Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (9 page)

Roughly 500 of the prisoners whose confessions have survived, or slightly more than 10 percent of the total, had held positions of responsibility in DK. In this category I include the political secretaries of military units and government offices, the secretaries of individual sectors and their assistants, regimental and divisional military commanders, cadres running industrial enterprises such as factories and railways, and those working in such government ministries as foreign affairs, information, industry and trade. Thirty of those purged had at one time been members of the Party’s Central Committee.
⁶⁸

Although their fates were the same, higher-ranking prisoners at S-21 often received special treatment. Kok Sros has recalled that the cadres quartered in the so-called “special prison” slept on beds and received the same rations as the staff. After they had been interrogated and tortured, he said, they were bathed and patched up by S-21 paramedical personnel and given time to compose more “accurate” confessions. Hoping to postpone or lessen torture, and perhaps in some cases hop-ing to be released, many senior cadres decided to cooperate and wrote confessions of several hundred pages. The guards assigned to them, Kok Sros recalled, were chosen from the best in the contingent. The special treatment that the cadres received can be explained in part by lingering feelings of respect for high-ranking figures, but it is more likely to have been connected with the Party Center’s requirement that they be kept healthy and comfortable enough to compose plausible confessions.
⁶⁹
None of the confessions provide descriptions of day-to-day life at the prison or any details about prisoners’ relations with each other. In this respect the sources from S-21 are much sparser from those we can consult

in studying the Holocaust, or the Argentine “dirty war,” or the Chinese and Soviet prison camps, not only because survivors of these facilities are far more numerous but also because the secrecy and the “discipline” of S-21 shut off the prisoners from each other and shut us off from nearly everything that was produced at the facility except confessions, memoranda, and self-critical autobiographies. In addition, unlike the Nazi camps, S-21 had very few “trusties.” The better treatment accorded some high-ranking prisoners did not include permission to fraternize with the staff. Instead, to use Wolfgang Sofsky’s phrase, the prisoners “existed in a tertiary social region, a world of misery and namelessness.”
⁷⁰

After mid-1976, when Tuol Sleng expanded, prisoners deemed to require extensive interrogation, but not senior enough to be confined in the “special prison,” were kept in cinder-block cubicles measuring two meters by eighty centimeters, where they were shackled by one ankle to the fl . Less important prisoners, like Vann Nath, were confi in large classrooms on the second floor of the complex, “lined up in rows and shackled to the floor with ankle irons. . . . A long pole was inserted into the sprockets of each ankle iron and secured at the end of the room.”
⁷¹

Male and female prisoners were segregated, and women with small children stayed with them while their husbands underwent interrogation and before all the family members were taken off to be killed. Scattered entry records reveal that wives and children were often kept at S-21 for very short periods—sometimes as little as two days—before their executions, and one document suggests that in early July 1977 seventy-five prisoners, identified only as sons or daughters of those previously executed, were “smashed”
(komtec)
at Prey So. Confessions of prison personnel suggest that female prisoners were frequently harassed and occasionally assaulted. Vietnamese female prisoners were especially vulnerable to attack.
⁷²

Isolation, poor food, and silence were crucial to breaking the prisoners down in preparation for their interrogations, for as Foucault has suggested, “solitude is the primary condition of total submission.”
⁷³
The prisoners’ day began at 5:00
A
.
M
., when they were awakened and strip-searched. They were then encouraged to engage briefl in awk-ward calisthenics, without being unshackled from the fl . Nearly twenty years later, Vann Nath recalled the “gymnastics” vividly:

Then we heard a voice order, “All of you get up.” When I sat up I saw a small boy, about thirteen years old, standing with a rod made of twisted electric wire, maybe a meter long.

“Why are you sleeping? It’s nearly dawn,” the boy said. “Don’t be lazy.

Do some exercises.”

“How can I exercise, brother?” a prisoner asked.

