Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (22 page)

The exploiting group wrote history so as to exploit the people even more. When we write the history of our country we write about the struggle of our Party and our people for independence and not to be the slaves of others any more. For example, when we write the history of Angkor we write that the people made it, and that is the truth: the people made it, not the kings.
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Several Party histories from the 1970s reflect this altered focus and new approach.
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With what Timothy Carney has called its “unexpected victory” in April 1975, the CPK achieved the closure that had been lacking in these earlier texts and grasped the “wheel of history”
(kong pravatt’sas).
With victory, Cambodia’s “two-thousand-year” history became coterminous with the Party’s rise to power. Put another way, the Communists’ victory in 1975 illuminated the Party’s past. Alternative readings of the past, along with the Party’s flesh-and-blood opponents, were unthinkable and had to be “swept clean.”

The involvement of S-21 in the historiography of the Party became important after April 1976, when, as we have seen, a military disturbance in Phnom Penh was interpreted by the CPK’s leaders as a revolt that threatened the hegemony of the Party and undermined its hitherto triumphal history. Thanks to the voluminous “evidence” about the conspiracy reaching the Party Center from S-21, the Party’s history from then on was conceived largely in terms of an open-ended struggle against internal enemies. S-21 became the regime’s cutting edge.

As I suggested earlier, the confessions extracted at S-21 also served a psychological purpose by objectifying the paranoid fantasies of the Party’s leaders. In this regard, the resemblances between the interrogators’ methods and objectives and Freud’s notions of therapeutic “archaeology,” while fortuitous, are striking.
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Interrogators at S-21, like psychoanalysts, excavated the memories of each “guilty person” who was assumed to be hiding a history (which is to say, a memory) of counterrevolutionary activities, plans, and associates. Like many psychoanalysts, the interrogators pretended to know what they were looking for and had some idea of the “memories” that they wanted the prisoners to “recover.” They also knew the format that a completed confession had to take, whereas the prisoners, like many psychiatric patients, did not.

In several other respects, of course, comparisons between what happened at S-21 and what sometimes takes place in psychoanalysis are invalid. Analysts, to begin with, seldom resort to violence, whereas S-21 was steeped in it. Analysis patients are usually free to get up and leave, thereby abandoning the procedure or seeking a more sympathetic interlocutor; all the prisoners at S-21 were killed, and their confessions were in effect their wills, last letters from the death house. Another aspect of the interrogations at S-21 that sets them apart from their psychoanalytic counterparts is that the fantasies being excavated, objectified, and spoken about in Pol Pot’s secret prison were not those of the prisoners but those projected onto them by the interrogators on behalf of their patrons (and, in a sense, their patients) in the Party Center. Perhaps the major difference between analysis and interrogation, of course, is that analysis is aimed, in theory, at the betterment of the patient, whereas interrogations aim to extract evidence from a prisoner for use in a legal proceeding. Insofar as interrogations at S-21 had a heuristic purpose, in line with the Maoist theory of reeducation, the two forms of questioning tended to overlap.

With these reservations, however, there are still uncanny resemblances between the two kinds of conversation and between the lopsided power relationships that they display. In a disturbing passage, Freud himself once suggested:

We must not believe what they say, we must always assume, and tell them, too, that they have kept something back. . . . We must insist on this, we must repeat the pressure and represent ourselves as infallible, until at last we are really told something.
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The S-21 interrogator’s manual, even more chillingly than Freud, when we recall the prisoners’ fates, makes a similar point:

They must write confessions in their own voice, clearly, using their own sentences, their own ideas. We should avoid telling them what to write. When they have fi telling their story or writing it down, only then can we raise their weak points, press them to explain why they did things, why they are lying, concealing, abbreviating things.
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A third reason why the S-21 archives were maintained has been suggested, in another context, by Peter Holquist, writing about the amass-ing of “all encompassing information” about “political moods” in the USSR and the relationship between information-gathering and surveillance by police services on the one hand and what Holquist calls the Bolshevik notion of “sculpting” twentieth-century society on the other. Seen in this way, the information collected at S-21 could be used by the Party Center to gauge the “political moods” of the people, so as to forestall opposition and reconstruct those who were not yet imprisoned along proper revolutionary lines. Collecting everyone’s biography, so as to “know” everyone in the country, fits into such a scheme. Indeed, DK seems to have been seduced by the notion that gathering masses of information per se increased its capacity to influence events. Unfortunately for the regime but fortunately for many survivors, information at the regime’s disposal was often incomplete or falsified, and hundreds of thousands of “enemies” were never found.
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If for argument’s sake we assume the S-21 confessions to be “true,” an ungenerous reading is that the Party’s leaders, in the dark for so long about so many conspiracies and betrayals, displayed colossal naïveté, misplaced trust, and a consistent misreading of people’s priorities and motives. Indeed, this is the line that Pol Pot took, somewhat plaintively, after 1979 in talking about his time in power. What went wrong, Pol Pot told some followers in 1981, was that he had “trusted people too much.” In 1995, he said that the deaths that occurred under DK could be traced to the fact that “we were like babies, learning to walk.” Pol Pot’s evasion of responsibility is easy to understand, and so is his self-pity, but the comparison between DK and a gigantic baby stumbling

across the Cambodian landscape, infl colossal damage, defi analysis.
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When they were extracted, of course, the confessions were not intended as demonstrations of the Party Center’s naïveté but as evidence of the CPK’s knowledge of everything that went on, however tardily obtained, and its leaders’ consummate ability to grasp the wheel of history and thereby create and control the Party’s triumphant narrative. Just as multiple “national” and personal stories fl together into the governing narrative of the CPK’s triumph over what it called “the United States” in April 1975, the records of “treasonous activities,” “plans,” and the “strings of traitors” being unmasked were also absorbed into that history, and the “enemies” neutralized, before their treasonous acts or any of their “plans” could take effect. Seen in this way, the confessions are mantras protecting the Party Center not only from its enemies but also from any genuine effort to understand what was going on. Duch, Pon, Chan, and their associates were simultaneously priests, therapists, miners, vivisectors, and historians. In concoct-ing history out of their leaders’ fantasies, which were probably also their own, they served their masters well.

chapter five

Forcing the Answers

As in the Nazi concentration camps examined by Wolfgang Sofsky, “excessive violence was an everyday phenomenon” at S-21.
¹
Some of the documents from the prison, and especially those that deal with torture, exude so much horror and speak so calmly about pain that they are difficult to absorb, even as they draw us toward the victims. For example, in July 1977 an interrogator appended the following unsigned note to the confession of Ke Kim Huot, the former secretary of Sector 7 in the Northwest Zone:

1. In the morning of 18.7.77 I decided to employ torture. I told the prisoner that I was doing this because I had not grasped the weak points of what he had said, and my pressure had not had any results. This was my stance. I watched his morale fall when I administered torture, but he had no reaction. When questioning began, it was still the same. As for his health, he ate some gruel, but he was not able to sleep. The doctor looked after him.
   
2. On the morning of 20.7.77 I beat him again. This time his reaction was to say that he was not a traitor but that the people who had accused him were the traitors. His health was still weak, but was not a serious problem.
   
3. In the afternoon and evening of 21.7.77 I pressured him again, using electric cord and shit. On this occasion he insulted the person who was beating him: “You people who are beating me will kill me,” he said. He was given 2–3 spoonfuls of shit to eat, and after that he was able to answer questions about the contemptible Hing, Chau, Sac, Va,
   etc.
   
4. That night I beat him with electric cord again.
   

At present he is a little weak. The doctor has seen him. He has asked to rest.
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Another interrogator’s comment vividly illustrates the lopsided relationship between torturers and their victims, which Michel Foucault has somewhat luxuriantly compared both to a “duel” and to a game of chess.
³

I first asked the enemy about his life and associations. When I had done this, I spoke about the discipline of the office [S-21], and I told him that his body, tied up with fetters and handcuffs, was worth less than garbage.

I had him pay respect to me. I told him that if I asked him to say a single word to me, he had to say it. I made him pay homage to the image of a dog [a common torture, involving an image of a dog with the head of Ho Chi Minh]. I beat him and interrogated him until he said that he had once been CIA. After I beat him some more, he admitted that he had joined the CIA in 1969.

Once he had confessed I didn’t have to beat him to obtain the rest of his story, but when he hesitated or came to weak points in his story I beat him, and I also beat him to clarify the points in his story where the information about important matters was confused.
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Coming face to face with documents like these, or with the harrowing photographs from S-21, we are at a loss for words. Indeed, Jean Améry,

E. Valentine Daniel, and Elaine Scarry have eloquently demonstrated that the
experience
of torture is impossible to put into words; Scarry even suggests that pain destroys language. Perhaps this is one reason why there seems to be no precise legal definition for torture. Why, then, do so many authors persist in trying to write about it ? Why should we? There is something unsettling about “fi writing” about pain. As Améry has remarked, “Torture is the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself.” He adds that “the howl of pain defies communication through language.” In spite of or perhaps because of such warnings, writers and readers alike are drawn inexorably toward a subject that is ugly, frightening, seductive, and ultimately inexpressible.
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We can be emotionally worn down by the idea of torture merely by visiting the site of S-21, looking at the mug shots, or leafing through the archive. It is tempting to take refuge in the received wisdom that the all-pervasive “evil” in the DK period was epitomized by the prison. Looking at every photograph and every confession, we know the prisoner’s fate. Repeatedly and with hindsight we confront descriptions of violence and the repetitive fact of death. At the same time, we are insulated from what really happened to the minds and bodies of the victims and to the personalities of the perpetrators later on. What happened is

awful, but it happened long ago to other people. “Evil,” we like to think, takes place elsewhere.

The Problem of Studying Torture

In studying torture at S-21 we are restricted not only by our distance from what happened but also by the relative silence of available sources on the subject. Since the early 1980s, only three survivors of the prison have talked at length about their experiences. Their testimonies are valuable and heartfelt, but they have limitations that spring from their repeated use as propaganda in the 1980s, from the survivors’ interview fatigue, and from the blurring of their memories over time. Moreover, the survivors cannot describe conditions in the prison in 1976, before they were arrested.