little or no formal defense, and were subject to condemnation on the strength of hearsay.

Torture in Cambodia’s Past

In prerevolutionary Cambodia, there is no documentation of torture being used for evidentiary purposes, although suspects were sometimes subjected to painful ordeals to “prove” that they were lying or telling the truth. Instead, scattered evidence suggests that torture took its punitive form, extending or intensifying punishments meted out for crimes of lèse-majesté. Vivid examples of such ordeals can be found in several Angkorean inscriptions and are mentioned as penalties for defiance of oaths sworn by medieval Cambodian officials. Bas-reliefs in the southern gallery of Angkor Wat depict some of the punishments that were thought to await transgressors. In the reliefs Yama, the Hindu deity of the underworld, is shown astride a buffalo dispatching rows of men and women either to an antiseptic heaven or into thirty-two vividly imagined levels of hell, where they are condemned, as in Dante’s
Inferno,
to grue-some tortures appropriate to their sins. A guide who pointed out the bas-reliefs to a visitor in 1981 likened Yama to Pol Pot.
²¹

In post-Angkorean Cambodia, images of hell, with victims being tortured, were painted as murals in many Buddhist
wat
s. Vann Nath has compared the prison to such a hell
(norok)
and his own experiences to those pictured in Buddhist murals, noting that prisoners were often addressed as
a-pret
(“damned souls”) by prison personnel. To complete the circle, Vann Nath’s paintings of tortures inflicted at S-21 now adorn the walls of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

In this context, the prisoners’ systematic dehumanization, which Nath has discussed in several interviews, may well have been linked to the fact that they were seen by their captors as irredeemable “unbelievers”—an unconscious carryover, perhaps, from Buddhist thinking, which tends to view nonbelievers (
thmil,
or “Tamils,” in Cambodian and Thai) as beyond the pale. Dehumanizing them made things easier for workers at S-21, just as dehumanizing Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other inmates made things easier for workers in the Nazi death camps. Those who were being tortured and killed, like the people in hell in the murals, were
others.
Pol Pot himself, in his marathon speech announcing the existence of the CPK in 1977, made this point succinctly: “These counterrevolutionary elements which betray and try to sabotage the revolution,” he said, “are not to be regarded as our people.”
²²

Elaborate public executions in precolonial Cambodia, often involving trampling by elephants, demonstrated the power of the king, destroyed the culprits, and awed the onlookers summoned to the scene. It is as if the judgment of their superiors and the fate of the culprits’ souls, as depicted at Angkor Wat and in later murals, had to be prefig-ured by the public destruction of their bodies.
²³

Other physical punishments for crimes in precolonial times were also very severe. Seventeenth-century Cambodian legal codes, for example, list twenty-one time-consuming, extremely painful punishments that were permissible in cases involving people “who seek to become great and seek to betray the king who is the lord of the land.”
²⁴
The Khmer narrative poem
Tum Taev,
set in the seventeenth century, first published in the early 1900s, and familiar to generations of Cambodian school-children, closes with the execution of an entire family after one of them is accused of lèse-majesté. Buried up to the neck, the family is decapi-tated by passing an iron harrow drawn by water buffaloes across their protruding heads.
²⁵

These precolonial cases and prescriptions resemble the public executions in prerevolutionary France described in detail by Michel Foucault in the opening pages of
Discipline and Punish.
But these cases differ in several ways from what went on in S-21, where tortures were inflicted selectively, in private, and had no connection with executions, which were carried out later, in secret, en masse, and usually at night. By combining elaborate physical torture and total secrecy, heavy documentation and complete surveillance, the practices of S-21 blend what Foucault has argued, in France at least, were separable stages in an evolutionary process, which he calls respectively the “vengeance of the sovereign” and “the defense of society.”
²⁶

In the colonial era in Cambodia (1863–1954), the French set up a career police force that operated under their supervision. By 1900 or so, penal torture had ceased to be practiced by Cambodian officials. Because of French scruples, judicial torture was never openly employed. Instead, the French established procedures, courts, and institutions for the administration of Western-style justice. Within this supposedly rational framework, however, interrogations of prisoners were often very rough. After Cambodia gained its independence, its French-inspired gendarmerie still beat prisoners, and people accused of treason were often tortured before being put to death. In the Lon Nol regime, prisoners of war were routinely tortured to obtain information. There is no evidence, however, that judicial torture was practiced extensively

by the police, or used as an instrument of national security, before the Khmer Rouge came to power.

Why was this the case? To begin with, hardly anyone accused of treason under Sihanouk or Lon Nol ever went on trial; thus there was little call under those regimes for the detailed confessions that judicial torture might be expected to produce. Another constraining factor was that until 1975, Western-style police procedures and courts in Cambodia remained in place. Evidence obtained under torture, if its use could be established, might have been challenged in court, and the unwelcome publicity, if it reached foreign observers, might have besmirched Cambodia’s reputation. This kind of constraint operated in other countries as well. If judicial torture occurred in postcolonial Cambodia, the absence of documentary corroboration suggests that it was carried out in secret, as has been customary elsewhere in modern times.
²⁷

Torture in DK

After the Khmer Rouge victory of 17 April 1975, the judicial system in Cambodia disappeared. There were no courts, judges, laws, or trials in DK. The “people’s courts” stipulated in Article 9 of the DK Constitution were never established.
²⁸
The absence of laws or safeguards, DK’s self-imposed isolation from the world, the importance placed by the Party Center on the confessions of “enemies,” and the blend of prestige and secrecy that characterized S-21 encouraged Duch and his associates to use torture and any other means at their disposal to obtain confessions. The staff concealed the practice, however, like everything else they did, from the Cambodian public.

Officials at S-21 believed that when they tortured prisoners they were responding to the country’s needs and to the fears of those who led it. The ideology of Democratic Kampuchea, as we have seen, was premised on continuous class warfare and continuous revolution. “Enemies” were everywhere and needed to be destroyed. Some were poised along Cambodia’s borders; others were farther off; still others were “buried inside the Party, burrowing from within.” Enemies often came disguised as friends. To ferret them out, extreme measures needed to be taken.

Most judicial torture in DK took place inside S-21, perhaps because, ironically, the facility was the only one in the country that had quasi-judicial functions, as refl by the documentation that the facility produced. S-21 also had authority from the Party Center to deal with

crimes of lèse-parti. Thousands of men and women charged with lesser offenses or imprisoned as class enemies succumbed to malnutrition, illness, and savage treatment in provincial prisons, but in general these people were not tortured to produce evidence of their crimes.
²⁹
Prisoners already ticketed for Tuol Sleng, however, were occasionally tortured in a provincial prison beforehand to soften them up and to provide some rudimentary documentation for interrogators in Phnom Penh. Vann Nath, for example, was tortured “for many hours” in Battambang before he came to S-21, and Baen Chhae (alias Chhaom Savath) said in his confession that he was tortured in Kompong Cham before being transported to Phnom Penh.
³⁰

Judicial torture at S-21, therefore, was linked to crimes which, like heresy in medieval Europe, involved betrayals of the ruling ideology and suspicions of hidden networks of conspirators. As in medieval times, guilt was established primarily by the prisoner’s confession, there being no other means of proof. After the Chan Chakrei “uprising” of April 1976, as we have seen, the leaders of DK felt continuously threatened. They needed scapegoats for what the DK Constitution (Article

10) called “hostile and destructive activities which threaten the people’s state.” The massive failure of their economic master plan soon required more scapegoats. By the middle of 1976, most of the prisoners brought to S-21 had been accused of treason or were connected with others who had been accused. S-21 became crucial to the regime’s survival.

The first step in any imprisonment and even more starkly in judicial torture is to dehumanize the prisoner. At S-21 this practice had the dou-ble effect of anesthetizing the torturers and cutting the prisoners off from any sense of community or self-respect. Because they were labeled “enemies” (like the
thmil
of prerevolutionary times) the prisoners had lost their right to be treated as Cambodians or as human beings. When they arrived at S-21, they were pitched head-over-heels into hell like the victims in the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat. Being arrested often involved a sudden change of fortune. With considerable pleasure, Vann Nath recalled being held for a time in the same room as a discredited Khmer Rouge cadre, known for his brutality but now disgraced: “When he was in the cooperative, he acted like a king,” Vann Nath recalled. “No one could look at his face. But now he was shackled by the legs, looking like a monkey.”
³¹

The process of Nath’s own dehumanization evokes prisoners’ accounts in other countries. In the 1930s Eugenia Ginzburg, a young Russian Communist fi imprisoned by Stalin and later sent to

Auschwitz, faced a Soviet judge who told her: “Enemies are not people. We’re allowed to do what we like with them. People, indeed!” The judge’s words might have served as a motto for S-21.
³²

Elsewhere in DK, most “base people” were given enhanced status. They were placed in the same categories as Communist Party members who had passed the “Communist Youth League” phase either as “candidates”
(triem)
or as having “full rights”
(penh sut).
In contrast, “new people,” as Cambodians with urban or nonrevolutionary backgrounds were called, became known as “depositees”
(pnhao),
a category reflecting their status as people evacuated to the countryside. Prisoners at S-21 had even lower status than “depositees.”
³³
Before being questioned, they were made to discard their black, revolutionary clothes and wear ill-fitting, ragged clothing tossed at them by the guards. The pronouns that guards used to refer to the prisoners were those normally applied to children and animals. In the autobiographies that opened their confessions, the prisoners no longer noted their class background
(vannakpheap)
as required on other Party documents. Stripped of clothing, humanity, and class, they could be invaded, beaten, and humiliated until their memories coincided with the requirements of the Party, at which point they could be put to death.