Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (6 page)

After leaving the Institute, he taught briefly at Chhoeung Prey
lycée
in Kompong Cham, where he enrolled at least one of his students, Ky Suk Hy, into the revolutionary movement and was soon arrested as a “Communist” by Sihanouk’s police. He was held without trial for several months—a normal procedure for political prisoners at the time— but he managed to obtain his release through the intervention of his childhood patron. Soon after Sihanouk was overthrown, Kang Keck Ieu had gone into the maquis
.

In the early 1970s, known as Duch, he was in charge of security in Sector 33, north of Phnom Penh. A French ethnographer, François Bizot, was arrested by Communist guerrillas there in 1970. Duch interrogated Bizot repeatedly for two months, accusing him of being a CIA agent and making him write several detailed autobiographies before allowing him to go free. Bizot came away chastened by Duch’s fanaticism. In his view, “Duch believed Cambodians of differing viewpoints to be traitors and liars. He personally beat prisoners who would not tell the ‘truth.’”
²¹

In 1973 Duch moved to Sector 25, north of Phnom Penh. His superior there was Sok Thuok (alias Von Vet), a Communist militant since the 1950s who was executed at S-21 in 1978. Sok Thuok’s deputy in 1973, charged with military affairs, was Son Sen, whose favorable attention Duch probably attracted at this time.

Duch picked up his expertise in security matters as he went along; there is no evidence that he ever traveled abroad or received any training from foreign experts. He may well have developed his elaborate notions of treachery involving “strings of traitors” between 1972 and 1973, when a secret operation was set up by the Khmer Rouge to purge the so-called Hanoi Khmers—Cambodians who had come south in 1970 after years of self-imposed exile in North Vietnam, ostensibly to help the revolution. Hundreds of them were secretly arrested and put to death in 1973, after the Vietnamese had withdrawn the bulk of their troops from Cambodia. A few managed to escape to Vietnam after detention; and others were arrested after April 1975. Many were arrested in the Special Zone. The stealth and mercilessness of the campaign may have owed

something to Duch’s emerging administrative style. The campaign, indeed, foreshadowed the modus operandi of S-21.
²²

Santebal
operations were transferred to the capital soon after the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975, but for several months the entity went under the name of Office 15; annotations by Duch appear on documents emanating from this office.
²³
The earliest documents connecting Duch with S-21 date from October 1975. For the next six months or so, Duch divided his time between a
santebal
prison at Ta Khmau, south of the capital, and interrogation centers scattered throughout Phnom Penh. The Ta Khmau facility, code-named S-21 Kh, was located on the grounds of what had been Cambodia’s only psychiatric hospital.
²⁴

As the man in charge of S-21, Duch worked hard to control every aspect of its operations. His experiences and instincts from teaching were helpful. He was used to keeping records, ferreting out answers to problems, earning respect, and disciplining groups of people. He drove himself and his subordinates very hard. “He was strong. He was clear. He would do what he said,” the former guard Him Huy has recalled. Duch often frightened workers at the prison. When asked what kind of a man Duch was, another guard replied, “Ha! What kind of man? He was beyond reason [
huos haet
].” In this man’s view, Duch’s worst crime was not to have presided over the deaths of fourteen thousand prisoners, but to have allowed two of his own brothers-in-law to be brought to S-21 and put to death. “Duch never killed anyone himself,” the for-mer guard recalled, but he occasionally drove out to the killing field at Choeung Ek to observe the executions.
²⁵

Duch’s neatly written queries and annotations, often in red ink, appear on hundreds of confessions. They frequently correct and deni-grate what prisoners confessed, suggest beatings and torture, and urge interrogators to unearth the buried “truth” that the prisoners are hid-ing. Duch also summarized dozens of confessions, pointing out the links he perceived with earlier ones and suggesting fresh lines of inquiry. The most elaborate of his memoranda, written in 1978, was titled “The Last Plan”; it attempted to weave two years’ worth of confessions into a comprehensive, diachronic conspiracy that implicated the United States, the USSR, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Like the late James Jesus Angleton of the CIA, Duch was mesmerized by the idea of moles infiltrating his organization. As a mathematician, he enjoyed rationally pleasing models. “The Last Plan” was his chef d’oeuvre.
²⁶

