Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (16 page)

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had taken place only in the minds of their accusers. The interrogators’ duty was to validate the Party’s verdict by extracting full confessions. These documents, once recorded, became induced historical texts that supposedly demonstrated a given prisoner’s “objective” connection to serious offenses, the assiduousness of the staff at S-21, and the clairvoyance of the Party.

In addition to Communist models, there are also striking parallels between the techniques used at S-21 and those employed in the Spanish Inquisition, seventeenth-century witch trials, the French Reign of Ter-ror in the 1790s, and, more benignly, in the early, “archaeological” phases of Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud noticed one of these parallels himself. Writing to his friend Wilhelm Fleiss in January 1897, he asked, “Why are [the witches’] confessions under torture so like the communications made by my patients in psychic treatment?”

One answer to Freud’s question might lie in the confident, lopsided relationship imposed by many judges, interrogators, and analysts onto their prisoners and patients. Moreover, analysts and interrogators frequently claim to know what they are looking for, while patients and prisoners often have no idea what is supposed to be “hidden.” One of Freud’s own youthful heroes was the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who “knew” where the ancient city of Troy was located and was proved right when he began to dig.
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When combined with other kinds of pressure, including torture, a skillful interrogator at S-21 could often induce memories that had little or no relation to “historical truth.” In some cases, the prisoner concocted them to please the interrogator and to validate the latter’s insistence that they were true. The vexed issues of “recovered” memories and transference then come into play.
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At S-21, some prisoners came to believe that they were genuinely guilty of counterrevolutionary crimes. This is hardly surprising, for under extreme conditions, as Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters have written in another context, “We desire to create a comprehensive cause and effect story out of our lives and... when we are unable to do this we are most vulnerable to the . . . suggestions offered by others.” At the same time, echoing a prevailing belief in the USSR in the 1930s, counterrevolution in DK was not an activity but a “state of mind from the point of view of the state.”
⁵
Whatever the prisoners had actually
done,
in other words, they were forced to agree with the Party’s assumption that they were guilty because they had been caught. Thus, Suy Chheng Huot, a former electrical worker, stated frankly at the end of his confession:

I am not a member of the CIA. I confessed to being CIA when confronted with my guilt. I beg the Organization to [kill] me because I have not followed the revolution. . . . I deserve to die because the Organization had [once] trusted me. I no longer wish to live, make no protests to the Organization, by way of seeking justice. But I must declare that in my heart I have not betrayed the Organization at all. I declare my guilt . . . because I am dying. Long live the glorious revolution! Long live the Revolutionary Organization!
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The Party’s efforts to obtain admissions of guilt were not always so successful. Sbauv Hin (alias Euan), the secretary of Division 310, was arrested in May 1977. After admitting that he harbored unrevolutionary concerns about his family and was partial to his military unit at the expense of national priorities, he veered off in a dangerously triumphant fashion:

I am supposed to report my plans for a coup d’état against the Party. In my nineteen years of revolutionary life I have fulfilled assignments as a Communist in which I was ready to sacrifice . . . my life for the cause of the liberation of my class and my nation. Under the Party’s leadership I have repeatedly refashioned
[kay pray]
myself. . . . I have nothing to hide from the Party. I have therefore had no thoughts of carrying out a coup d’état against the Party. I fi this question preposterous because the thought has never occurred to me. . . . I regret very much that I had no advance knowledge that I was going to be arrested, in which case I could have proven my loyalty to the Party. However, it’s too late now. I’m shackled in S-21.
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Sbauv Hin was also shackled by his knowledge that there was no resist-ing the authority of the Party, even (or especially) when it was being nourished with so much false, but pleasing, information. When Sbauv Hin closed this section of his confession with the sentence, “Only the Party knows my biography,” he was simultaneously pleading innocent and acknowledging the Party’s right to declare him guilty.
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For days or months, interrogators at S-21 invaded the prisoners’ bodies, minds, and histories, teasing out, inducing, and inventing memories to coincide with prepackaged accusations and adjusted to the for-mat of confessions. Prisoners and interrogators were engaged in shadow-boxing, with the interrogator trying to get at the “truth” (without revealing what it was) and the prisoner trying to please or in some cases—but which ones?— to obfuscate the interrogator by concealing, spinning out, or doctoring his or her story.

The interrogators were expected to coax and terrify the prisoners until they produced a document that coincided with the Party’s “knowledge” of their “crimes” and the Party’s readings of its oscillating history. In Milan Kundera’s Kafkaesque formulation, it was always a case of the “punishment seeking the crime.”
⁹
The prisoners, in turn, had to blend, amplify, or suppress what they actually remembered in order to construct the admissions demanded of them. For interrogators and prisoners alike, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn has written, the process resembled “a grandiose game of solitaire whose rules are... incomprehensible to its players.” The Party Center, to extend the metaphor, kept the rules concealed, and interrogators were encouraged to frame their questions in such a way that “the enemies can’t grasp our intentions.” The ensuing dialogue, unsurprisingly, came to resemble a game of blind man’s buff.
¹⁰
Many prisoners, it seems, were arrested primarily to force them to betray their superiors. Thus, several cadres arrested in 1976 were questioned to build a case against the Eastern Zone secretary, Sao Phim, and in 1978, Kheang Sum Han (alias But), was pressed by his interrogators

to implicate Son Sen.
¹¹

All the prisoners in S-21, with a handful of exceptions, were killed not only because of their alleged guilt but also because the existence of the prison, its location, and its purposes needed to be kept secret. The exigencies of secrecy overrode the advantages, never taken seriously, of letting innocent prisoners out.
¹²

Prisoners were brought to S-21 for many reasons: because they had been named in other confessions, because their unit commanders were suspected of being “enemies,” or because they had come under the suspicion of security services in the zones. Hu Nim’s confession suggests that “enemies” were sometimes exposed at regular self-criticism meetings for cadres. The “enemies” were sent off to S-21 after they had been pushed into admitting treasonous behavior.
¹³

By and large, however, the ways in which prisoners were chosen, summoned, collected, and delivered to the facility are unclear, and so are the administrative relationships between S-21 and “education halls” (the word “prison” was not used elsewhere in the country, but we know that every zone in DK had its own
santebal
office, organized along lines similar to those of S-21). These bureaus apparently reported to the zone secretaries rather than to S-21 or the Party Center in Phnom Penh. Aside from the confessions themselves, we know little about what written evidence was used as the basis for arresting people or was made available to interrogators at the prison. The narrow range of questions to which most of the prisoners responded suggests that little documentation had accompanied them to S-21.
¹⁴

Lower-ranking figures were usually inculpated by their membership in military or production units that had performed badly or by the arrest of their superiors, but the prisoners who were interrogated at length had to confess to treasonous crimes of their own as well as to crimes of association. Many of these individual crimes are completely implausible.

In their confessions, prisoners were always asked to implicate their associates. The “strings of traitors”
(khsae kbot)
appended to nearly all of the confessions occasionally run to several hundred names, creating the impression of a vast, nationwide conspiracy. This is exactly what Duch and his superiors had in mind. “The world view of the [S-21] confession,” as Steve Heder has noted, “includes the individual who is confessing, the people above him who persuaded him to betray the revolution and the people below him whom he persuaded to betray it. Everything is seen in terms of networks and forces.”
¹⁵
Very few prisoners admitted to making decisions on their own. Instead, they usually confessed to being enticed to join or to betray the revolution by the rhetoric and friendly manner of higher-ranking people. Em Choeurn, for example, heard someone talk about the failure of the revolution to deliver material prosperity. “I heard such a clear explanation,” he confessed a year later, “I became angry at the Party and began to take action to destroy it.”
¹⁶
Hak Kim Chheang, beaten by his teacher as a boy, claimed that he had been recruited that very afternoon by a “Chinese spy” who saw him weeping, while Khim Phuong, a teenage girl, was attracted to treasonous conduct by descriptions of the plentiful possessions that might come from espousing “freedom.”
¹⁷

Often, the sponsors who brought people into the revolution later were accused of encouraging them to betray it. Many prisoners, probably because they were frightened and in pain, betrayed the people who had brought them into the Party, supposing that this information was what the interrogators wanted most. The regime’s naïveté in filling the CPK’s ranks with so many “enemies” is never mentioned. Instead, the sequences of betrayal in the confessions were intended to emphasize the conspiratorial character of society outside the Party and to cut short and discredit any genuine revolutionary activity by prisoners or their erstwhile patrons.

In this fashion, many men and women who had devoted their lives to the revolutionary cause, including several who had been closely associated with Pol Pot, were made to confess longstanding “CIA” affilia-tions. The prisoner Re Bo at least knew what was expected of him and

confessed: “I was a traitor from the day I entered the revolution until the day I was arrested.” How could it be otherwise? In the eyes of the Party Center, someone who had truly joined the revolution could never conceivably have betrayed it. Someone who betrayed the revolution, conversely, could never have been loyal.
¹⁸

The “weak points” in confessions at S-21 were seen by Duch and his colleagues not as proof that prisoners had nothing to remember but as occasions when they were most strenuously attempting to conceal something. A prisoner’s moments of indecision or vagueness struck interrogators as deliberately “complicated”
(smok smanh)
and thus as further evidence of the prisoner’s guilt. In many cases, of course, isolation, sleeplessness, torture, and fear had already made the prisoners incoherent, suggestible, or both.
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The two methods consistently used by interrogators at S-21 to obtain results were called “doing politics”
(tvoeu nayobay)
and “imposing torture”
(dak tearunikam),
which is discussed in chapter 5. “Doing politics” involved insulting the prisoners, asking them questions, and persuading them that the Party knew their crimes already. The 1976 study notebook set out a seven-point procedure for interrogations:

l. First, extract information from them.

1. Next, assemble as many points as possible to pin them down with and to prevent their getting away.
   
2. Pressure them with political propaganda.
   
3. Press on with questions and insults.
   
4. Torture.
   
5. Review and analyze the answers so as to ask additional questions.
   
6. Review and analyze the answers so as to prepare documentation.
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