Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (2 page)

In addition to those named already, and at the risk of offending any-one I might forget to single out, I am happy to acknowledge the help of Norman Aiblett, Susan Aitken, Lya Badgley, Elizabeth Becker, Andy Brouwer, Frederick Brown, Mary Brown Bullock, Timothy Carney, Susan Cook, Robert Cribb, Thomas Cushman, Stephen Dunn, Penny Edwards, Craig Etcheson, Joseph Fraley, Lindsay French, Edward Friedman, Jörg Friedrich, David Garrioch, Christopher Goscha, Bailey Gunther, Eleanor Hancock, Anne Hansen, Iem Sokhim, Helen Jarvis, David Jenkins, William Joseph, Ben Kiernan, J. D. Legge, Suzanna Lessard, John Marston, Robin McDowell, Kevin McIntyre, Paul McNellis, Robert Moeller, Rudolf Mrazek, Seth Mydans, Irina Paperno, Kong Peng, Christophe Peschoux, Craig Reynolds, John Rickard, Michael Schoenhals, Daniel Schwartz, Bruce Sharp, Sok Sin, Larry Stross, Nate Thayer, Serge Thion, Ton-that Quynh-Du, William Turley, Khatarya Um, Lionel Vairon, Walter Viet, Eric Weitz, Thongchai Winachikul, and Yang Lian.

My editors, Patrick Gallagher of Allen and Unwin and Reed Malcolm and Cindy Fulton of the University of California Press, have been supportive and enthusiastic. I am also grateful for the comments prepared by anonymous readers for the Press and for the inspired and assiduous copyediting of Erika Büky. All but two of the photographs, those by Kelvin Rowley and Carol Mortland, were generously provided by the Photo Archive Group. Gary Swinton, of the Monash Geography Department, prepared the diagram of S-21.

Putting the book together, in spite of its horrific subject matter, has been a pleasurable, cooperative effort. Without the copious help I have mentioned it could never have been written.

chapter one

Discovering S-21

On 7 January 1979, a bright, breezy day in Cambodia’s cool season, heavily armed Vietnamese forces, accompanied by lightly armed Cambodian allies, reached the outskirts of Phnom Penh after a blitzkrieg campaign that had begun on Christmas Day. For over a year, Vietnam had been at war with the Maoist-inspired regime of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), known in the West as the Khmer Rouge. Their invading force of over one hundred thousand troops, including armored units, was reinforced by a sustained aerial bombardment.
¹

The rapidity of the Vietnamese success took their commanders by surprise. After barely two weeks of fighting, Cambodia cracked open like an egg. The leaders of DK, most of their army, and tens of thousands of their followers fled or were herded out of the city. The invaders were welcomed by nearly everyone who stayed behind. These were people terrorized and exhausted by nearly four years of undernourish-ment, back-breaking labor, and widespread executions. A similar welcome, tragically misplaced, had greeted the Khmer Rouge themselves when they had occupied Phnom Penh in April 1975 and ordered its population into the countryside to become agricultural workers. In both cases, people were longing desperately for peace.
²

By late afternoon the Vietnamese forces had occupied the city. Aside from a few hundred prisoners of war and other people—including some of the workers at S-21—who were in hiding, waiting to escape, Phnom Penh was empty.
³

1

After the Khmer Rouge had emptied the city in 1975, Phnom Penh had remained the country’s capital, but it never regained its status as an urban center. The bureaucrats, soldiers, and factory workers quartered there probably never numbered more than fifty thousand. During the DK era, the country had no stores, markets, schools, temples, or public facilities, except for a warehouse in the capital serving the diplomatic community. In Phnom Penh, barbed-wire fences enclosed factories, workshops, barracks, and government offices. Street signs were painted over, and barbed-wire entanglements blocked many streets to traffic. Banana trees were planted in vacant lots. Automobiles abandoned in 1975 were rusted in piles along with refrigerators, washing machines, television sets, and typewriters. Scraps of paper in the gutters included prerevolutionary currency, worthless under the Khmer Rouge. On 7 January 1979, no people or animals could be seen. As in 1975, the central government, such as it was, had disappeared. Once again, Cambodians were being made to start at zero.
⁴

