Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (20 page)

A month earlier, Dith Kung, also a soldier, had remembered:

In February 1976, Sung told me, “If you do a socialist revolution, food isn’t tasty, and you work without stopping to the point where young people collapse at their work places. You work all day and all night, there’s no time to rest, you have no freedom at all. Doing a revolution means eating rice gruel morning and afternoon, and there’s not even enough of that. To go some place or come from some place you need a letter. There’s a rule for going out and a rule for coming in. When you do a socialist revolution there are no wages, either, no ranks, no women, no alcohol, no gambling, no cars to travel in. You just walk everywhere.”
⁶⁸

Several confessions compared the fate of Cambodian soldiers after their victory in April 1975 with that of Vietnamese soldiers soon afterward. In Vietnam, former combatants were allowed to rest and visit their families. In Cambodia, on the other hand, they were immediately forced to go to work growing rice. As Vann Khoeurn put it, “In other countries they fight the enemy for a month and then they rest. We fight the enemy without stopping.”
⁶⁹
“When the war was won,” Prum Phorn observed, “the Vietnamese army had clothes to wear and food to eat.” This idea was echoed by Norn Nal, who wrote, “Neighbors [i.e., in Vietnam] fought imperialism too, but they have enough to eat.” The comparisons with DK, although not spelled out, are obvious.
⁷⁰

Chou Ny of Regiment 411 used information gleaned from CPK study sessions to paint the Cambodian revolution in a unfavorable light. In his confession he assigned these subversive views to a senior cadre, whom he quoted:

“Soldiers in Vietnam don’t grow rice like we do. Their soldiers are happy, and move about freely, as they wish. They have enough to eat, and, unlike us, they lack nothing. To be sure, they’re engaged in a revolution, but it’s only the outer husk. Inside, they’re not happy with socialist ways, because [socialism] is no way for people to live. They’re aroused and they struggle ceaselessly against socialist ways, because they’re confused, they can’t keep going. And that’s not all. In the Soviet country, which has had a socialist revolution for a long time now, they haven’t begun to do what we do, they never started out as we did. They are reexamining things today, because they can’t keep up the hot class struggle that a revolution involves. Waging a revolution is really hard. . . . When we waged a national democratic revolution, they said it was difficult, against the enemy. When the war ended, we went on into a socialist revolution, and they said we would be happy. In fact it was still difficult, from the point of view of food, clothing, freedom to move around. None of this was like other countries.”
⁷¹

Victory had brought Cambodian soldiers very few rewards. In many cases victory had actually lowered the victors’ painfully earned new sta-tus. Young men and women had run away from their parents’ farms to “liberate” Cambodia as well as themselves, and they were unwilling to revert to growing rice once victory had been achieved. The regime’s pro-peasant rhetoric was lost on young people who felt that as revolutionary combatants they were entitled to leave to others the mud, back-aches, and low status of growing rice. To compound the irony, those meting out the punishments had seldom grown any rice themselves.

Kae San (alias Sok), a high-ranking Party member, was displeased by these developments and made a play on words to underscore his point:

[In May 1975] the one named Chhas said: “Friend, do you see, we’d been liberated a month without any rest
(somrak).
All we did were storming attacks
(vay samruk).
We grew rice all day and all night, you can imagine the problems and the confusion.”
⁷²

A few months later, Khloeung Run, also a soldier, reported a friend’s distress when confronted by the ragged appearance of so many people:

Som said, “Doing a revolution is difficult and complicated
(smok smanh). . . .
There are difficulties in living and in clothing. Let’s look at clothing for a moment. We’ve never had new clothes at all. Cadres and ordinary soldiers were the same. You go to the battlefield, all you saw was rags and tatters, nothing clean, and that wasn’t all. Whatever day month or year it was you saw people sleeping on the ground, their bodies never touched water, they were spattered with mud for a month at a time.”
⁷³

Older combatants complained that they were separated from their wives and children. The breaking up of their families made no sense. As Keng Bak put the problem, using someone else’s voice:

Han said that he missed his wife, and I replied, “Friend, if you examine the revolutionaries, and especially your own friends, you’ll soon see that when the Organization says ‘We have been liberated into freedom,’ freedom is nowhere to be seen. If there were any freedom you’d be allowed to see your wife; what reason can there be for not seeing her?” Han answered, “That’s up to the Organization. If the Organization doesn’t take care [of us] one day we’ll desert the ranks, just wait, one of these days I’ll look for a new place myself.”
⁷⁴

Although these complaints about DK are succinct, eloquent, and powerful, there are few examples in the archive of what James Scott has called the “hidden transcripts” of resistance to oppression. Examples of confrontation, outrage, and ironic backchat between oppressors and oppressed, so frequent in memoirs of the Holocaust or the Russian and Chinese gulags, for example, are rare.
⁷⁵

Because they are so rare in the archive, the occasions when prisoners attacked the revolution head-on are courageous and moving. Prak Chhean, a low-ranking soldier from Division 310 said frankly: “The Organization is shit”;
⁷⁶
Ho Tong Ho, a former teacher who had visited the United States in the 1950s, used his confession to deliver a wither-ing attack on the ideology and practice of the CPK, remarking that “I can’t see how Communism can succeed in the future if technical workers are dismissed, industrial production stops, and factories close their doors.”
⁷⁷
Neak Ang Kear, a radio operator, confessed that his work had suffered because of his “hot anger at the revolution,”
⁷⁸
and Tan Douern noted crisply that as far as he was concerned, “Communism means eating one can of rice a day and following the ideas of uncivilized people.”
⁷⁹

Many “hidden transcripts” would have been delivered orally and so would not have found their way into the documentary archive. Nhem En, who lived with his colleagues in a house several hundred yards from the prison, has recalled hearing a prisoner shout out at night, when the city was completely quiet: “If you want to kill me, go ahead:
you
are the real traitor!”
⁸⁰

Very few of the prisoners questioned DK’s top-down style of rule or its violence, characteristics that DK shared with prerevolutionary Cambodian regimes. Insulting senior figures by name was taboo. The closest anyone came in the confessions I have examined was In Van, who worked for an elite battalion “guarding the Organization” until he was arrested in March 1977. In his confession he berated Khieu Samphan, probably Brother Number Six or Seven:

Khieu Samphan is conducting an oppressive socialist revolution, attacking the free spirit of the people and pitilessly exploiting them. For these reasons, we must fight to liberate our brothers and sisters among the people from the exploitation of this group, whose revolution is impure.
⁸¹

More calmly, Phuong, a senior cadre from the Eastern Zone who had been targeted at
santebal
since 1976 but was not arrested until 1978, attacked the regime head-on:

The people are losing all popular democratic rights and freedoms, all the cadres and the entire state power are under the control of the CPK at all times. . . . Day by day the people and cadres are being imprisoned and chained, massacred by the hundreds, and there’s not the slightest bit of organization or law to guarantee the people’s rights. The people are silent as if they were in so much pain that they don’t dare utter a thing.
⁸²

The secretary of the Western Zone, Chou Chet, arrested in March 1978, confronted his captors directly at several points, delivering a stinging attack on the CPK and its policies without mentioning anyone in the Party Center by name:

[I said that] the current regime was a highly dictatorial one, too rigid and severe, one that overshot the comprehension and consciousness of the people. Therefore a lot of people were muttering . . . that they were doing a lot of work and getting little back for it, how they couldn’t get together with their families, couldn’t rest, never had any fun, and so on.
⁸³

We know from Vann Nath’s account that prisoners whispered to each other and from former workers at the prison that they sometimes talked to prisoners, even though doing so was against the rules. Pha Thachan remembers tapping on the brick walls of his cell to draw the attention of prisoners on either side. He never saw them and had no idea who they were. What was said or tapped out on these occasions— a “hidden transcript” if there ever was one—remains a mystery. Similarly, records of conversations among the interrogators about their work or about the prisoners are very rare and otherwise impossible to reconstruct. Most of the victims and all the perpetrators can be overheard only through the papers that survive.
⁸⁴

The “treacherous activities” of prisoners, as opposed to their complaints about the regime, are impossible to corroborate, but in many cases they call to mind the genuine problems that hard-pressed cadres were encountering in the countryside as they struggled to impose the policies of the Party Center. A November 1976 memorandum to Son Sen from Roeun, the political secretary of Division 801, stationed outside the capital, described the “activities of those who serve the enemy” in military units:

1. They agitate among cadres and other ranks not to believe in our revolution, raising the issue of insufficient food.
   
2. They stir up combatants to desert military ranks, or to desert the cooperatives, saying that cooperatives are difficult.
   
3. At worksites, they encourage people to steal whatever they can; what they can’t eat they throw away.
   
4. They stir people up people to be “free”: wandering around, speaking their minds, mentioning freedom in Vietnam and Laos.
   
5. They agitate people with tales of rank, privilege, and wages in Vietnam and Laos, where [people] are happy with wages, whereas the Kampuchean revolution isn’t happy and will be unhappy for a long time.
   
6. They stir up people to be lazy at their work, saying, “If you can’t eat your fill, you have no strength to work.”
   ⁸⁵
   

These “activities of those who serve the enemy” resembled those to which Party cadres and ordinary soldiers repeatedly confessed. The words the prisoners used to describe their “treacherous activities” were often Leninist ones they had absorbed from CPK study sessions. For example, prisoners claimed to have “educated”
(op rum)
and “organized”
(chat tang)
their treacherous followers: these are both key Marxist-Leninist terms, crucial to CPK thinking. Other examples of Party-inspired language include the prisoners’ claims that they had “nourished secret work”
(cenhchom ka somngat),
“built forces”
(kosang komlang),
“expanded forces”
(bongrik komlang),
conducted “storming attacks”
(vay samruk),
and engaged in “propaganda”
(khosna).

The prisoners often confessed to imitating the subversive tactics that the CPK had used en route to gaining power. Unsurprisingly, most of the so-called subversive “parties”
(pak)
that the prisoners founded or joined were organized exactly like the CPK. Indeed, some of the “enemies” admitted that they had been “buried inside” the CPK for many years, when the CPK itself was “buried inside” Cambodian society. Unlike the CPK, however, the treacherous parties had identifiable leaders—usually important cadres who had already been arrested or were dead—to whom members had directed their “feudal” loyalties and onto whom the Party Center could pour its disdain.