Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (7 page)

could recall no women regularly employed to question prisoners.
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Most of the interrogators and document workers had fought in the 1970–1975 war, often serving as messengers
(nir’sa)
—a perilous, respected job. In most cases, their education had been limited to a few years in rural primary schools or sojourns in Buddhist
wat
s, where a premium was placed on memorization, obedience, and neat calligraphy, all virtues in demand at S-21. However, the transitions from schooling to warfare to S-21, where political acuity was also prized, were often difficult for these young men, as the ex-interrogator Ma Meng Kheang confessed:

It’s difficult to think so much. You get so tired [at S-21] and you get headaches, and besides, it’s a political place, it’s not easy to work there, it’s different from rice or vegetable farming or working in a factory. You never know when the day is finished. You never know if you are “correct.” With farming, on the other hand, you either have a crop or you don’t, in a factory a machine starts up or it doesn’t.
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The hours for interrogators were long, and the work was exhausting. Questioning often extended far into the night. Interrogators resented the conditions under which they were forced to work and sometimes compared them unfavorably to the relative freedom they had enjoyed as soldiers in the civil war.
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The Documentation Workers

The telephone directory lists fourteen men in the documentation unit, but it was undoubtedly larger than that, and those listed were probably in charge of three-man teams. The unit was responsible for transcribing tape-recorded confessions, typing handwritten ones, preparing summaries of confessions, and maintaining the prison’s voluminous fi Unsurprisingly, given what we know of the consequences for “sabotage” in DK, typographical errors are almost nonexistent. Even so, between 1976 and 1978 at least ten documents unit staff were arrested, interrogated, and put to death. They confessed to being “lazy,” preparing “confused” documents, “ruining” machines, and beating prisoners to death when they assisted with interrogations.
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The photography subunit at S-21 operated under the supervision of Suos Thi. People in this group took mug shots of prisoners when they arrived, pictures of prisoners who died in captivity, and pictures of important prisoners after they were killed. According to Nhem En, who worked in the subunit, photographs in this final category were taken by specially selected cadres (the prisoners’ throats had been cut) and forwarded in single copies to the “upper brothers.” The unit also produced identification photographs of the staff. Over six thousand photographs taken by the unit have survived. Hundreds of the mug shots, selected and enlarged by East German photographers in 1981, have been posted on the walls of the Tuol Sleng Museum since 1980.
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The photography subunit used cameras, film, paper, and developing chemicals that they discovered at various locations in the capital. Nhem En, who defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1996, was interviewed several times. En was a peasant boy from Kompong Cham who joined the

Khmer Rouge forces in 1970, when he was ten years old. He was selected to study photography in China in 1975 and 1976 and then came to work at S-21. Five Khmer worked with him in the photography unit, and one of them was purged. En himself came under suspicion in a December 1977 study session for “playing the radio” and “taking bad photographs”—offenses he recalled spontaneously twenty years later. One of his photographs, developed from a negative processed during Pol Pot’s visit to China in October 1977, appeared to show “Brother Number One” with an unseemly blotch above one eye. Chan accused Em of doctoring the photo to insult Pol Pot, and Em was packed off to the “reeducation office”
(munthi kay pray)
at Prey So. In early 1978 he was released, he says, after Chan had found the fl in the original, Chinese negative.
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The Guards

The defense unit, not included in the telephone directory, was the largest at the prison. In 1978 it had 169 members: 127 assigned to the main facility and the rest attached to the “special prison” to the south reserved for high-ranking cadres. In 1976 and 1977 guards were organized into six four-hour shifts a day, but in 1978 guards worked in ten-man units for eight-hour shifts. They were expected to follow a set of thirty rules designed to keep them alert and to prevent them from fraternizing with prisoners. The rules enjoined them to keep prisoners from escaping, obtaining weapons, attempting suicide, or talking to each other.
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Guards were not allowed to talk to prisoners, to learn their names, or to beat them, but as a former guard admitted in his confession, “If you’re on guard at night, you can beat the prisoners without anyone noticing it.” Kok Sros has recalled that while guards were forbidden to beat prisoners, only those who beat them “severely” were punished. Moreover, “If a prisoner didn’t obey our orders, we had authority to beat them.” As for casual chatting, which inevitably took place, Kok Sros went on to say that

we could talk to them, but we weren’t allowed to pity them. . . . Some of them asked us to release them, but if we did that we would take their place. Some of the prisoners said, “I didn’t do anything wrong, why did the Organization bring me here?” I didn’t know what to do. . . . I told them I was afraid to help them.
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Guards were also forbidden to observe or eavesdrop on interrogations, and they were expected to be constantly alert: “While on duty,” an S-21

regulation reads, “[guards] must not sneak naps or sit down or lean against the wall. They should [always] be walking, guarding, examining things carefully.” Guards seldom had enough sleep. In their self-critical autobiographies, they overwhelmingly list “drowsiness”
(ngok nguy)
as the greatest flaw affecting their work. Elaborate routines governed the disposal of weapons and ammunition and the disposition of prisoners’ chains, shackles, and locks. There were also complex procedures for transferring prisoners from their cells to interrogation sessions and between cells and the trucks that took them to Choeung Ek.
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Rules for guards prohibited humane behavior. High spirits and levity

in the contingent also worried those in charge. A self-criticism document prepared at the prison in 1977 accused some guards of “laughing together in their free time” and “lacking a firm revolutionary stance.” The same “offenses” crop up in the self-critical autobiographies that the guards prepared from time to time and also in guards’ confessions.
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Nhem En has recalled friendly rough-housing with his colleagues in the photography group, and Kok Sros has referred warmly to the friendships he developed in his three years of working at the prison. None of this is surprising, when we recall that many of the workers were rural teenagers unaccustomed to any kind of institution, much less one where laughter was viewed as a “shortcoming.”

