Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (19 page)

The revolutionary potential and intrinsic worth of Cambodians after 1975, it was thought, reflected their class origins. Those with the fewest resources had the best “life stories” and supposedly the highest status. Conversely, those with too many relationships or possessions had “complicated” biographies and constituted potential enemies. The class origins of the “upper brothers” were prudently concealed. Most of them—Ta Mok being the most important exception—sprang from Cambodia’s minute bourgeoisie. They had prepared self-critical biographies about themselves, but by leading the country to victory in 1975, they had clearly already overcome the stigma of their past. In their lifelong search for enlightenment, as it were, they had reached the outskirts of nirvana, the highest level of Buddhist consciousness (a connection they would have scoffed at). Like those embodiments of the Buddha known as
bodhisattva,
they were uniquely equipped to assist others toward enlightenment. In this context, it is of interest that Ho Chi Minh chose his pseudonym (“Ho the enlightened one”) in 1943 before taking command of the “liberation” of Vietnam.

The next question asked respondents to list membership in “nonrevolutionary political organizations.” S-21 personnel whose questionnaires I have examined wrote “none.” Prisoners, on the other hand, were often nudged at this point to admit connections with the Lon Nol regime, with fictional or defunct political parties, and with foreign intelligence agencies.

The questionnaire then asked when the respondent had “entered the revolution”
(choul padevat).
This event had presumably consisted of swearing allegiance to the Organization and expressing a willingness to bear arms. In most of the questionnaires and the majority of confessions, joining the revolution coincided with joining the Khmer Rouge army between 1970 and 1975. After listing the date, S-21 workers and many low-ranking prisoners named the people who had vouched for them. The sponsors were usually village officials or military cadres.

The next questions provided space for “reasons for entering the revolution.” In the confessions this often revealing item was almost always missing. Instead, immediately or shortly after they “entered the revolution,” most prisoners admitted to having entered the service of the CIA or another foreign power. Ironically, the austere ceremonies that some of the prisoners connect with joining the CIA resemble those set out in Party statutes for joining the CPK. Prisoners remember swearing allegiance and facing a fl in the presence of their sponsors. Forced to admit joining something that most of them had never heard of, they resurrected the only political step that any of them (or their interrogators) had ever taken.
⁵¹

Some older prisoners, to be sure, identified the CIA specifically with the United States. They claimed to have been recruited by American agents and confessed to being paid enormous salaries in dollars. Other claims were equally fantastic. Phe Di, arrested in the Northern Zone in June 1976, for example, sketched an identity card he claimed he had been given in the Lon Nol era, signed by “the Chief of the CIA” in Phnom Penh, John B. Devine (?).
⁵²
Another prisoner said he had been recruited by an American named “Kennedy” in the 1960s and confessed that one of his high school teachers, Khieu Thirith (who had been Ieng Sary’s wife since 1952), had been a CIA agent. This bizarre accusation led Duch, when he read it, to scribble nervously in the margin: “Whose wife is she? What evidence do you have?”
⁵³

Another prisoner, knowing only that the “CIA” was in some sense the opposite of DK, asserted that the acronym meant “having enough to eat”; others claim to have been told by their recruiters that “with CIA there will be women and liquor and theaters and markets, stone houses and automobiles to ride” or that after joining the CIA they would be “be free to move around [because] there aren’t any rules
(viney).
” A more acceptable defi to the CPK came from Penh Sopheap, the daughter of Sok Thuok (alias Von Vet), a high-ranking CPK cadre. She was arrested with her father in 1978. She recalled her mother telling her that “CIA is a person who burrows inside the Party.”
⁵⁴

Steve Heder has suggested that in S-21 confessions, “words like CIA and KGB . . . became generic descriptions of enemies. If you said some-body was CIA, you didn’t mean that he was organizationally a member of the CIA, you just meant that he was an enemy.” Similarly, in the Cultural Revolution in China, it was not important what an enemy was

called, so long as he or she was dramatically read out of society and effectively condemned. “To discredit a person,” a document at the time asserted, “the following can be used: rightist, ultra-leftist, counterrevolutionary, bad element, agent of the USSR, USA, KMT, etc.”
⁵⁵
In a similar vein, Lynn White has argued that “measures for labeling people” constituted an aspect of Chinese policy in the Cultural Revolution that was conducive to widespread violence. His insight can be applied to DK, where anyone labeled repeatedly as an “enemy,” regardless of corroboration, was brought to S-21 or executed on the spot.
⁵⁶
In affiliating offenders with foreign intelligence agencies, the interrogators at S-21 were following precedents from the Soviet Union in the 1930s, where prisoners were accused of working for foreign intelligence agencies trying to overthrow Stalin’s regime. Since no loyal Soviet citizen could conceivably oppose the regime, people who did so were by defi “non-Soviet.”
⁵⁷
In Cambodia, people accused of betraying the revolution were similarly thought to be non-Khmer. A speech by Pol

Pot in December 1977 noted that

we have [expelled] the international spy networks. The three big ones are the American CIA, the Soviet KGB, and the network belonging to the Vietnamese consumers of territory. These espionage networks have been buried inside our party, inside our army, and inside our people for more than twenty years.
⁵⁸

In 1997, Pol Pot told Nate Thayer that “Vietnamese agents” had been responsible for most of the deaths that occurred under DK. How could it be otherwise, given the purity of the Party’s intentions, the intrinsic innocence of ethnic Khmer, and the scientifi basis of the Party’s vision?
⁵⁹

The next sections in the autobiographical questionnaires asked for lists of “strong points” and “shortcomings.” In the confessions, a per-son’s “strong points” disappeared, and “shortcomings” were absorbed into the “history of [my] treasonous activities.”
⁶⁰
The “histories of treasonous activities,” in turn, not only listed actions by the prisoners but often also reported conversations in which acquaintances complained about life in DK. Many of these complaints foreshadow the criticisms of DK by people who escaped or survived the regime. They depict a nation whose people were plagued by poor, inadequate food, who wore ragged clothing and worked too hard, who were subjected to constant surveillance and bullying, and who suffered from endemic distrust, excessive puritanism, and restrictions on freedom of movement.

