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

In response to questions asking what they were hiding from the interrogator, many prisoners came up with improbable stories of hidden weapons, bullets, medicines, packets of poison, and in more than twenty cases, Vietnamese. Pok Pha confessed to “gathering forces,” otherwise unidentified, whom he had “concealed in deep holes.” Sixty-one confessions involving hidden objects or persons were accompanied by neatly drawn maps, prepared by S-21 personnel, locating the hiding places precisely, down to bureau drawers. The confessions that mention concealed Vietnamese were all written in 1978, after hostilities with

Vietnam had broken out. They are suggestive of the mass hysteria that swept through the Party Center at this time. Invisible Vietnamese were thought to be everywhere, “burrowing from within,” waiting to pounce, while in the countryside Vietnamese forces confronted the DK army in the open. Concealed enemies were always the most dangerous. In July 1978, after a study session titled “On the Problem of Hidden Vietnamese,” the senior interrogator Pon wrote:

There are surely Vietnamese hidden in Phnom Penh because Phnom Penh is not yet cleared of traitors. Documents at
santebal
reveal that traitors have hidden Vietnamese in Phnom Penh, in the Northwest and in other zones.
⁸⁶

According to some confessions, the Vietnamese were hidden in houses or concealed in vacant lots within sight of important ministries in Phnom Penh. None of these confessions was rejected by Duch and his associates as fanciful, and yet none of the Vietnamese prisoners of war and “spies” questioned at the prison ever stated that they had been hid-den by Khmer. These cases are perhaps the clearest examples in the archive of objectified fantasies known by prisoners, interrogators, and the Party Center to have had no basis in fact. At the same time, betraying the regime was tantamount to concealing Vietnamese within oneself, in the same way that treason necessarily implied “bourgeois” tendencies.
⁸⁷

Just as the maps showing the hiding places of weapons, medicine, poison, and Vietnamese confi the narrative truth of the confessions, most of the confessions were up-to-date in the sense that prisoners were encouraged to admit working for the sorts of enemies who were then being targeted by the Party Center. No one “hid Vietnamese” in 1976, in other words, and in 1978 no one confessed to working for Lon Nol. Naturally enough, prisoners’ “crimes” were also related to their work. Thus, prisoners who had been engaged in agriculture confessed to wrecking farm machinery, fl burning, stealing and uprooting crops, maiming, killing and losing track of livestock, and arbitrarily cutting down fruit trees. Factory workers confessed to wrecking machinery, stealing materials, making faulty goods, and plotting with coworkers to sabotage production. Cooks confessed to repeatedly attempting to poison high-ranking figures, smashing crock-ery, serving Chinese experts food on dirty plates so as “to destroy relations with China,” or putting pebbles or feces in vats of soup. A woman who prepared food for Chinese “guests” attached to the ministry of foreign relations claimed to have “sought to destroy the policy of the

guests” by serving them overcooked soup and providing them with bro-ken spoons.
⁸⁸
Those employed by the capital’s electrical works confessed to short-circuiting the system, while people employed in the ministry of foreign affairs confessed to contact with foreign diplomats in Phnom Penh or with “enemy agents” while on duty overseas. Workers in DK hospitals confessed to injecting patients with poison, stealing or misusing medicine, and having sexual relations with patients and with each other. Former patients, in turn, confessed to malingering and to seducing nurses. Drivers confessed to “intentional” accidents, dock workers to breakage and pilferage, and railway workers to damaging rolling stock. Soldiers confessed to desertion, hiding weapons and ammunition, and to having conversations wth their colleagues that belittled the regime, while those working at S-21 confessed to working slowly, preparing “confusing” documents, encouraging prisoners to escape, forbidding them to defecate, and beating them to death. People who had lived abroad said that they had fallen under malign foreign influences, such as “freedomism”; diplomats confessed to conversations with officials in foreign countries.

Once the “guilty people” had been brought to S-21, none of their previous actions, real or concocted, significant or not, was considered accidental. How could they be, if the Party’s leaders were following the laws of history? The prisoners’ counterrevolutionary frame of mind, evidenced by their arrest, had from the interrogators’ standpoint influenced everything they did, including what might appear to others as loyal service to the Party. “Offenses” that were hardly punishable under a code of law were ratcheted up to the level of “treason” by adducing treasonous motives to everything the prisoners had done.

Terrified into creativity but constrained by their unpracticed imaginations, prisoners struggled to “remember” the kinds of crimes that the relentless and similarly terrified interrogators wanted them to confess. Some of the prisoners came up with revelations so bizarre as to cast doubt on the whole archiving exercise at S-21. Noeun Moeun, a soldier in Regiment 171, for example, confessed:

In 1.1977 I shot three bullets at the Vietnamese Embassy. After I had done so I reported to [my patron] Sovanna.

In 2.77 Sovanna ordered me to shoot at the Chinese Embassy. I fi three bullets at the Chinese Embassy and then I fi two more bullets at the hostel for Chinese workers so as to disable the policies of Cambodia and China. Afterwards I reported to Sovanna about the problems I had in gathering forces.... After I had informed Sovanna in 3.1977, Chut and I went to fire

three bullets at the Albanian Embassy, three bullets at the Korean Embassy, and one bullet to the west of the Independence Monument. When that was done I went to inform Sovanna about the difficulty I was having in fi these shots. When I told him, Sovanna said, “Comrade, you should take on some secret characteristics. You mustn’t let them know that you are involved in the shootings. We should plan some strong activities in the future and use the forces that you have gathered. We need to shoot at embassies, at the Organization’s place, at factories and at various ministries in Phnom Penh.” After receiving this guidance I returned home, and on 27.3.77 I was arrested.
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None of the macabre “offenses” described in this and many other confessions would have been punishable by death in prerevolutionary times. Some would not have even have attracted the attention of the offender’s family or neighbors. Yet it was crucial for the staff of S-21 to extract confessions that admitted
something.
Oeur Iep, for example, confessed to having a “narrow attitude,” forgetting to water plants, and failing to respect communal living. Mol Moeun confessed to the offense of “eating too much, like cadres,” and Peou Chhim admitted that he was “lazy and incorrect and talked about women.”
⁹⁰

Most post-1976 confessions include a section labeled “plans”
(phaenka),
which enumerated counterrevolutionary activities that the prisoners had hoped to carry out but that had been foiled by their incarceration. For many prisoners, “plans” proved impossible to remember or imagine. As a result, interrogators frequently complained in their notes to confessions that the prisoners’ “plans” were “confused,” “lacking,” or “unclear.” Some of them were “revealed” only after extensive torture. The exigencies of the interrogation format were such, however, that no prisoner interrogated at length could be documented without a “plan.” It was important for the Party’s history and for the well-being of those in the Party center that the “plans” be simultaneously numerous and ineffective.

Many of the “plans,” as recounted in the confessions, are absurd, and in many cases they probably refl what the interrogators believed would fit the bill. Thus, soldiers from the countryside confessed to plotting to assassinate “the Organization” or “Brother Number One,” whom they had never seen, or sought to “overthrow the revolution” with a handful of unarmed associates. A former guard at S-21, Tum Thun, claimed to have plotted with some associates to loosen prisoners’ shackles and handcuffs, to leave prison doors open, to fall asleep at the gate of the prison so that prisoners could escape—and also to beat prisoners to death.
⁹¹
Interestingly, he did not confess to
committing
any of

these offenses, which constitute a kind of wish list. Another S-21 guard, An Hot, confessed that he “planned to fall asleep on duty.” A film pro-jectionist, Khim Yu, planned to “cause contradictions among foreign guests” by bungling film presentations. Chuon of Division 450 confessed that he planned to “alter the consciousness” of thirty colleagues, without specifying how this would be accomplished, and another prisoner planned to urge his friends to flee to Thailand or Vietnam. By and large, the “plans” sections of the confessions seem in many cases to have been slapped together by workers at S-21. They are the least revealing and probably the most consistently concocted portions in the texts.
⁹²

The autobiographical pamphlets close with the names and addresses of family members who might be called on to vouch for the person writing the life story. In the confessions, these names are usually replaced at the end of the text by “strings of traitors” and “secret networks”
(khsae somngat).
The lists seem to have been relatively easy for the interrogators to obtain, and the data they contained were also usually easy to confi from other sources. In many cases, prisoners provided the names of people already captured or purged by the Organization, and these names were then annotated with the word “caught”
(chap),
while others were marked with an X, perhaps to indicate that they had been put to death. Names listed in the “strings” were used as the bases for additional arrests. They were also consolidated into typewritten summaries, bringing together the names of people affiliated with certain military units, sectors, offices, factories, or work sites.
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Why go to such trouble to compile and concoct these mountains of material? One plausible rationale, as I suggest in chapter 3, was that the Party’s leaders wanted the confessions on fi as raw material for an ongoing, triumphant history of the Party. Another is that the confessions and mug shots objectified the leaders’ paranoid fantasies and were used to convince them that their innumerable enemies were being found, questioned, and put to death. However, other possible explanations have their roots in Cambodia’s historiography and traditions.

In prerevolutionary Cambodia, centralized power and control over historical documents were intimately linked. Historical chronicles were prepared at court to celebrate and legitimize the genealogy of a ruler and his accession to power.
⁹⁴
Held in the palace, these heroic documents became parts of a dynasty’s regalia. Throughout Cambodian history writing itself was highly valued, in part because literacy was a skill closely guarded by priests and their students and in part because so many written texts had intrinsic (and therefore secret) religious content

or power. In a broader Buddhist context, history was perceived as proceeding in an inexorable decline over the five thousand years following the Buddha’s death and enlightenment in 543
B
.
C
. Inside this
longue durée,
history was dynastic, anecdotal, and cyclical, focusing on the actions of those in power and incorporating anecdotes (often imported, with the proper names altered, from other chronicles) that gave pleasing accounts of battles, ceremonies, and intrigues.

Under Pol Pot, historical texts were also composed, controlled, and held by the “ruling apparatus”
(kbal masin),
and historical narratives still described the defeat of enemies. At the same time, the writing of history began to be conceived in a different way. While both genres related events that reflected favorably on a given ruler, Marxist-Leninist history was teleological, dialectical, and collective, a modern genre that supposedly followed scientifi laws. By mastering these laws, it was thought, a Marxist-Leninist party like the CPK could seize power and maintain itself thereafter. Thus when a Party spokesman declared in 1976 that “two thousand years of history” had ended, he probably meant not only that past practices were dead but also that progressively oriented, Party-centered history could now replace the chronicles and everything they stood for. Cambodia’s history-writing, as well as its social relations, had been overturned.

In an undated document titled “Characteristics of the CPK,” a Party spokesman made these points after outlining the Party’s history: