Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (12 page)

Whereas the August speech had mentioned foreign enemies, the September “Summary” referred more ominously to “instruments and agents” of foreign powers who “furtively steal their way into and hide themselves in our revolutionary ranks.” The speech foreshadowed the one delivered in December that deplored “a sickness in the Party.” It also inaugurated a new phase of class conflict in DK, which, the speaker said, would be “sharp . . . uncompromising, bitter, thorough, and life and death . . . long into the future.”
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Ney Saran: “The Contemptible Ya”

The full-blown reign of terror that ensued from September onward was probably linked in some way to what Keo Meas, Ney Saran, and other prisoners were being forced to “confess” at S-21. It is impossible to determine whether these prisoners had been involved in genuine plots, although documents that survive from S-21 about them are suspiciously

skimpy and may have been culled after 1979 to conceal evidence of connivance with the Vietnamese. As they stand, the documents do little to explain the paranoia that seems to have gripped the Party’s leaders from then on.

Ney Saran’s confession covers only thirty-one pages, drawn from seven interrogation sessions. Several viciously worded memoranda from Pon to Duch and from Duch to Ney Saran supplement the slim dossier.
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On 23 September, for example, Pon reported to Duch that he had beaten Ney Saran with rattan whips and electric wires. In a four-page memorandum written to the prisoner on the following day, Duch addressed Saran disingenuously as “Older Brother, in Anticipation,” and noted that

you are a person in whom the Organization has placed the greatest confidence, because you have been closer to the Organization and closer to our revolutionary movement of Kampuchea when compared with other people whom the Organization has recently arrested. The Organization has made it clear to us that you cannot hide anything that has happened in the past. The Organization knows what is good and what is evil. You can’t lie or blame other people as you have done. . . . The Organization . . . has clear views about stubborn people.

Two days later, Duch wrote to Pon that “if [Ney Saran] continues to hide his treacherous linkages . . . he should be executed and not allowed to play games with the Party any more.” Torture was stepped up, and Pon wrote to Duch:

In the afternoon I asked Brother Duch to give permission to use both hot and cool techniques; having received permission toward the early evening I went in to threaten him, telling him to prepare himself at 8 or 9
P
.
M
. for the torture to be continued. At about 10
P
.
M
. I went in to get ready to carry out torture with [my] bare hands. IX [Ney Saran] started to confess by asking us to summarize what he was to report. We clarifi this as follows: “Please write a systematic account of your treasonous activities from beginning to end.”

Keo Meas

The confrontation between Pon and Ney Saran is easy to imagine, but a “systematic account” of his activities, if it was ever written, has not survived. Similarly, no full confession by Keo Meas has come to light. The ninety-six pages in his handwriting in the S-21 archive consist of letters that he addressed to Pol Pot over a relatively brief period.
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Several of

them carry Duch’s notation “Don’t summarize,” which suggests that they never left the prison. Keo Meas’s dossier also contains questions posed by Pon and Duch, directives to Keo Meas in Pon’s handwriting signed “
santebal,
” and cruel annotations by Duch demanding information, revisions, and retractions.
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Even under intense pressure, Keo Meas continued to protest his innocence. He had almost thirty years’ experience in the cut and thrust of Communist debate, and in his letters to Pol Pot he was fighting for his life. “These accusations are absurd,” he wrote. “They are totally incomprehensible to me. I knew and did nothing of the sort.”

As far as the Party’s anniversary was concerned, he wrote on 29 September, the day before it was to be celebrated, that

my view is in favor of maintaining 1951, and if anyone wants to go down a different path from this, I’m not willing to go along. I will . . . oppose it by maintaining that the Pracheachon Group and the Pracheachon newspaper were legal organs of a Marxist-Leninist Party, which was founded in 1951.

When Was the Birthday of the Party?

Keo Meas’s stance on the anniversary issue exposed a major contradiction in the CPK’s perceptions of its history, one that had been papered over for many years and was to be resolved in Pol Pot’s favor. The contradiction had been noted in passing in the 30 March meeting of the Party Center: “Set the birth of the Party at 1960; do not use 1951 . . . make a clean break.”
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At stake in what seems like a semantic argument were the large questions of the Party’s leadership and Cambodia’s relations with Vietnam. From 1960 to 1975, the anniversary of the CPK had been celebrated on 30 September 1951, a date that blended 30 September 1960, when a Party meeting in Phnom Penh had constituted the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea (WPK), with the year 1951, when its predecessor party, the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP), had been founded at the instigation of Vietnam.
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A CPK cadre who defected to Vietnam from the Eastern Zone in 1978 reported that preparations were being made in mid-September 1976 to celebrate the Party’s twenty-fi anniversary. As these were underway, however,

we received an urgent message from higher authorities ordering us to sus-pend the preparations. Later on a circular from the central office informed us that the Party had been founded on 30 September 1960. Anyone who had

joined the Party prior to that date should consider himself not a Party mem-ber, and his years with the Party before 30 September 1960 were invalid. If he agreed, he would be redeemed by the Central Committee. Otherwise, he would be sent to a reeducation camp.
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The September issue of the CPK’s journal,
Revolutionary Youth,
carried an article anticipating the twenty-fifth anniversary, while an article in the September–October special issue of
Tung Padevat
declared that the CPK had been founded in 1960, because “we have made a new numer-ation.” The rationale for the change, the author said, was that

the Revolutionary Organization has decided that from now on we must arrange the history of the Party into something clean and perfect, in line with our policies of independence and self-mastery.
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This passage marked another stage in the ascendancy of Pol Pot and his colleagues. Since articles in both journals were always vetted and largely written by Pol Pot and Nuon Chea, the possibility of an uncoordinated disagreement between them is remote. It seems more likely that the
Revolutionary Youth
article was published to draw the “1951” faction into the open, where they could be “smashed,” whereas the article in
Tung Padevat
represented the considered thinking of the Party Center.