The effect of the desolation on the newcomers was phantasmagoric. Chey Saphon, for example, was a forty-seven-year-old Cambodian Communist who had fought against the French in the 1950s. He had lived in Vietnam since 1955 and had been trained as a journalist. On 7 January he was thrilled to be returning home with the Vietnamese troops. He was so unnerved by what he saw, however, that years later he recalled that he “spent the whole afternoon in tears.”
⁵

Over the next few days Vietnamese troops fanned out across Phnom Penh. On 8 January, in the southern sector of Tuol Svay Prey, two Vietnamese photojournalists who had accompanied the invasion were drawn toward a particular compound by the smell of decomposing bodies.
⁶
The silent, malodorous site was surrounded by a corrugated tin fence topped with coils of barbed wire. Over the gate was a red placard inscribed in yellow with a Khmer slogan: “Fortify the spirit of the revolution! Be on your guard against the strategy and tactics of the enemy so as to defend the country, the people and the Party.” The place carried no other identification.
⁷

Pushing inside, the two photographers found themselves on the grounds of what appeared once to have been a high school. The spacious, dilapidated compound measured roughly four hundred meters from east to west and six hundred meters from north to south (see illustrations). It consisted of four whitewashed concrete buildings, each three stories high, with balcony corridors running along each upper story. A fi single-story wooden building, facing west, split the compound

into two identical grassy spaces. To the rear of each of these, one of the taller buildings faced east, toward the entrance. Similar buildings marked off the northern and southern boundaries of the compound.
⁸
The purpose of the compound was unclear to the two men, although the single-story building, littered with papers and office equipment, had obviously been used for some sort of administration.

In rooms on the ground floor of the southernmost building, the two Vietnamese came across the corpses of several recently murdered men. Some of the bodies were chained to iron beds. The prisoners’ throats had been cut. The blood on the floors was still wet. Altogether the bod-ies of fourteen people were discovered in the compound, apparently killed only a couple of days before.
⁹

In large classrooms on the upper floors of the western buildings, the patrol found heaps of shackles, handcuffs, whips, and lengths of chain. Other rooms on the upper floors had been divided by clumsily bricked partitions into small cells where each prisoner’s foot had been mana-cled, as William Shawcross later wrote, “to a shackle large enough to take a ship’s anchor.” Ammunition boxes in some of the cells contained human feces.
¹⁰
On the third floor were slightly larger, more elaborately constructed cells with wooden walls and doors.

The two intruders took photographs of all the rooms in the facility, adding photos of the corpses. They then “informed the Vietnamese authorities” of what they had found. That evening the corpses were burnt “as a sanitary measure.” Some of the photographs taken at that time now hang in the rooms where the bodies were found.

Over the next few days the Vietnamese and their Cambodian assistants discovered in nearby houses thousands of documents in Khmer, thousands of mug-shot photographs and undeveloped negatives, hundreds of cadre notebooks, and stacks of DK publications. In a workshop near the front gate they found several recently completed, oversized concrete busts of the DK prime minister, Pol Pot, a concrete mold for the statues, and some portraits of him, apparently painted from photographs.

The Vietnamese had stumbled into a vicious and important Khmer Rouge facility. Documents found at the site soon revealed that it had been designated in the DK era by the code name S-21. The “S,” it seemed, stood for
sala,
or “hall,” while “21” was the code number assigned to
santebal,
a Khmer compound term that combined the words
santisuk
(security) and
nokorbal
(police). “S-21,” and
santebal,
were names for DK’s security police, or special branch.
¹¹

Over the next few weeks the history of the site was pieced together. In the early 1960s, when Cambodia had been ruled by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, it had been a high school. It was named after Ponhea Yat, a semilegendary Cambodian king associated with the foundation of Phnom Penh.
¹²
After Sihanouk was overthrown in 1970—the event that sparked Cambodia’s civil war—the school had taken the name of the surrounding district, Tuol Svay Prey (hillock of the wild mango). An adjoining primary school was called Tuol Sleng (hillock of the sleng tree). This name was used to designate the entire compound after it became the Museum of Genocidal Crimes in 1980, perhaps because the sleng tree bears poisonous fruit.
¹³