“How stupid you are, you old coot,” the boy said. “Get the shit buckets, put them under the bars, and jump together.”

All the prisoners followed his instructions. The noise of the shackles and buckets clanged throughout the room. I tried to jump a few times with the others. How could we do that, with one ankle fastened to the shackles and the other foot jumping?
⁷⁴

Those scheduled for interrogation could be taken off to as many as three sessions a day, scheduled from 7:00
A
.
M
. to noon, from 1:00
P
.
M
. to 6:00
P
.
M
., and from 8:00
P
.
M
. to midnight. Those who stayed behind were forbidden to communicate with each other; they were allowed to address guards only when they needed to relieve themselves.
⁷⁵

Prisoners in the large classrooms were “washed” every three or four days by being hosed down en masse through open windows. Food consisted of a few spoons of watery rice gruel, garnished with bits of water convolvulus
(trokuon)
or banana leaves, served up at eight in the morning and eight at night. Prisoners soon lost weight and suffered from diarrhea, “numbness”
(spuk),
swollen limbs, and a range of skin diseases. As their resistance weakened, they were infected by other prisoners. Many of them died before they could be questioned, and others died after questioning but before they could be taken off to be killed. If they died at night, their bodies were not removed until the next morning. The contradiction between treating prisoners like animals and expecting them to provide detailed, supposedly rational confessions was central to the culture at S-21, and it was never resolved. Would more humane treatment have led to “truer” confessions? There is no way of knowing, but humane treatment of prisoners was almost always out of the question. There was no need, from the administrators’ point of view, even to keep the prisoners healthy.

After a month of confinement Vann Nath recalled:

After they starved us for so long and we were unable to walk, unable even to sit up, we had no resistance, we had no strength in our hearts for resistance. It was all gone. We just lay there waiting for the day that we would die.
⁷⁶

Over the lifetime of the prison, conditions for prisoners varied in response to the number being held and the intensity of the Party Cen-ter’s fears. In 1975, before
santebal
moved to Tuol Sleng and its operations became secret, several inmates were released and either sent to the

prison’s agricultural facility at Prey So or returned to their former units.
⁷⁷
Later on a handful of prisoners, like Ung Pech and Ruy Nikon, were unshackled and allowed to perform manual work on the outskirts of the prison. In early 1978, a dozen other men—including Vann Nath and three other known survivors—were detailed by Duch to paint and sculpt images of Pol Pot. In the closing months of DK, as conditions worsened in the fi with Vietnam, Pol Pot seems to have toyed with the idea of establishing a cult of personality similar to those that surrounded his mentors Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung. The “trusties” at S-21 were recruited to provide a fitting monument. Talking to David Ashley in 1995, Vann Nath recalled:

Near the end we had to design a revolutionary monument. The design was fi taken to Nuon Chea who approved it and was then supposed to be taken to Pol Pot for his approval. The monument was like those in China and Korea and featured Pol Pot at the front of a line of people with his right hand stretched skywards and his left arm grasping a copy of the revolutionary works, the red book. Pol Pot was the only figure depicted as a particular individual and behind him were a number of people indicating the progress of the revolutionary struggle, beginning with axes and knives and ending with abundance, with guns and B-40s. Duch said that the plan was to destroy the temple at Wat Phnom and replace it with this monument. If the Vietnamese hadn’t invaded, I think that’s what would have happened.
⁷⁸

For over fourteen thousand men, women, and children confined in S-21, there was no revolutionary struggle “beginning with axes and knives and ending with abundance.” For days or months on end they inhabited an anteroom to death. Their struggle ended not with abundance but when their skulls were smashed with ox-cart axles at the killing field of Choeung Ek.

chapter three

Choosing the Enemies

S-21 was a total institution whose mission was to locate, question, and destroy the enemies of the Party Center. Given its prisoner intake and the number of inmates who were executed by the facility, S-21 was probably the most efficient institution in the country. Considering the emphasis the Party Center placed on protecting itself from “enemies,” it was also one of the most important.

