Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (25 page)

The Soviet Show Trials

As we have seen, officials at S-21 worked on the assumptions that prisoners were guilty of something because they had been accused, and subhuman because they had been arrested. Both notions had deep roots in Cambodian culture. At S-21, however, the main inspirations for prolonged interrogation accompanied by judicial torture and leading to copious confessions came from abroad: from the so-called Moscow show trials (sometimes called the Great Terror) of 1936–1938, when hundreds of Soviet Communist Party cadres and military fi had confessed publicly, and often spuriously, to sabotage, espionage, and treason. Thousands more were executed without trial. The elaborate confessions extracted in Moscow were orchestrated to please Stalin. They confi his often inchoate fears, preempted “enemy” initiatives, and strengthened his authority. In this respect, the Soviet purges and the confessions stemming from them closely resembled those extracted at S-21. Like Stalin, who spent most of the period of the show trials concealed from public view, Pol Pot made only a few carefully orchestrated appearances throughout the DK era. Moreover, the heavily coached Soviet defendants, like those in Cambodia later on, almost never denied their guilt once they appeared in court, and they seldom offered any defense. The prisoners in both countries were regarded as “less than garbage.” After reciting their confessions to the court, most of the Soviet prisoners, like those at Tuol Sleng, were secretly put to death.

In both cases the sentence of death was a foregone conclusion— recalling the Red Queen’s “Sentence first, verdict afterwards”—but in Moscow the ordeals were staged openly, in courtrooms, with the trappings of twentieth-century justice, whereas at S-21 everything was kept secret, there were no occasions for dialogue, and neither the prisoners nor the judges were ever on display. One reason for this difference is that Moscow trials were intended, among other things, to demonstrate the Soviet Union’s leadership of the world socialist movement, whereas the Khmer Rouge leaders, indifferent to world opinion, believed that secrecy was a key ingredient of their success.

Another difference between the two procedures was that physical torture preceding the Soviet trials seems to have been infrequent and was limited—officially at least—to such practices as sleep deprivation and exposing prisoners to bright lights, prolonged questioning, poor food, and isolation. Solzhenitsyn, referring to his own interrogations in the 1940s, wrote: “My interrogator had used no methods on me other than sleeplessness, lies, and threats—all completely legal.” At S-21 these pressures were used along with physical violence. The Soviet methods were enough to break most prisoners; severe physical torture was in any case precluded by the requirement that the prisoners look healthy in court and sound as if they were confessing of their own free will. (However, physical torture was specifically permitted by Stalin in cases involving “known and obstinate enemies of the people,” with the justifi that it was widely used by “bourgeois intelligence services.”) The concealed victims at S-21, on the other hand, could be beaten and tortured as often and as violently as their captors saw fit.
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Even when these differences are kept in mind, the resemblances between the Soviet accusations and confessions and their counterparts at S-21 are too numerous to be coincidental. How did the Soviet mod-els reach Cambodia? To begin with, most of the “upper brothers” were familiar with the Moscow trials. Pol Pot, Son Sen, Ieng Sary, and Khieu Samphan would have learned about them in the early 1950s, when they were all students in France and fledgling members of the French Communist Party. They would have read Party documents, journalism, and

briefi that justifi the purges. They would also have known and approved of the Soviet-orchestrated show trials that were taking place in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other Soviet-bloc countries.
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Although they never commented publicly on these trials, these young Cambodians must have been struck by the abject self-incrimination of the accused, the comprehensive evidence arrayed against them, and the identifi of revolutionary justice with a concealed, all-powerful leader. Their training in the French Communist Party, which was emphatically pro-Stalin, would hardly have led them to sympathize with Stalin’s victims or to appreciate the niceties of bourgeois as opposed to revolutionary justice. When the time came, the confessions extracted at S-21 replicated the paranoid ideology, the holistic, accusa-tory format, and the interrogatory procedures of the Soviet show trials. Since in both cases a Communist Party, obsessed with history, was purging itself to protect its suspicious leaders, the resemblances are not surprising.

Chinese and Vietnamese Models

Another model for S-21’s draconian procedures came from Communist Party purges and reeducation campaigns in China, filtered through Vietnam. Cambodian Communists fighting alongside the Vietnamese in the first Indochina war (1946–1954) probably learned about Soviet interrogation techniques, Chinese-style “reeducation,” and the proper for-mat for “counterrevolutionary” confessions from their Vietnamese patrons.

Vietnamese training for Khmer cadres in security work, if there was any, would probably have reflected Chinese models. In this early period, these included the rectifi
(zhen-fan)
campaigns conducted at Yan’an in 1943 and the land reform campaigns in North China after 1949. Purges swept through China and Vietnam in the mid-1950s. Thousands of people were killed, thousands of careers were ruined, and tens of thousands of people were interrogated and then released. The Chinese and Vietnamese blended Soviet notions of implacable revolutionary justice with ideas of redemptive “thought reform” or “reeducation” that had roots in prerevolutionary China and Vietnam but very little resonance in Cambodian history.
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Drawing on this tradition, the Chinese and Vietnamese pursued what Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman have called a “therapy” strategy to deal with deviants, as opposed to that of “nihilation” pursued in the