The code name S-21 began to appear on Khmer Rouge documents in September 1975. For the next nine months, until the facility came into operation in May or June 1976, the security service’s work was spread among several units in Phnom Penh, the southern suburb of Ta Khmau, and in Sector 25, north of the capital.
¹⁴
By the end of 1975, according to a former guard, Kok Sros, interviewed in 1997,
santebal
coalesced under the command of Kang Keck Ieu (alias Duch), a former schoolteacher who had been in charge of security in the so-called special zone north of the capital during the civil war. Duch became the director of the Tuol Sleng facility in June 1976. He remained in command until the day the Vietnamese arrived.
¹⁵

Sensing the historical importance and the propaganda value of their discovery, the Vietnamese closed off the site, cleaned it up, and began, with Cambodian help, to examine its voluminous archive. On 25 January 1979, a group of journalists from socialist countries was invited to Cambodia by the Vietnamese to report on and celebrate the installation of the new Cambodian government, known as the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). The journalists were the first official visitors to see Tuol Sleng. Chey Saphon accompanied them to the site. One of the journalists, the Cuban Miguel Rivero, wrote later that “there were still traces of blood on the fl . The smell was even more penetrating. There were thousands of green flies circling the room.” Rivero added that he saw documents “written in Sanskrit” and “several” copies of Mao Zedong’s
Little Red Book
at the “Dantesque” site.
¹⁶

Soon afterwards, in February or March 1979 (his own memory is uncertain), Mai Lam, a Vietnamese colonel who was fluent in Khmer and had extensive experience in legal studies and museology, arrived in Phnom Penh. He was given the task of organizing the documents found at S-21 into an archive and transforming the facility into what David

Hawk has called “a museum of the Cambodian nightmare.”
¹⁷
The first aspect of Mai Lam’s work was more urgent than the second. It was hoped that documents found at the prison could be introduced as evidence in the trials of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, DK’s minister of foreign affairs, on charges of genocide. These took place in Phnom Penh in August 1979. Although valuable information about S-21 was produced at the trials, none of the documents in the archive provided the smoking gun that the Vietnamese and PRK officials probably hoped to find. No document linking either Pol Pot or Ieng Sary directly with orders to eliminate people at S-21 has ever been discovered, although the lines of authority linking S-21 with the Party Center
(mochhim pak)
have been established beyond doubt.

Because of his penchant for history, his experience with museums (he had organized the Museum of American War Crimes in Ho Chi Minh City), and the criminality of what had happened at S-21, Mai Lam approached his work with enthusiasm and pride. His genuine, somewhat patronizing fondness for Cambodia and its people, based on his experiences in Cambodia in the first Indochina war, also inspired him. “In order to understand the crimes of Pol Pot–Ieng Sary,” he told interviewers in 1994, “fi you should understand Cambodians, both the people and the country.”
¹⁸

In turning S-21 into a museum of genocide, Mai Lam wanted to arrange Cambodia’s recent past to fit the requirements of the PRK and its Vietnamese mentors as well as the long-term needs, as he saw them, of the Cambodian people. Because numbers of the “Pol Pot–Ieng Sary genocidal clique,” as the Vietnamese labeled them, had been Cambodians themselves, the message that Mai Lam was trying to deliver was different from the one that he had hoped to convey in the Museum of American War Crimes, but it was just as harsh. The history that he constructed in the exhibits at S-21 denied the leaders of the CPK any socialist credentials and encouraged viewers to make connections between the DK regime and Tuol Sleng on the one hand, and Nazi Germany and what Serge Thion has called the “sinister charisma” of Auschwitz on the other. The comparisons were fitting insofar as S-21, like the Nazi death camps, was a secret facility where all the inmates were condemned to death, but any more explicit links between Nazism and DK, although seductive, were inexact.
¹⁹