Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (14 page)

Duch’s reply, written after Chhe had been tortured, took issue with the prisoner’s contention that he had been framed by treacherous associates. “Painting people black” was an enemy trick, Duch wrote, but the CPK was “so far advanced” that it was always able to detect and overcome such trickery. He went on to say that

in my historical observations, I have never seen a single cadre victimized by trickery aimed to paint him black. The Party doesn’t pretend to be worried by this issue. Speaking to be easily understood, [let me say that] there has never been a single cadre who has come into
santebal
because of trickery to paint him black. . . . What’s your understanding of the problem, brother?

Looking at the problem: does it arise because the CPK has been deceived by the enemy into painting you black, or because you haven’t been straight-forward with the CPK? It’s my understanding that you haven’t been straight-forward with the CPK. What’s your understanding? I ask you to consider this problem and resolve it. When we agree, we can work together.

Siet Chhe was hard to crack. In June Duch altered his approach. In what may be the cruelest document in the S-21 archive, the interrogator Tuy wrote to Siet Chhe:

Write out the story of [your] sexual activities with your own child in detail because from the standpoint of the masses, this [offense] has been clearly observed. You don’t need to deny this. Don’t let your body suffer more pain because of these petty matters.

The person involved was Siet Chhe’s only daughter, a young woman of twenty who was already a dedicated revolutionary. Siet Chhe denied the charges and insisted that his favorite child was still a virgin. His eloquent denial appears in an appendix to this book. Something seems to have snapped inside him after he was psychologically invaded in this manner. For the remainder of the year, until he was killed, he wrote no more memoranda. Instead, his confessions implicated dozens of former colleagues.

Purging the Northwest

At some point in 1977, probably when confronted with the mixed results of the agricultural expansion envisaged by the Four-Year Plan, and probably using information that was reaching him from confessions extracted at S-21, Pol Pot decided to place more emphasis on ferreting out enemies of the state than on economic development. The Four-Year Plan itself seems to have been quietly abandoned.
⁷¹

In April and May 1977,
santebal
’s attention shifted to the Northwestern Zone, where civil and military cadres were accused of sabotaging the economic aspects of the revolution by imposing harsh conditions on the populace so as to lower everyone’s morale and to undermine their confidence in the revolution. In 1977, because of a poor harvest and a poorly equipped and ill-fed labor force, the expected deliveries of rice from the northwest had not arrived in Phnom Penh. Cadres in the zone were accused of hoarding or destroying the harvest, deliberately starving the people under their jurisdiction, allowing others to flee the country, offering Cambodian territory to the Thais, plotting with Cambodian exiles, and trading rice to Thailand.
⁷²

In prerevolutionary times, the northwest had been Cambodia’s rice bowl, producing the bulk of the country’s rice exports. Much of the region had been under Thai control in World War II, and with Thai encouragement it had become a breeding ground for the anti-French Khmer Issarak in the late 1940s. In 1967, a rebellion against Sihanouk’s army had broken out in a former Issarak stronghold in Samlaut. The uprising led to severe repression and thousands of deaths. Armed struggle against Sihanouk was inaugurated in the zone in February 1968. During the civil war, however, much of the region had remained in the hands of the Phnom Penh regime.
⁷³

After 1975, its population included hundreds of thousands of “new people” evacuated to the countryside from Phnom Penh, Battambang,

and other towns. CPK cadres in the northwest tended to be inexperienced at administration, and many of them lacked local ties. Their counterparts in zones bordering Vietnam, in contrast, had enjoyed years of revolutionary training and, after 1970, uninterrupted periods of political control. Many of the cadres put in charge of the Northwest Zone in 1975 and 1976 were either former schoolteachers like Khek Pen (alias Sou), the popular secretary of Sector 4 who was purged in 1977, or former combatants from other zones without much education. In some cases, “new people” were given responsibilities, but these people were regarded as potential saboteurs because of their class origins and previous activities. “Cooperatives administered by bad class elements,”
Tung Padevat
declared in October 1977, “are without rice to eat.” The article suggested that the “bad class elements” were to blame.
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On the other hand, the secretary of the zone, Muol Sambath (alias Nhem Ros), was a veteran revolutionary who hailed from the northwest and had built up a following there.
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Like Sao Phim in the east, he had remained in the region during the civil war. What Pol Pot and his colleagues disliked about the northwest, aside from its proxim-ity to Thailand, was that its leader was quasi-independent and linked by marriage to Sao Phim. Because he was so popular, the Party Center held off arresting him for several months.

Within the zone itself, conditions varied from sector to sector. In the main rice-growing area, located primarily in Sector 3, there was usually enough to eat, and relatively few executions took place. In the more sparsely populated sectors 1, 4, 5, and 6, “new people” were assigned to clearing often malarial forest, conditions were much worse, and death tolls from disease and malnutrition were among the highest in DK.
⁷⁶
In formulating the Four-Year Plan, Pol Pot and his associates had high hopes for the northwest, which was expected to produce 30 percent of the nation’s annual yield for every year of the plan. The Party Center expected the zone’s “new people,” most of whom had no experience in farming, to fulfill the regime’s unrealistic hopes to harvest three tons of rice per hectare.
⁷⁷

In mid-1976 Khieu Thirith, who was Ieng Sary’s wife and Pol Pot’s sister-in-law, visited the northwest and was distressed by what she saw. “Conditions were very queer,” she told Elizabeth Becker in 1980. “The people had no homes and they were all very ill.” Instead of blaming these conditions on commands emanating from the Party Center, she told Becker, as she had probably told Pol Pot, that “agents had got into our ranks.”
⁷⁸

One of these “agents,” presumably, was Phok Sary, a sector official who was arrested in 1978 and was made to shoulder the blame for some of the problems in the zone:

I gave instructions to wreck the paddy harvest by harvesting it unripe. There was also to be wrecking when it was threshed. I designated Chaet to burn paddy . . . and a lot of already harvested paddy was burnt. I told forces in the districts that robbers and new people were burning the paddy. My goal was to create turmoil among the people, between the base people and the new people. This stymied the Party’s [Four-Year] Plan. . . . When the paddy was being farmed, the only action was to wreck it along with the equipment used for planting and harvesting. In addition, the forces attached to the district secretary were instructed to starve the people of rice, to make them eat gruel, so as to get them to make demands on the Organization.
⁷⁹

In April and May 1977, cadres from the northwest began to be brought into S-21. Some had “intellectual” connections; others were purged for sabotaging the Four-Year Plan.
⁸⁰
By the end of the year the secretaries and their assistants of all seven sectors in the Northwest Zone had been purged, and tens of thousands of citizens had been killed. Before the year was out several thousand “base people” (those who had not lived under Lon Nol during the civil war) had been brought into the Northwest Zone by train from the southwest. Cadres from the west and southwest followed, and in several northwestern districts they purged and replaced “disloyal” officials. In some districts they instituted communal eating, and they set often impossibly high standards for rural work. The purges and the harsh policies of the new arrivals generated hundreds of refugees, who spoke to journalists and diplomats in Thailand.
⁸¹

Throughout 1977 relations between DK and Vietnam had deteriorated as Vietnam refused to negotiate border issues on DK’s terms and DK increased its pressure through anti-Vietnamese propaganda broadcasts and cross-border raids. In September 1977 the Vietnamese ambassador to Cambodia, Phan Van Ba, speaking with Pol Pot, took issue with DK claims that the regime wished to “retake” areas of southern Vietnam known to the Khmers as Kampuchea Krom, or “lower Cambodia.” Pol Pot replied: “That would not be in our real interests. The problem is that we have enemies in our ranks.” His response defi analysis: were the “enemies in our ranks” people who wanted to attack Vietnam, or those who counseled him against it? And how was the ambassador to discern Cambodia’s “real interests”?
⁸²

War with Vietnam

On 27 September 1977, in a fi speech broadcast on DK’s national radio, Pol Pot announced and celebrated the role of the CPK in Cambodian history. His decision to bring the CPK into the open had probably been forced on him by China, which he was about to visit. The speech was broadcast on 30 September to coincide with the Party’s “seventeenth” anniversary. By then Pol Pot was already in Beijing. In the speech, he referred to an “infamous handful of reactionary elements” working to undermine DK, but he named no names and struck an optimistic note appropriate to the occasion. In the meantime, Eastern Zone forces had inaugurated a series of unpublicized attacks on Vietnam.
⁸³

In late October, soon after Pol Pot returned from China, Vietnamese forces mounted a serious offensive against Cambodia. They remained on Cambodian soil, in the vicinity of Svay Rieng, until the end of the year, and they herded several hundred prisoners (many of whom would probably have fl Cambodia in any case) into Vietnam when their campaign was over. Neither country publicized the conflict, but shortly before the Vietnamese forces withdrew in early January 1978, DK broke off diplomatic relations with Hanoi. Soon afterward the Party Center formally declared victory. Pol Pot visited Sao Phim’s headquarters at Suong to celebrate the event. He called on his listeners to engage in all-out warfare against Vietnam, echoing an inflammatory document titled “Guidance from 870” issued earlier in the month that compared Vietnamese troops to “monkeys shrieking in the forest” and noted that the war could be won easily if every Khmer combatant killed thirty Vietnamese.
⁸⁴
Later in the month Pol Pot cited “flaming national hatred and class hatred” as weapons in the struggle. According to the Tuy-Pon notebook, he told supporters on 17 January: “When you fight the Vietnamese, if you attack his legs, he can’t crawl; if you attack his arms, he can still walk.”
⁸⁵
Where the “legs” and “arms” were located was left for his listeners to decide.

Racially based nationalism had emerged as the basis of DK propaganda, and the “enemies” brought into S-21 in 1978 were overwhelmingly accused of collusion with Vietnam. Son Sen and the secretary of the newly named Central (formerly Northern) Zone, Ke Pauk, who had been sent to the Eastern Zone in November 1977 to supervise the fighting, were asked to remain there to reorganize its military forces and to

purge anyone who was thought to have “aided” the Vietnamese. By mid-February, the Vietnamese had formulated secret plans to overthrow DK either internally or by force. There is no evidence that the Party Center was aware of this decision, but their worst nightmare—that Vietnam would “swallow” Cambodia—was coming true.
⁸⁶

For the first half of 1978, the “enemies” targeted by the Party Center were often said to have “Cambodian bodies and Vietnamese heads,” and at S-21 particularly stubborn prisoners were made to pay homage to a drawing of a dog whose head was Ho Chi Minh’s.
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Most of the “traitors” were thought to be in the Eastern Zone, where the Vietnamese incursion had been most successful and where veteran cadres, from Sao Phim down, had a history of associations with the Vietnamese dating from the early 1950s.
⁸⁸

Sao Phim was a popular figure in the zone. He had been a Communist since the 1950s. Although comfortable with Marxism-Leninism as he understood it, Sao Phim had been slow to introduce the more radical aspects of CPK policy, such as communal eating, into the zone. In some areas he allowed people to wear their own clothes instead of peasant costumes. In December 1978, several months after Sao Phim’s suicide, the deputy prime minister, Sok Thuok (alias Von Vet), confessed to a conversation he claimed to have had with Sao Phim in 1977, when both of them had allegedly been members of the subversive WPK: