Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (11 page)

Three days later, shortly before dawn, grenades exploded near the Royal Palace, and shots were fired at the National Museum in Phnom Penh. The palace and the museum were not far from the heavily guarded compound occupied secretly by the “upper brothers.” There is no evidence, however, of casualties, material damage, or further conspiratorial activity. The motives behind the explosions are unclear, but the “upper brothers” took them, and their timing, very seriously indeed. Prince Sihanouk was scheduled to resign as head of state later in the day, and, while the hapless soldiers who threw the grenades were probably unaware of the coincidence, the country’s jittery leaders saw the incident as foreshadowing a coup d’état. The grenade-throwers were arrested within a week, and tape recordings of their confessions, with a covering note by Duch, were rushed to the Party Center.
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The culprits belonged to Division 170, a unit formed after April 1975 out of Division 1, which had been recruited in the Eastern Zone during the civil war. At the time of the explosions, elements of the division were stationed on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, where its soldiers were assigned to growing rice—a task many of them found demeaning. In keeping with S-21 practice, which it shared with police operations everywhere, the culprits were pressed to implicate their superiors. Suspicions soon coalesced around Chan Chakrei, a fl Eastern Zone military fi and former Buddhist monk who was acting as Division 170’s political commissar. Chakrei, thirty-three years old, was also deputy secretary of the newly formed national army’s general staff, working under Son Sen.
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Chan Chakrei had switched sides at least once before; he had come under CPK scrutiny in 1975. Arrested on 19 May, he was designated in S-21 documents by the Roman numeral I, at the head of a “string” of alleged conspirators that ran to twenty by the end of the year. In the course of a four–month interrogation he confessed to links with the Lon Nol regime and to membership in the Khmer Serei, a quasi-military, anti-Sihanouk movement based until 1975 in South Vietnam.

He also claimed to have planned to assassinate Sihanouk and to poison the “upper brothers.” In the wake of Chakrei’s arrest, Ly Vay, the deputy secretary of Division 170 (Number II), was hauled in. In his confession, Ly Vay spoke vaguely of “wanting to disrupt security in Phnom Penh.” Chakrei, for his part, implicated Ly Phen (Number IV), the political commissar of the Eastern Zone armed forces, Ros Phuong of Division 170 (Number VII), and Suas Neou (alias Chhouk, Number VIII), the secretary of Sector 24 in the Eastern Zone. Ly Phen was arrested in June 1976, Ros Phuong in July, and Chhouk in August.

Chhouk was a longtime protégé of the Zone secretary, Sao Phim, a senior revolutionary who was close to the Party Center but already suspected of disloyalty because of his friendly relations, dating back to the 1950s, with Vietnamese Communist cadres. Sao Phim at this time belonged to the so-called Central Military Commission
(kanak kam-matikar santesuk-yothea),
which allegedly set policies for purges in DK.
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Chhouk’s confession was of special interest to the Party Center because of his connections with Sao Phim. A passage dated 28 September 1976—which may of course be fi like so much of the archive—suggests that Sao Phim had prepared him for the possibility of interrogation. We know from Phuong’s 1978 confession that Chhouk’s arrest in 1976 had been delayed until Sao Phim returned from a mission to China, so such a briefi may well have taken place. The passage reads:

During the second stage when the Party interrogated me using torture [Chhouk wrote] I stuck to Brother [Sao] Phim’s instructions by agreeing to implicate Keo Meas. [The Organization] still did not believe me, since I could not provide exact answers about treasonous activities, I did not know where any Party Center standing committee traitors were. I did not know how many there were . . . or how they acted. I implicated Keo Meas but I didn’t know where he was. I implicated Vietnam, but incorrectly in the details. Then my situation gradually deteriorated as the Organization asked to uncover the apparatus leaders. I tried to evaluate and balance between two things: Who was stronger, my group or the Party? . . . I stuck to the hope that no matter how the security people educated and questioned me I could protect the treasonous elements [of Sao Phim], evade up and down to implicate the Hanoi group, the old resistance group and miscellaneous small elements. But because of the Party’s inspired judgment, the Party refused to accept my reports, saying they were unclear and asking me to do them again. This was the final word of the Party, asking me to reconsider. Then . . . even if I was to lose my life, I was determined to answer the Party truthfully about [Sao Phim’s] treason. . . . I pledge absolutely to follow the Party’s road.
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Purging Senior Cadres, 1976