Duch lived close to S-21 with his wife and their two young children, and he remained at the prison until the evening of 7 January 1979,

when he walked out of Phnom Penh and soon disappeared from sight. In 1996, no longer affiliated with the Khmer Rouge, Duch met some American evangelical missionaries in northwestern Cambodia and con-verted to Christianity. He was working as a medical orderly in April 1999 when a journalist discovered his past identity. Duch was later interviewed by Nate Thayer and spoke freely about his past before he was arrested by Cambodian police and imprisoned in Phnom Penh.
²⁷

Duch’s Assistants

Duch’s deputy
(anuprotean)
at S-21 was Khim Vat (alias Ho), a soldier in his mid-twenties who served concurrently as the head of the prison’s defense unit. Ho had been born and raised in Prek Touch, south of the capital, and had joined the revolutionary ranks as a teenager in 1966. Serving in the 11th (later the 703d) Division, he lost an eye in combat. His signature appears on many entry and execution lists. In 1978, he often joined forces with Chan to interrogate Vietnamese prisoners of war. Ho was a fierce disciplinarian feared by his subordinates. Kok Sros recalled:

I was scared of him. If I looked him in the face he looked mean, and if he gave us instructions and we made a mistake he would beat us. If we said something wrong, he beat us. We had to be careful when we spoke; whatever we said had to be to the point. I knew he was strict, so I was always careful.
²⁸

Nothing is known of Ho’s career after 1979. His deputy, Peng, hailed from the same district as Ho and had served with him in Division 703. Peng, a Sino-Khmer, had been born in 1950. At S-21 he commanded the guards. He also kept track of arriving prisoners and assigned them to rooms and cells. According to Khieu Lohr, a former guard, Peng had “keys to all the cells.” He reported to Duch, who decided whether prisoners were to be interrogated, ignored, or taken off to be killed. Peng accompanied Duch on his tours of the prison and acted as his bodyguard. Vann Nath was so frightened of Peng, whom he called a “brutal young butcher,” that he “never dared to look him in the eye.” Ung Pech, in his testimony at the trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in 1979, called Peng “savage and cruel,” adjectives not applied to any other S-21 employee at the trial. Peng seems to have been demoted in 1978, when his duties were taken over by Him Huy, but, according to Kok Sros, Peng survived the Vietnamese invasion and died in southwestern Cambodia in the 1980s.
²⁹

After Duch, Ho, and Peng, the most important person at S-21 was probably Chan, who headed the interrogation unit. Aside from his stint of teaching in the 1950s, we know nothing about his early life, although his fl in Vietnamese, rare among Cambodians, suggests that he was born and raised in Vietnam. He arrived at S-21 with Duch in 1975 and remained there until the Vietnamese invasion. In 1990, he was still working with the Khmer Rouge as an interrogator. Nate Thayer, who saw him questioning prisoners at that time, recalled that Chan “was the most frightening-looking character” he had ever seen. When sighted again by an United Nations official in 1996, Chan was semiretired and engaged in market gardening.
³⁰

Chan’s deputy was another former mathematics teacher, Tang Sin Hean (alias Pon), a Sino-Khmer from Sector 25 who had served under Duch during the civil war. He was already working for
santebal
by July 1975. In a self-criticism session at the prison in December 1976, he deplored his “middle bourgeois” class background, confessed that he was often “individualistic” in his thinking, and admitted that because he worked so hard on
santebal
matters he had failed to “build himself” or learn as much as he should have done from the “masses.” The document closed with warm testimonials about his performance at S-21 from Chan and Duch.
³¹

Pon interrogated many prominent prisoners, including Keo Meas, Ney Saran, Hu Nim, Tiv Ol, and Phouk Chhay. Several documents signed by Pon and attached to these interrogations propose extensive torture. At a biweekly self-criticism meeting held at the prison in 1978, staff claimed to be “frightened” of Pon, who criticized himself for not “following the masses,” probably a euphemism for his top-down, authoritarian style.
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The documents unit
(krom akkesa),
closely linked to the interrogations unit, was headed in 1977 and 1978 by Suos Thi, a former soldier in his mid-twenties who came from the same district as Ho and Peng. Suos Thi had “joined the revolution”
(choul padevat)
in August 1971. He had served with Ho in Division 703 before coming to S-21 in November 1975. In his self-critical autobiography Suos Thi claimed that he had become a revolutionary because he was “angry about imperialism, privilege, and capitalism that exploited poor people.” Among his “shortcomings,” he admitted that he “enjoyed going to movies,” “liked to laugh,” “quarreled with his siblings,” and “got angry quickly.” Among his virtues, he said, was a “willingness to perform any

tasks for the Party.” He survived into the 1990s, when he was twice interviewed by journalists. Asked if he “regretted” working at S-21, he said that he was “very sorry for the killings, for the children and women. In fact, some of the people weren’t guilty at all.” At another point in the interview, he was more laconic. “When they gave you a job,” he said, “you had to do it.”
³³