The theory of the regime posited the existence of enemies, and the search for them was a crucial ingredient of its practice. Because Cambodia’s leaders subscribed to the Maoist doctrine of permanent revolution, counterrevolutionary “enemies” were continuously created, and purges (the Cambodian compound verb,
boh somat,
translates as “sweep and clean”) were continuously needed to assure the safety of the Party Center and to maintain the revolution’s purity and momentum.
¹
Enemies were thought to be everywhere. “Sweeping and cleaning” them could never stop. Building and defending the country went hand in hand. As a CPK motto put it, “One hand is for production, the other for beating the enemy.”
²

To Pol Pot and his associates, friends and enemies posed a “life-and- death contradiction”
(tumnoas slap ruos).
In making this distinction, Pol Pot drew on Mao Zedong’s 1957 speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People,” in which Mao had classified “the problem of eliminating counterrevolutionaries” as an example of “the fi type of contradiction” (i.e., between the enemy and ourselves).
³

41

Twenty years later, in a fi speech announcing the existence of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), Pol Pot said:

Within the new Kampuchean society there exist such life-and-death contradictions as enemies who belong to various spy networks working for the imperialists, and international reactionaries are still planted among us to carry out subversive activities against our revolution. . . . These elements are small in number, only 1 or 2 percent of the population.

From Pol Pot’s perspective, in other words, 140,000 Cambodians at most (2 percent of an estimated seven million people) were real or potential enemies of the regime. “Contradictions with these elements,” he continued, “must be dealt with the same way we deal with any enemy.” These measures included “winning over” and “educating” some of the enemies and “neutralizing” others. Finally, Pol Pot proposed to “isolate and eradicate only the smallest number of elements, those who determinedly oppose the revolution and the people and collaborate with foreign enemies to oppose their own nation, people, and revolution.”
⁴
As he spoke, several thousand people had already been questioned, tortured, and put to death at S-21.

DK divided its enemies, as Stalin and Mao had done, into those outside and those within the country.
⁵
External enemies included powers opposed to socialism, led by the United States, and “revisionists” or “hegemonists” like the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and their allies. Pol Pot and his colleagues frequently suggested that the destruction of Cambodia was so important to these enemies that they had set aside their antagonisms to achieve it. In the same vein, a document prepared at S-21 in March 1976 fantasized that recently deposed South Vietnamese and Communist Vietnamese forces were happily cooperating with each other in Vietnam with a view to overthrowing DK, coordinating their efforts with those of Thailand and the U.S. Seventh Fleet.
⁶
Six months later another S-21 document, drawing on information from former Lon Nol soldiers who had undergone training in the United States, described SEATO (the South East Asia Treaty Organization)—whose principal policy objective was to destroy DK—as having Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, and “the Viet Cong” as its members.
⁷
In 1978 Nuon Chea, the second-ranking official in the Party Center, told sympathetic Danish visitors that

It is . . . widely known that the USA planned to seize power from us six months after liberation. The plan involved joint action on the part of the USA, the KGB and Vietnam. There was to be a combined struggle from inside and outside. But we smashed the plan.
⁸

External enemies were relatively easy to identify. They could be held in check by vigilant defense and by Cambodia’s powerful friends. “China can help us scare our enemies,” Pol Pot told CPK cadres in 1977. “Hav-ing friends like the Chinese is a good thing.”
⁹

Internal opponents of the regime, on the other hand, were hard to locate and considered more dangerous. Those operating in the open posed no special problems. They included the “new” or “April 17” people evacuated from the towns in 1975 and men and women from the “old society” whose class origins or biographies were inimical to the revolution. After April 1975, tens of thousands of these people were kept under informal surveillance in the countryside or were held in “education halls”
(sala oprum),
indistinguishable from prisons, where conditions were harsh and thousands died.
¹⁰