Those besides Sao Phim implicated in Chhouk’s confession included three senior Party figures: Ney Saran (alias Ya, Number IX), the secretary of the Northeastern Zone; Keo Meas (Number X), a veteran revolutionary then under house arrest; and Non Suon (alias Chey, Number XII), who was serving in effect as DK’s secretary of agriculture. They were not informed of the Party’s suspicions, of course, and for the time being they remained at large. In July and August the CPK convened meetings to acclimatize Party members to its Utopian Four-Year Plan, scheduled for promulgation in September. In that month, Ney Saran and Keo Meas were brought into S-21. Non Suon was arrested at the beginning of November.
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These three men had much in common with each other. Aside from their age, they had almost nothing in common with Pol Pot. They had joined the anti-French resistance in 1945 and1946. They had learned about Marxism-Leninism from Vietnamese Communist cadres or from Cambodians trained in Vietnam. None of them had studied in France. Unlike Brothers Number One and Two, Non Suon and Keo Meas had operated in the open in the 1950s; Ney Saran had taught at the same school as Saloth Sar. Keo Meas had twice run as a radical candidate for the National Assembly, and Non Suon had been imprisoned by Sihanouk in 1962. Both men had joined the Party’s Central Committee in September 1960, alongside Saloth Sar, whom they knew well. In 1963, Ney Saran and Keo Meas had joined Pol Pot and a handful of others in Office 100, the Vietnamese base on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, where they remained until 1965. From then on, their paths diverged. Non Suon, released from prison in 1970, joined the maquis near Phnom Penh, Ney Saran became a military leader in the northeast, and Keo Meas worked in Beijing and Hanoi on behalf of the United Front government in exile. When he returned to Cambodia in 1975, Keo Meas, probably suspected of being pro-Vietnamese, was placed under house arrest.

At S-21, the three were accused of having formed the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea (WPK) to oppose the CPK from within. Belonging to WPK, it seems, was shorthand for treason committed by CPK members after Pol Pot had been brought into the Party Center in 1960. In 1977 and 1978, the dissident “party” became the focus for accusations leveled at many prisoners at S-21. The party was a moving target, and WPK had the same portmanteau usefulness as “CIA” or “KGB.”

Because WPK was seen as a permanent source of enemies, its leaders were always said to be at large. In July 1978, for example—almost two years after Keo Meas had been arrested and put to death and a month after Sao Phim had killed himself—Pon wrote in his notebook: “Find the leaders of the WPK. This is crucial.”

Ironically, as many high-ranking prisoners knew perfectly well, Pol Pot’s own party had chosen the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea as its name in 1960. Although the name change had probably been approved, if not imposed, by the Vietnamese, there is no evidence that a rival Party using this name was ever established. Instead, the Party was known as the WPK until mid-1966, when Pol Pot, again in secret, renamed it the CPK.
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Despite these contradictions, the idea that Keo Meas had founded a concealed party called the WPK was still current in 1978, when Von Vet, the deputy prime minister, was arrested and wrote in his confession that the subversive party

was put together with the help of the Vietnamese, who had Keo Meas create it so that the Vietnamese could build up their forces in Kampuchea. The important CIA people joined this party. In form it belonged to the Vietnamese, but [in] reality . . . it belonged to the CIA. It took the form of the Communist Party in order to proceed with its work.
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Keo Meas and Ney Saran were arrested in a bewildering sequence of events that began in August 1976, when the CPK’s Four-Year Plan was discussed at a cadre meeting, and closed in October with a controversy over the founding date of the CPK, manipulated by the Party Center, that was resolved in Pol Pot’s favor. Taken together, the events and arrests marked a turning point in the histories of DK and S-21. By the end of the year, perhaps as a result, the Party Center’s pronouncements had become pessimistic and bellicose. By the beginning of 1977, purges reached the central nervous system of the CPK. For these reasons, the sequence of events that occurred from August to October 1976 must be set out in detail.

On 21–23 August, CPK cadres assembled in Phnom Penh to be briefed by Pol Pot on the Party’s “Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields,” a 110-page document compiled earlier in the month. The plan proposed to expand Cambodia’s agricultural production so dramatically that exports, especially rice, could earn enough foreign currency to pay for imported agricultural machinery and later, when agricultural outputs increased, to fi industry. To overcome the

obstacles in its path, the Party Center counted on the revolutionary fer-vor supposedly generated by the leveling of Cambodian society, the collectivization of the means of production, and the collective empowerment deriving from the Khmer Rouge’s victory in April 1975. These dogmatic assumptions were untested. The plan made no allowances for variations in world markets, paid little heed to the types of soil or the availability of water within Cambodia, and overlooked crippling shortages of workers, tools, and livestock. Most importantly, the plan failed to acknowledge that most Cambodians were prostrate after five years of war and that hardly any of them had enough to eat. Instead, the Party Center assumed that nearly everyone in the country was ready, able, and willing to grow enormous quantities of rice.
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In political terms, the plan offered Pol Pot and his colleagues an opportunity to grasp the wheel of history
(kong pravatt’sas)
and thereby to display the purity and strength of Cambodia’s revolution to allies and enemies overseas. Study notebooks prepared by S-21 cadres suggest that the Party Center seriously believed the Cambodian revolution was the most successful in world history. The Four-Year Plan, in turn, was the CPK’s most detailed policy document. The Party’s leaders probably hoped to unveil it at anniversary celebrations scheduled for 30 September, when it seems likely that they also hoped to proclaim the CPK’s existence.

In Pol Pot’s address to the August gathering dealing with the plan, the language of his “preliminary explanation” echoed the breezy self-assurance of the plan itself. In passing, he singled out the “contemptible people to the east and to the west” (Vietnam and Thailand) as causes for vigilance and alarm. He said nothing about internal enemies.

Mao Zedong’s unexpected death on 8 September triggered some uncertainty in the Party Center. A former DK cadre told Steve Heder in 1980 that “after Mao’s death there was apprehension in Kampuchea. . . . People were afraid that chaos and confusion in China might affect our solidarity with China.”
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On 18 September, at a memorial service for Mao in Phnom Penh, Pol Pot admitted publicly for the first time that Cambodia was being governed by a Marxist-Leninist Party. He praised Mao’s writings, including “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People.” On the same occasion, the Chinese ambassador, Sun Hao, noted that Mao had reached “the scientific conclusion that there are bourgeois elements even inside the Communist party”—a key tenet of Chinese radicalism that was used to justify the continuing purges there.
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Pol Pot’s “Resignation”

On September 20, Pol Pot “resigned” as prime minister on grounds of ill-health. The announcement of the resignation was made by Phnom Penh Radio a week after it had supposedly occurred. Pol Pot’s place was taken, the announcement said, by Nuon Chea, “Brother Number Two,” who had occupied the position since 1963 and was to do so until Pol Pot’s eclipse in 1997. Pol Pot’s “resignation,” if it ever occurred, may have been caused by genuine illness—he suffered from recurrent bouts of malaria and dysentery—or because he feared assassination and wanted to go into hiding. It is more likely, however, that Pol Pot never resigned and that the announcement was intended to throw some of his internal enemies off balance and to draw others into the open. This explanation seems plausible given that neither Nuon Chea nor Ta Mok, interviewed by Nate Thayer in 1997, had any recollection of the event.
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Ney Saran was arrested on the same day that Pol Pot resigned. Keo Meas was apprehended five days later. From a study session convened at about this time, perhaps to coincide with the anniversary of the Party’s foundation, a brief, anxiously worded document emerged, titled “Summary of the Results of the 1976 Study Session.” The text, which consists of notes taken from a speech by a Party spokesman, is much darker in tone than Pol Pot’s August speech describing the Four-Year Plan. It is tempting to associate its pessimism with suspicions or information emerging from the two arrests.
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