In the “separate” category in the telephone directory, listed with Duch, Pon, and Chan, appears the name of “Brother Huy.” Two men with this name were working at S-21 in 1978. The one named in the directory was probably Him Huy, a self-described “lower-middle” peasant from Sector 25 who became a Khmer Rouge soldier in 1972 because, he wrote in his self-critical autobiography, he was “sick of capitalism and privilege.” Serving under Ho, he had been wounded in the final assault on Phnom Penh. He came to S-21 in early 1977 as a guard, and in 1978 he took charge of documenting prisoners entering the facility and those executed at Choeung Ek, duties previously carried out by Peng. In late 1978 Huy was put in charge of security matters at the prison, placing him fifth or sixth in the chain of command. “After they killed all the [other] bosses,” he told Peter Maguire, “they promoted me.”
³⁴

In many interviews with journalists and scholars since 1985, Him Huy has admitted that he drove truckloads of prisoners to Choeung Ek and also killed “several” prisoners there. He claims that he was imprisoned after 1979 for “a year” for these offenses. Vann Nath, however, remembers Huy as a “very cruel” member of the assassination squad that accompanied prisoners to Choeung Ek. Another survivor said that Huy had been responsible for “hundreds” of deaths. These grim views were echoed by Nhem En and others interviewed by a British journalist in Phnom Penh in 1997. In interviews Huy has often stressed his repentance, remarking at one point, “I don’t feel that [working at S-21] is what my parents intended me to do.”
³⁵

The second Huy at S-21, Nun Huy, was nicknamed “Tall Huy” (Huy
k’puh
) or “Rice fi Huy” (Huy
srae
). He ran Office 24, the prison farm at Prey So affiliated with S-21. In the hierarchy of the prison, he was an important fi In 1976, for example, he supervised some study sessions for Communist Youth Group members working at the prison. His wife, Prak Khoeun, a “full-rights” member of the CPK, worked as a part-time interrogator at S-21. The two were arrested in November 1978. Nhem En claimed that Huy was arrested for sexual offenses, but his confession does not mention these.
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The Interrogators

In November 1976, the interrogation division consisted of at least eleven six-man interrogation groups. These evolved into ten six-person units by mid-1977, which were further divided into three-man teams, led by a unit supervisor. Each team included a chief, an annotator-deputy, and a third member, in the manner of Communist Party cells and other triadic organizations throughout DK. The third member, sometimes referred to as a guard, may have been the person assigned to inflict torture. By 1978, most interrogators worked in a “hot”
(kdau)
contingent. This was directed by a senior interrogator, Pu, about whom no biographical data have come to light. In 1976 and 1977 there had also been a “gentle”
(slout)
subunit, whose members were apparently prohibited from using torture. The “hot” subunit was referred to in one confession as the “cruel”
(kach)
contingent. Its members were allowed to torture prisoners. In 1978, the “gentle” group was no longer mentioned in confessions, although it may have been replaced by a “cool”
(trocheak)
unit. An eight-person “chewing”
(angkiem)
unit under Prak Nan, an experienced interrogator, dealt with tough, important cases.
³⁷
In 1977 and 1978, it seems that at least one interrogator, Prak Khoeun, the wife of “Rice-fi Huy, was a woman. Prak Khoeun came from Sec-tor 25 and classifi herself as a “lower-middle peasant.” She had joined the revolution in 1972, she wrote, because she was angered by the “way the power-holding classes exploited and looked down on poor peasants.” Having transferred to S-21 in 1977 after marrying “Rice-fi Huy, she admitted torturing “several” prisoners “until they couldn’t function.” There may have been other female interrogators at the prison. Ung Pech remembered one whom he nicknamed “the Monster”
(a-yeak),
and the archive reveals that Kun, who was the wife of a senior Khmer Rouge cadre and arrested with him at the end of 1978, was interrogated by two women, Li and Kon. On the other hand, Kok Sros, interviewed in 1997,