What the prisoners missed most, it seems, was
happiness,
an elusive but almost palpable condition that they connected with family life, abundant food, and the freedom to go where they pleased. This nostalgia also affected prison workers. When the prisoner Yos Thoeurn complained that in DK “we live like animals in a cage” and Huy Savorn compared the revolution to “being in jail,” the workers recording the accusations must have silently concurred. Similar statements surfaced later in some of their own confessions.
⁶¹

Most of the prisoners were young combatants with a limited knowledge of the world. None of the confessions that I have seen, for example, took issue with such DK policies as the closing of schools and newspapers, the disempowerment of the rich and educated, the abolition of law courts and elections, or the forced evacuation of the towns. Three that I have located complained about the suppression of religion, but they lamented the loss of festivals rather than of Buddhist teaching or monasticism. Those that mourned the loss of ranks
(sakdi),
prestige
(muk mo’t),
and honors
(ket’yuos)
did not regret the disappearance or humiliation of high-ranking people or the destruction of Cambodia’s bourgeoisie. Instead, the prisoners who regretted the loss of privilege confessed that they wanted it for themselves.
⁶²

Prisoners also complained frequently about the harsh discipline imposed by revolutionary life. Under DK, they said, they were unable to “go where they wanted”
(teu tam chet),
to “stroll”
(dao lenh),
or simply to “play”
(lenh)
with their families and friends. Under DK, they were always working and always pushed around. Nop Nuon, a former interrogator, complained that “the Organization orders us around like cows or buffaloes,” and Kim Chhoeung noted sourly that “we live under the leadership of others. You need permission to do this, you need permission to do that . . . In the [1970–1975] war we soldiers had difficulties, too. We never thought of them in the life-and-death battlefields, though, because what we wanted [in the end] was to be free or happy, but when the war stopped, suddenly everything was just as difficult [as ever].”
⁶³

Many prisoners missed having the freedom to decide what they might do next. While they were willing to condemn “freedomism”
(sereipheap)
in political meetings and obediently connected this form of evil with the United States, many of them fondly remembered the personal freedoms they had enjoyed before the civil war. Prum Yon described his “counterrevolutionary” stance as follows: “If I want to eat something, I eat it; if I want to do something, I do it; if I want to go

somewhere, I go.” Another prisoner recalled that “in the old society, there were no secrets, and if you had some money you could be happy”; a third confessed to the “crime” of “encouraging people to love the happiness that they had enjoyed in the past.”
⁶⁴

Prisoners also missed the pleasures of living among relatives and friends. Some of them expressed nostalgia for gambling, dancing, theaters, movies, alcohol, and extramarital sex—“sinful” pleasures that were frowned on and curtailed in DK. These regrets crop up so often in the confessions of young prisoners as to suggest that they were saying what they imagined their interrogators wanted to hear. While it is unlikely that many of the young prisoners had ever had the time, money, or leisure to become gamblers, alcoholics, or libertines, “crimes” of this kind were perhaps the only ones they could readily imagine.
⁶⁵
Asked to write about “counterrevolutionary” actions, prisoners dredged up or invented sexual encounters, playful conversations, card games, or drinking bouts. Several female prisoners were coaxed into confessing serial liaisons; males owned up to a series of one-night stands.

Many prisoners expressed a generalized nostalgia for prerevolutionary life. Complaints of this kind often recur word for word in documents written several months apart. It seems likely that copy deemed suitable for confessions was spooned into the texts by the interrogators or document workers regardless of what a given prisoner had done or said. It is also possible that the confessions of many low-ranking prisoners were cobbled together by document workers without much interrogation, once the general outline of appropriate “crimes” and what constituted acceptable complaints was clear. Indeed, the former interrogator Chhim Chhun admitted in his confession that he “only wrote the [prisoners’] stories that were easy to write. If a story had too many relationships [in it] and was hard to write I threw it out.”
⁶⁶

Even with these constraints, the confessions that describe the shortcomings of the revolution are often extraordinarily frank. For example, in July 1977, Chhin Cheap, formerly a soldier in Division 310, recalled a conversation with one of his friends.

Chhun of Division 310 made me see that the revolution was pitch dark
(ngongut).
He said, “Doing a revolution these days is difficult and confusing, from the standpoint of clothing and nourishment; there’s never enough of either.” He said, “When the war was on, that was difficult enough, but when it stopped things became even more difficult. There was no time to rest. To make a comparison, it’s like they order us around like cattle but

don’t even let us eat grass. What’s more you can’t live where you like, there’s no freedom, you can’t even walk a short distance without permission. The way we live now is unhappy. There’s no fun. . . . If we look at the old society, on the other hand, sure, our parents used to work, but not too hard, and they never lacked food, they were happy, they were independent, easy. If we wanted to do something we could do it, provided we had money.”
⁶⁷