In early November, Non Suon, a longtime associate of both men, was arrested as he disembarked from an airplane bringing him home from an official mission to China. At S-21 he protested his innocence at first, but after three weeks of interrogation he succumbed and wrote:

I am a termite boring from within . . . and wrecking the Party in every way I can. No matter how the Party has educated and nurtured me, I have not abandoned my dark and dirty intentions. . . . I would like to present myself to the Party Organization for punishment for the serious crimes I have committed in willingly betraying the Party so that the Party can strengthen and expand [its] ranks . . . and advance toward the construction of a Communist society.
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Purging Diplomats and Intellectuals

By December 1976, when Pol Pot delivered his “sickness in the Party” speech, the Party Center had decided to keep the CPK’s existence secret from outsiders and to shelve the Four-Year Plan. The rationale for these decisions, given at the December meeting, was that unspecified “documents have revealed that enemies have tried to defeat us using every possible method”—probably a reference to the confessions that had recently

been extracted at S-21. At about the same time, although the documents are lacking and the reasons for the timing unclear, the Party Center probably decided to inaugurate sustained hostilities against Vietnam. In early 1977 DK launched a series of vicious cross-border raids from the Eastern and Southwestern Zones. Hundreds of civilians were massacred in these incursions, which were not publicized in either country.
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As DK prepared itself for war, the CPK also purged people in the diplomatic service and the ministry of foreign affairs suspected of being “pro-Soviet” or “pro-Vietnamese.” Prominent victims included the DK ambassador to Vietnam, Sean An, and Hak Seang Lay Ni, a foreign ministry official accused of founding yet another rival Communist party, with Soviet encouragement, in the 1960s. Several other diplomats were also rounded up. These punitive measures also reflected the distrust felt within the Party Center for anyone except themselves who had had professional training, extensive residence overseas, or contacts with non-Khmer.
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The purges also foreshadowed the campaign against intellectuals
(neak cheh dung)
inside the Party that gathered steam in the first half of 1977. In February, two prominent Party intellectuals, Koy Thuon and Touch Phoeun, were brought into S-21. Both members of the CPK’s Central committee, they were the first cadres at this level to be purged. S
antebal
’s targets soon included military and civil cadres in the Northern Zone, where Koy Thuon had served as secretary until early 1976, and other intellectuals in the CPK who were associated with both prisoners. In the words of the “Last Plan,” these were people “who pretended to be progressive and infiltrated the revolution to gain information.”
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Koy Thuon was born in 1933 and entered the Lycée Sisowath in 1949. After graduation he embarked on a teaching career. In 1959 or 1960, inspired by Tiv Ol, a fellow teacher who was “like a brother” to him, Koy Thuon was drawn toward revolutionary ideas. Sponsored by another teacher, Son Sen, he joined the CPK. In 1960 he worked with Khieu Samphan on Samphan’s short-lived weekly,
L’Observateur.
After a stint of teaching in Kompong Cham, where he recruited Sua Va Si (alias Doeun) and others into the Party, Koy Thuon fled to the maquis. During the civil war, he was active in the Northern Zone, where he earned a reputation as a womanizer and bon vivant. In the words of the “Last Plan,” “the group [around] Koy Thuon . . . created an atmosphere of pacifi luxury and excitement entertained by arts, girls, receptions and festivities . . . stimulated prestige, ranks and relations with the enemy.”
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Koy Thuon’s copious, neatly written confession implicated over a hundred people. These included senior Party figures, civil and military cadres who had worked with him in the North, and his subordinates in the commerce committee. His confession also implicated a cohort of former schoolteachers, including the minister of information, Hu Nim; the director of Office 870, Suas Va Si; his assistant, Phok Chhay; the ex-minister of the interior, Hou Youn (purged in 1975); and Koy Thuon’s former mentor, Tiv Ol, who was working in 1977 with Hu Nim. Koy Thuon also implicated Tiv Ol’s wife, Leng Sim Hak, but she was not arrested for another six months. In closing, his confession listed “networks of traitors” in the northeast, the northwest, the port of Kompong Som, and Phnom Penh.
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In his confession Koy Thuon was forced to devalue his career and to blacken the reputations of everyone he had worked with except those in the Party Center. His numerous intellectual acquaintances constituted a new category of targets. The purge against them began soon after his arrest. Following Laura Summers’s suggestion, Steve Heder has referred to these men and women as “democracy activists” and has characterized them as “ex-petit bourgeois associated with Son Sen either directly or via Koy Thuon.” Heder locates the most sustained, coherent opposition to Pol Pot’s policies in the DK era, within this group.
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