Internal Enemies

What concerned the Party Center more than these remnants of the past were those designated as “hidden enemies burrowing from within”
(khmang bonkop si rong phtai knong).
Although these men and women had joined the revolution, they were now working to betray it. In May 1975 Nuon Chea attacked such enemies at length when he spoke to Party cadres.
¹¹
A few months later, an editorial in
Tung Padevat
claimed that internal enemies had “tried to make the revolution change its col-ors.”
¹²
In 1978, an editorial in the journal railed against people who

were able to carry the signboard
(plaque)
“Revolution” temporarily, mas-querade as revolutionaries, burrow away, build up their treasonous forces inside our revolutionary ranks and damage our revolution at a time when our revolution wasn’t strong, hot or battlehardened, when it still took the form of a secret network or when it was cut off from the masses. But at the moment when the revolutionary mass movement sprang out seethingly, resplendent with power, when the secret networks awoke, at that point the buried enemies boring from within no longer had a place to hide, no matter how important they were. Every single one of their silent, shielded, masked activities aimed at destroying the revolution could be seen clearly by the revolutionary masses and could be smashed at once.
¹³

Toward the end of the regime, talking to the Danes, Nuon Chea remarked in passing that “we are not worried about . . . external, military aggression. We worry most of all about the enemy inside.”
¹⁴

The hunt for internal enemies was deeper, more complex, and more relentless than merely finding and “smashing” treacherous individuals.

Insidious “bourgeois” ideas, preferences, and attitudes were thought to be buried in everybody’s consciousness—an idea that Pol Pot inherited from Stalin and Mao. In 1977 Pol Pot declared, “We all carry vestiges of our old class character, deep-rooted for generations.” These had to be destroyed before socialism could be achieved. A year earlier, a writer in
Tung Padevat
had said:

We must rid each Party member, each cadre of everything that is of the oppressor class, of private property, stance, view, sentiment, custom, culture which exists in ourselves, no matter how much or how little.
¹⁵

In “sweeping clean” Cambodia of its traitors and all citizens of their potentially “bourgeois” thinking,
santebal
’s work had to be wide-ranging, open-ended, and merciless. As a DK adage put it, “It is better to arrest ten people by mistake than to let one guilty person go free.”
¹⁶
Once they were identified, arrested, and brought to S-21, suspects of the Party Center became “guilty people”—guilty because they had been arrested rather than arrested because they were guilty. Dehumanization of the prisoners was immediate and total. Just as Lon Nol had seen his opponents as nonbelievers or
thmil
(i.e., “Tamils”), and just as the

U.S. Congress until recently regarded indigenous Communists as “un-American,” Pol Pot and his colleagues thought of Cambodia’s internal enemies as intrinsically foreign and impure. Internal enemies could wreak enormous damage. In his “Last Plan,” Duch compared their strategy to “the way that weevils bore into wood” or “the way oil per-meates” and likened them to “worms”
(dongkeau)
or “germs”
(merok)
that had come from the CIA, Vietnam, and so on to attack healthy, revolutionary people.
¹⁷

Once infected, anyone could infect others. Counterrevolution, unless it was nipped in the bud, could become an epidemic. In December 1976 Pol Pot drew on this quasi-medical imagery in a passionate address to CPK cadres. “There is a sickness in the Party,” he said:

We cannot locate it precisely. The sickness must emerge to be examined. Because the heat of the people’s revolution and the democratic revolution were insufficient at the level of people’s struggle and class struggle . . . we search for germs within the Party without success. In the Party, the army, and among the people we can locate the ugly germs. They will be pushed out by the true nature of the socialist revolution.
¹⁸

Like many of Pol Pot’s statements, this one was a volatile mixture of hubris, paranoia, and wishful thinking. It failed to defi the “true

nature” of the revolution, explain how the sickness might “emerge,” or, most important, demonstrate any proof that the Party had “treacherous, secret elements” buried inside it. Instead, the speech referred vaguely to “observations over the last ten years.”

The 1975 Purges

The purges conducted by the Party Center and enacted at S-21 can be broken into two broad phases. The fi lasted from September 1975 until September 1976. The second extended until the collapse of DK. Most of those targeted in the first wave of purges were civilian and military officials affiliated with the defunct Lon Nol regime. In the back-wash of victory, thousands of these people were rounded up and killed. In Vietnam, by contrast, such people were normally sent off to “reeducation” camps; many died, but tens of thousands eventually emerged. The 1975 killings in DK, like reeducation in Vietnam, were ordered from the top. According to Cho Chhan’s 1977 confession, after the “liberation of the entire country,”

the Organization put forth a policy of successively exterminating officers, starting from the generals and working down through to the lieutenants, as well as government security agents, policemen, military police personnel and reactionary civil servants.
¹⁹

These killings extended the civil war and reflected its brutality. Historical precedents can be found in the Soviet Union after 1917, in China in 1949–1950, and in Vietnam after 1954. Another parallel, pointed out in 1979 by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann, might be the “purifi
(épuration)
of suspected collaborators and “enemy agents” that followed the Allied victory in France in 1944–1945. In both France and Cambodia, popular anger, the sudden empowerment of former victims, and the absence of judicial safeguards combined to encourage a range of extrajudicial behavior that included widespread killings.
²⁰

In Cambodia, the killing campaign was curtailed in June 1975 by the Party Center. Soon afterward more formal and more extensively documented procedures for dealing with “enemies,” centered on
santebal,
came into effect. From October 1975 onward, instead of being summarily put to death, people suspected of working against the revolution were interrogated and required to prepare confessions. Prisoners included officials of the defunct regime, Cambodians who had studied

abroad, deserters, malingerers, Khmers with links to the deposed Thieu regime in Saigon, and the so-called Hanoi Khmer, who were viewed by the Party Center with particular suspicion and had been subjected to CPK purges since 1972.
²¹

In 1976, as the purges gathered momentum, the Khmer Rouge worked hard to consolidate their control over the country and to bur-nish their reputation overseas. In January, Democratic Kampuchea’s constitution was promulgated. In April national elections were held, a central government was formed, and steps were taken to set up a national army. Phnom Penh Radio announced that a “rubber planta-tion worker” named Pol Pot, unknown by that name to anyone outside the Party, was the country’s new prime minister. In May,
santebal
shifted most of its operations to Tuol Sleng. Soon afterward, the second wave of purges began.

Because Tuol Sleng functioned as the capital’s main political prison, the sorts of victims targeted earlier continued to be brought in, questioned, and killed, but as Elizabeth Becker has phrased it, “The Party leaders [now] shifted their attention from eliminating or transforming the bourgeoisie to eliminating the bourgeois tendencies in the Party.” The alteration ushered in a full-scale reign of terror that continued until the collapse of DK. As Hannah Arendt has suggested, “Only after the extermination of real enemies has been completed and the hunt for ‘objective’ enemies begins does terror become the actual content of totalitarian regimes.”
²²

The Second Wave of Purges

The new search for enemies was accelerated by two unnerving, inexplicable events. On 25 February 1976, an explosion occurred in the city of Siem Reap, accompanied by sightings of foreign aircraft. In early April a series of what were probably random explosions in Phnom Penh seemed to Pol Pot and his colleagues to foreshadow a full-blown coup d’état
.
Exactly what happened on these two occasions is still unclear. Publicly the regime blamed the Siem Reap explosion on “CIA agents”— a charge sustained as late as 1978—and the incident in the capital on DK troops manipulated by Vietnam. In private, the Party’s leaders suspected the secretary of the Northern Zone, Koy Thuon (alias Khuon), of involvement in the Siem Reap explosion. They also came to suspect the secretary of the Eastern Zone, the veteran revolutionary Sao Phim (alias Sovanna) of masterminding the incident in the capital. Both men,