Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (15 page)

He informed me of the good situation in the East Zone. [The WPK] had been able to build itself up in the ranks of the military and among the people. Cooperatives had already been established, but the harvest was distributed and there was a private standard of living in accordance with the demands of the people [who] did not want to eat in common because they perceived that this meant shortages of everything. If they . . . lived privately, eating in families as in China, the people would be very happy.
⁸⁹

Von Vet went on to say that the notion of following Chinese models of socialism had “been disseminated among the people . . . especially in the East, the Northwest and the Northeast, starting from the end of 1977”—that is, when the survival of the Cambodian “race”
(puch)
began to take priority over the development of socialism.

Between March and May 1978, while scattered fighting against Vietnam persisted, the Party Center continued its purge of the Eastern Zone. Sao Phim seemed to know what was happening but was unable to raise the energy or gather the forces to resist.
⁹⁰
In March, he was suffering from intestinal troubles and a skin disease. Half-suspecting that

he was a target of the Party Center, he spent some time recuperating in the 17 April Hospital in Phnom Penh before traveling by train to the northwest with the zone secretary, Nhem Ros.

On 25 March, while Sao Phim was hospitalized or possibly visiting the northwest, the secretary of the Western Zone, Chou Chet (alias Si) was arrested and brought to S-21. Along with Nhem Ros and Sao Phim, Chou Chet was a holdover from the pre–Pol Pot period of Cambodian radicalism. Several of his CPK colleagues from that period, as we have seen, had been purged in 1976. Chou Chet seems to have been a loyal revolutionary unwilling to adopt the strident rhetoric of the regime and concerned about people’s welfare. His wife, Im Nan, held the prestigious post of party secretary in Sector 32 in the Northern Zone. She was arrested with him. In her confession, she claimed to have cooked for Pol Pot in Office 100 in the 1960s and to have repeatedly tried, without success, to poison him.
⁹¹

The Party Center then embarked on a wholesale purge of cadres in the Eastern Zone. In April 1978, so many were brought into S-21 that some of the trucks bearing prisoners had to be turned away. The prisoners were presumably taken off to be killed without any interrogation.
⁹²
The purges were conducted by senior members of the CPK, led by Son Sen and supported by loyal troops dispatched from the Southwest and the Central Zones under Ke Pauk.

In mid-May 1978, Ke Pauk invited senior Eastern Zone cadres, from Sao Phim down to officials at the battalion level, to a meeting at Sao Phim’s headquarters at Suong, which been occupied by Ke Pauk and reinforced with tanks and infantry from other zones. Sao Phim, sensing a trap, refused to go. Those who went were arrested, and some were executed on the spot. Several divisional commanders and the secretaries of Sectors 20, 21, and 22 were bundled off to S-21. Over the following days, Pauk sent messages summoning Phim to meetings. The subordinates whom Phim sent to ascertain Pauk’s intentions were arrested one by one. Their failure to return provoked Sao Phim’s suspicions. Unable or unwilling to believe that Pol Pot was behind the attacks—he preferred to consider Son Sen and Pauk as traitors—Sao Phim prevaricated.

On 25 May Pauk launched an attack from Suong against recalcitrant Eastern Zone units. He ran into spirited resistance, later characterized by some participants as a rebellion against DK control. On 31 May, Sao Phim decided to go to Phnom Penh to plead his cause with Pol Pot. When he reached Chrui Changvar opposite the city and sent a messenger to announce his arrival, forces were sent from Phnom Penh by boat

to capture him. He fled by Jeep and sought refuge in a
wat.
In the meantime, helicopters dispatched from Phnom Penh dropped leafl throughout the zone naming him as a traitor and asking combatants to lay down their arms. Three days later, when a 300-man force recruited locally was on its way to arrest him, Sao Phim shot and killed himself.
⁹³

Fighting between government forces and Eastern Zone units continued for several weeks, during which several Eastern Zone cadres, including the divisional commander Heng Samrin (later Cambodia’s president), sought refuge in Vietnam, where they were enrolled in a force being assembled to invade Cambodia. In June and July, in what Heder has called “massive, indiscriminate purges of Party, army and people alike,” pro-government forces massacred thousands of people in the east. In the most extended and systematic outburst of state-sponsored violence in the DK era, they killed off entire villages suspected of harboring “traitors.” Tens of thousands of other civilians were evacuated from the zone and told that they would be resettled. Many of these were massacred either en route or when they arrived in the southwest, the zone from which the cadres who had purged the east had predomi-nantly come. Some were in fact resettled in the northwest. By September 1978 the Eastern Zone had been “swept clean.”
⁹⁴

The Final Purges

The closing months of DK were marked by the regime’s desperate attempts to seek military support from China and political backing from non-Communist countries while playing down some of the harsher aspects of DK rule. The purges continued, but at a slower pace. In the process, previously immune entities were targeted. Prisoners were brought into S-21 from the railroads, the factories, and even from the supposedly loyal southwest, where a tightly focused, xenophobic anti-intellectual, Ta Mok, had been in command for many years. Toward the end of 1978, the factory workers were joined in S-21 by nearly a hundred Vietnamese prisoners of war. Von Vet, a deputy prime minister, and his longtime associate, Cheng An, the deputy minister for industry, were also purged in November, charged respectively with plotting a coup and with mobilizing factory workers, many of whom were former soldiers. Any organized group of young men was now potentially a nest of traitors.

In December suspicions fell on Son Sen, who had been made secretary of the Eastern Zone in addition to his other duties, following Sao

Phim’s suicide. Because of these new responsibilities and the burden of the fighting with Vietnam, Son Sen may have been exercising less control than usual over the operations of S-21. He had been closely associated with Von Vet since the civil war, and scattered evidence suggests that the two men might have been considering a self-defensive coup d’état against the Party Center. The Vietnamese invasion and the collapse of DK probably saved Son Sen’s life.
⁹⁵

Without such extraordinary interventions, no mechanisms at S-21 or in the Party Center could stop or decelerate the process of “sweeping clean.” Any command to do so would have had to emanate from the “upper brothers,” and until the last few months of 1978 it never came. At that time, while fewer and fewer prisoners were being targeted, those who were tended to be high-ranking cadres. As conditions throughout the country worsened, suspicions deepened in the upper ranks of the Party, and as fi with Vietnam went badly, scapegoats were needed. Inevitably, as the lower ranks of the CPK were eliminated, suspicions fell on increasingly senior figures. Even Ta Mok and the Southwestern Zone cadres whom he commanded came under scrutiny in the regime’s closing weeks. Who might have come next? Where could the persecutions end? The all-consuming purges made macabre sense: how could anyone ever be sure that the last concealed enemy had been found?

A larger, more experienced, and more self-confi Communist Party might have been able to restrain the purges when they got out of hand. Belated efforts along these lines were made in the closing months of 1978, when the prisoner intake at S-21 dropped off sharply. However, the Party Center still felt itself surrounded by enemies. There was ample evidence from S-21 to prove it:
santebal
’s mission had always been to validate the Party Center’s worst suspicions. After the Vietnamese invasion of 1977–1978 and the purges in the Eastern Zone, the Party Center was beset by fears and racing against time.

Reigns of terror and continuous revolutions (in DK, the two phenomena overlapped) require a continuous supply of enemies. When these enemies are embedded in a small, inexperienced political party, ethnically indistinguishable from the majority of the population, attempting to purge
all
its enemies can have disastrous effects. As Duch and his colleagues did what they were told, they undermined Cambodia’s military effectiveness, dismantled the administrative structure of the country, and destroyed the Party. The killing machine at S-21 had no brakes because the paranoia of the Party Center had no limits. The

half-hearted reforms instituted in 1978—the amnesty proclaimed by Pol Pot and the reduction of torture at S-21—
⁹⁶
were counterbalanced by the fact that several of the revolution’s highest-ranking figures were arrested at that time, just when the Party needed experienced cadres to present a united front in the confl with Vietnam. By the end of the year, the Party’s administration of the geographic zones had largely bro-ken down; Ta Mok had assumed command of several zones at once. When the Vietnamese launched their invasion in late December 1978, the CPK’s Central Committee had been decimated. Except for Ta Mok, all the original zone secretaries and most of their replacements had been purged, as had the administrators of nearly all the nation’s factories and hospitals and hundreds of military cadres. By the end of 1978, there were not enough experienced people to run the country or enough military leaders to organize a coherent defense. As the one-time Communist Mey Mann told Steve Heder in 1997, recalling this period, “Everybody was accusing everybody else of treason, and nobody knew

what was really happening.”
⁹⁷

In July 1997, when Pol Pot was placed on trial at the Khmer Rouge base at Anlong Veng—ironically, his crime was ordering the murder of Son Sen—one of his accusers blamed him for encouraging a generalized paranoia among his followers. Although the accusation focused on the 1990s, its vivid wording suggests, in hindsight, some of the destructive energies unleashed at S-21:

[Pol Pot] saw enemies as rotten flesh, as swollen flesh. Enemies surrounding. Enemies in front, enemies behind, enemies to the north, enemies to the south, enemies to the west, enemies to the east, enemies in all eight directions, enemies coming from all nine directions, closing in, leaving no space for breath. And he continually had us fortify our spirit, fortify our stance, fortify over and over, including measures to kill our own ranks . . . even strugglers of the same rank in the movement.
⁹⁸

Between 1975 and the collapse of the regime, tens of thousands of its “enemies” were arrested and killed throughout the country. At least fourteen thousand had been held, questioned, tortured, and put to death by
santebal.
Had the Vietnamese invasion been delayed, the end of the spiraling, destructive process at S-21 is impossible to envision. The “wheel of history” had developed an inexorable momentum, crushing everyone in its path. Indeed, as an interrogator from the prison arrested at this time asked plaintively in his confession: “If
angkar
arrests everybody, who will be left to make a revolution?”
⁹⁹

chapter four

Framing the Questions

In January 1978, Vann Nath, a commercial painter in Battambang, was arrested there and interrogated for several days before being shackled and driven in a truck to S-21. In 1978, he had no idea why he was arrested. He still doesn’t. Talking with Sara Colm in 1995, he recalled his first interrogation:

“What was the problem that caused them to arrest you?” the interrogator asked.

I said I didn’t know.

“The Organization isn’t stupid,” he said. “It never catches people who aren’t guilty. Now think again—what did you do wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I said again.
¹

Many other prisoners at S-21 were asked to explain why they had been arrested and therefore why they were guilty. Like Joseph K in Kafka’s novel
The Trial,
they had not been accused because they were guilty; they were guilty because they had been accused. The questions were intended to throw the prisoners off balance, but the interrogators themselves were often genuinely curious and sincere. They believed that the prisoners were guilty, but they had no idea what offenses they were supposed to uncover. The first encounter, which was bewildering on both sides, resembled interrogation techniques used by police officials everywhere, and also drew on the practices of other Communist regimes.
²
As in the USSR and Maoist China, many of the prisoners’ hidden “crimes”