An Evening at S-21

In the early days of the prison the rules for guards were apparently more relaxed. A night-watch report from October 1976, which suggests as much, is the only surviving document recording conversations between guards and prisoners. This report provides a rare glimpse of prisoners and guards in relatively humane interaction and also records some examples of prisoners’ courage and resistance, sadly lacking from most of their torture-induced confessions.
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summary sent to the older brother in charge of the guard group

1. Interior Guards
   
   1. Activities of Enemies
      

—Building K, Room 5, cell 5, the prisoner Pun Suphoal told the guard that mosquitoes were biting excessively.

—Room 4, cell 3, the prisoner Ngai Yet said that he couldn’t sleep, between sunset and 2
A
.
M
.

—In the room under the stair, to the west, a sleepless prisoner stole frequent looks at the guard and at the electric wiring.

—Room 5, cell 4, the prisoner Suk Hoeun, alias Hom, managed to shift a table, noisily, without informing a guard.

—Room 3, cell 4, the prisoner Yim Phoeung, at the time when our comrade was distributing rice gruel, said maliciously that he’d not yet eaten and had just come in from work but [in fact] he wasn’t [ever] working, he’s wearing shackles.

—In the cookhouse, Room 6, cell 3, the four prisoners Mau Hung, Yu Nan, Pun Leang, and Di Somat intend to break their locks and escape.... One of them said: “This is not the Organization’s place, it’s a place for individuals.” Mau Hung said, “This is the place where the Organization caught me, it’s a place where I won’t survive, because the Organization consists of outlaws” [
chao prey,
literally “wild robbers”]. That’s what Mau Hung said to one of our fellow guards.

—Building Kh, room 5, cell 10, when the guard asked the prisoner Som Saravuth to stretch, the prisoner claimed to be unable to rise, but when the guard left his room he stood up.

Subunits at the Prison

Three subunits and the prison farm at Prey So operated under the aegis of the defense unit. One of the subunits included eight “capturers” (sometimes called “messengers,” or
nir’sa
) and ten in a “motorized section.” According to Nhem En, the “capturers” accompanied prisoners to S-21 from the countryside and executed them all, including important cadres, who were killed and buried near the prison. Nhem En’s memory is corroborated by Kok Sros. In 1977, Him Huy worked in this unit and earned a fearsome reputation among other members of the staff. A “motorized section” drove batches of prisoners into S-21 and conveyed others to the execution grounds at Choeung Ek.

A twenty-six person “economic support” subunit, affiliated with the defense unit, provided food and custodial services for guards, interrogators, and prisoners. Two of its members were barbers, and five oth-ers were responsible for raising chickens, rabbits, pigs, ducks, and vegetables within the compound. Four “excrement bearers” in the unit provided a plumbing and sewage system of sorts. The duty was given to guards as a punishment for minor infractions.
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Excrement was removed in buckets from the prison and used for fertilizer.

Seven employees in the economic support unit prepared and delivered food for a prison population that averaged a thousand or more for most of 1977 and 1978. Six others performed the same task for less

than a hundred interrogators and document workers, and thirteen more took care of perhaps two hundred guards. In Duch’s report on the prison in the first three months of 1977, he takes seven lines to deplore the deaths of ducks and chickens at the prison and only two lines to report fourteen prisoners’ deaths from torture. In the looking-glass world of S-21, ducks were mourned more than people.
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Rice for S-21 and probably for other units in the capital was grown at Prey So. In the DK era, men and women were sent there from units, factories, and work sites in Phnom Penh for minor offenses or pending transfer to Tuol Sleng. In the first ten months of 1977, according to a document prepared by “Ricefield” Huy, over two thousand prisoners passed through Prey So. One hundred ninety-two of them, “mostly under twenty years of age,” a report from the facility asserted, had died of “illness.” Eighty had managed to escape. All but twenty-seven of these were recaptured and sent on to S-21. Some of the remaining prisoners listed in the document were probably also sent along to S-21, whereas others—Nhem En and Him Huy among them—returned to duty at S-21 after serving short sentences at Prey So.
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Ho’s defense unit also supervised the work of fi paramedical personnel who treated sick prisoners undergoing interrogation, patched up those who had been severely beaten, and certified deaths. One of the paramedics, Phoung Damrei (alias Phoeun), complained in his confession that there were only three trained medical personnel at S-21 to deal with thousands of prisoners. It was “impossible” to treat them, he said, and large numbers of them died. The man in charge of the detachment, Pheng Tri, was later arrested himself and made a similar admission at a study session in 1977, whereupon he was reproved by Chan for “not believing in revolutionary medicine.” Prison records list prisoners as succumbing to malaria, diarrhea, “emaciation,” “tiredness,” and mistreatment. In a document listing twenty-one deaths in a short period, five are attributed to “wounds” and one to “torture, suffocated inside a plastic bag.” Fifty-two prisoners are said to have died of “illness” between April and September 1976, a period when the prison housed less than 300 people at any one time, and a cadre notebook from 1977 recorded that 30 deaths had occurred at the prison in July, 88 in September, 49 in October, and 67 in November, making a total of 234 deaths over four months. Many those who died had already been worn down by wounds, malnutrition, and torture; several photographs of corpses in the archive show that they were all severely undernourished.
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