USSR and later at S-21. In all four countries prisoners were expected to confess fully and openly to accusations, reassessing their past to har-monize with the requirements of the Party. They were also supposed to express profound remorse. Redemption, however, was difficult to obtain and seldom complete. The characters of those accused of counterrevolutionary activities were permanently stained, but after “rectification” far fewer victims were killed in China and Vietnam than in the USSR. Instead, thousands of “enemies” spent long periods in prison.
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In the closing months of 1978 Cambodian officials at S-21 toyed with the idea of adapting a similar strategy, perhaps in line with the amnesty offered by Pol Pot to former “enemies” earlier in the year. A document from Office 870, as the Central Committee was called, promised leniency to people who had “joined the CIA, done work for the Vietnamese, or entered the KGB” before 1975; those who had offended

later would be judged on a case-by-case basis.
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In 1978, perhaps reflecting this change of tactics, S-21 was referred to in some confessions as a “reeducation hall”
(sala kay pray),
the name used at the time by provincial prisons in DK
.
According to Pon’s notebook, a policy was inaugurated in October 1978 not to beat Cambodian prisoners, instead reserving the fury of
santebal
for “foreigners such as Vietnamese, and CIA agents of imperialist powers.” According to Vann Nath, the number of prisoners held at S-21 dropped sharply at about that time, following celebrations honoring the CPK’s eighteenth birthday. His memory is corroborated by S-21 entry statistics for October and November. The cells reserved for senior cadres were cleaned and repainted, and rules affecting the prisoners were generally relaxed. Pon claimed in his notebook that confessions could now be extracted without beating from “80 percent” of the prisoners, but added that if political approaches failed interrogators could still “rely on beating.” In December he wrote, “Instead of not beating them at all, beat them only a little bit at most.” The new policies were not framed in terms of previous errors, and those who had presided over the massive violence of 1977 at S-21 remained in power.

In a case from December 1978, an interrogator referred to the reforms in his notes attached to a confession:

As for [the prisoner], when I first did politics with him he was willing to talk, but he said he had entered the CIA [only] in 1977. For two days he insisted on this story. After he had spoken and written all this down, right up to 1978, he said he had not betrayed the Party. At this point I took him up [close] to me and pointed out to him the Party’s new line about helping

[prisoners], and then I threatened him and said if he didn’t speak I would beat him. At that point he agreed to continue telling his story.
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No documentation survives to explain the motivation for the reforms, and because the prison closed soon afterward it is impossible to say whether these reforms might have foreshadowed wider ones, conceivably involving the “reeducation” and release of some of the prisoners. For the remainder of the prison’s existence, however, death sentences remained in effect, and the prisoners held at S-21 on the eve of the Vietnamese invasion were murdered on the spot. Pon’s December 1978 entries, the last in his notebook, close by asking : “If it’s necessary to break a particular per-son, should we use a special torture, special interrogators, or different methods?” Five months earlier, his immediate superior had posed the same question in his notebook, suggesting that interrogators must be “experienced,” that beating should coincide with other “work,” and that the prisoner’s health should be taken into account. Chan closed his notes by asking: “Should an interrogator beat [a prisoner] with his hands?” His answer was, “If it must be done, a little will suffice.”
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Ironically, although thought reform and other Sino-Vietnamese notions of redemptive justice found few echoes either in prerevolutionary Cambodian culture or in DK, it seems likely that the merciless procedures used at S-21 came to the country through a Chinese official who had observed the Moscow trials in the 1930s, rather than through Vietnam or directly from the USSR.

This official was K’ang Sheng (1898–1975), who had masterminded the Chinese reeducation campaign at Yan’an in 1942 and 1943 and the more sweeping national purges of the 1950s. K’ang Sheng was the head of Mao’s secret police. After becoming the head of the Chinese Communist Party’s security and spying operations in the Kuomintang-controlled areas in 1931, he had lived for several years in the USSR, where he had studied Soviet security and interrogation procedures and observed the beginning of the purges. Using his Soviet contacts, K’ang himself saw to it that several expatriate members of the CCP were purged. When K’ang Sheng returned home in 1937 his experience proved useful and pleasing to Mao, and he was probably responsible for introducing Soviet purge techniques to China. During World War II K’ang Sheng took charge of the Chinese version of
santebal;
he became known at the time as “Mao’s pistol,” and the 1942–1943 “rectifi tion” and “rescue” purges he supervised were especially vicious and thorough. When they were over he admitted that fewer than 10 percent

of those who had “confessed” were genuine spies or enemies. Emerging from semiretirement in the 1960s, “venerable K’ang” became a senior ideologue of the Cultural Revolution, closely allied with the so-called Gang of Four, and involved in the purges that swept through the Party in 1967 and 1968. When he died in 1975 he received a full state funeral. Five years later, with the downfall of the Gang of Four, he was posthu-mously expelled from the Communist Party.
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A former Chinese official who has been involved in Cambodian affairs since the early 1960s has said that K’ang Sheng befriended Pol Pot when the latter (as Saloth Sar) visited Beijing in 1966. At the time K’ang was in charge of liaison with foreign Communist parties and is known to have favored those that appeared to be sympathetic to Chinese attacks on Soviet “revisionism.” During Saloth Sar’s visit, K’ang Sheng became a key member of the Case Examination Committee (later renamed the Central Case Examination Group), a secret entity established in May 1966 to “manage the purge of senior counterrevolutionary revisionists.” Although there is no way of telling whether Saloth Sar learned about the facility from K’ang Sheng then or later, it may well have provided an institutional model for S-21.

K’ang Sheng and Saloth Sar probably renewed their acquaintance on the Cambodian’s subsequent visits to China in 1970 and 1971. When K’ang Sheng died in 1975, the Chinese official said, Pol Pot visited the Chinese Embassy in Phnom Penh to present his condolences in person. If this connection between Pol Pot and K’ang Sheng indeed existed, a plausible line of descent for S-21 can be established from Soviet security procedures and ideology in the 1930s and the Soviet-style Chinese purges later on.
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