Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (26 page)

Torture at S-21

Keeping these precedents and continuities in mind, we can return to the practice of torture at S-21 and the rationale given for torture by people working there. No records detailing the frequency of torture at the prison have survived. To study the phenomenon we must rely on the scattered memoranda that passed between interrogators and their superiors, supplemented by interrogators’ confessions, marginal notes that appear on some confessions, three study texts written by S-21 officials, and the interrogators’ notebook compiled in 1976.

These documents clearly do not reveal the full range of tortures that were inflicted on prisoners at S-21. They also give no clear idea of the

frequency with which torture was applied, of any policy developments affecting torture, or of the duration and intensity of the tortures that were imposed. It seems likely that the administration of torture, like everything else at the prison, became routinized as the “system” evolved over time, as interrogators overcame their initial hesitation, and as some methods of torture came to be preferred over others.

By the middle of 1977, as we have seen, S-21 was running relatively smoothly. With a year’s experience of trial and error, interrogators had become more adept at both “doing politics” and inflicting torture. They certainly had a clearer idea of what kinds of documentation satisfi their superiors, what tortures “worked,” and how prisoners and their confessions could be “processed” expeditiously. As time went on, interrogations became swifter, and confessions became shorter. Increasingly, confessions were tape-recorded and the transcriptions typed. Elaborate summaries were then drawn up to connect confessions, military units, geographical regions, and “strings of traitors.” How the wholesale bureaucratization of procedures at the prison affected the frequency or intensity of torture, however, is impossible to say, although we know that torture and beatings continued apace in 1977. The photographer Nhem En remembered “lots of screaming, especially at night, when there was no noise in Phnom Penh. The cries were so loud that we could hear them from half a mile away.” In a similar vein, the former guard Khieu Lohr told Alexander Hinton: “I could hear screams, but no words. Sometimes everything went quiet.” Kok Sros, interviewed by Douglas Niven, said he heard people screaming under interrogation “every time I went on duty” and also “whenever a prisoner disobeyed a guard.”
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The cries of people being tortured were treated at the time as an administrative problem that compromised the secrecy of the prison’s operations. “Problem of political education,” Tuy wrote in his notebook. “Sometimes the sound of prisoners being beaten can be heard outside [the prison].”
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Often the interrogators’ zeal accomplished nothing. In many cases neither the prisoner nor the interrogators knew what crimes had been committed or what the prisoner’s often garbled admissions meant. A key feature of most interrogations was to ask prisoners abruptly why they had been arrested and then to beat the ones who said they didn’t know. Lacking information themselves, the interrogators resorted to torture, and, as Aristotle pointed out more than two thousand years ago, confessions that flow from torture often bear little relation to the truth.
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Interrogators often lost control. The temptation must have been overwhelming when three young men, armed with heavy sticks, whips, electrical current, and other devices were locked in a room with a helpless, shackled, supposedly treasonous prisoner. “If violence is considered normal in a social collective,” Wolfgang Sofsky has pointed out, “it gradually becomes a binding norm.”
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Ma Meang Keng (alias Rin), a former interrogator, confessed that violence was a dead end and its own reward, as he recalled a deceptively relaxed conversation with his colleagues:

A fortnight later... the one named Noeun, the one named Sreng, and I were taking a break on the top fl of the canteen [at S-21]. At that time, Noeun said, “In [interrogation] group 1, all you hear everywhere is the sound of beatings, and [people] asking [prisoners] if they are ‘C’ [i.e., CIA] or not.... With a question like that, what can anyone answer, if some of them don’t even know what ‘C’ stands for? You never hear [people in] Group 1 ‘doing politics’ at all, all they think of is beating, and when all they think of is beating, the enemies answer confusingly, accusing this one, accusing that one. This is the weak point of Group 1.” The one named Saeng said that it was the same near where he was: all you ever heard were thuds and crashes and people screaming, “C or not C?” when they don’t know “C” chicken from “C” duck.
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As this harrowing passage suggests, a balance between torture and politics was often impossible to achieve, especially when the interrogators had so little training in either politics or interrogation, so much administrative leeway, so much testosterone, and so much combat experience. “Doing politics” in DK, reversing Clausewitz, amounted to waging war by other means. Like the Red Guards in Mao’s China, the interrogators at S-21 had been taught that the Party’s “enemies” were to be “smashed” in “storming attacks.” They had also been told that they were the regime’s “life-breath”
(donghaom).
Emerging from bursts of overheated, haphazard training into the secret and supposedly rational world of S-21, they proceeded to “smash enemies” without hesitation, with their bare hands and a variety of weapons.
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Prisoners’ comments about torture were rare. They were also unwelcome. For example, when Ney Saran wrote in his confession, “The answers I gave on 28.9.76 were given after I had been severely tortured, and I offer them with this in mind,” the passage was crossed out by Duch, who sent the document back with the notation: “You have no right to report on such matters to the Organization.”
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Sun Ty, in his confession, scribbled a private note to the Organization that protested his innocence and said he had been tortured:

At first I refused to answer, but after I had been beaten with a heavy stick I invented an answer. I beg the Party not to arrest the people I named. Our comrades are good. I am not CIA or Khmer Serei.

The presence of these comments in Sun Ty’s file suggests that they never left S-21.
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Instances of torture mentioned in the archive and by survivors are given in the following list.

Beating

by hand

with a heavy stick with branches

with bunches of electric wire

Cigarette burns Electric shock

Forced to eat excrement Forced to drink urine Forced feeding

Hanging upside down

Holding up arms for an entire day Being jabbed with a needle

Paying homage to image(s) of dogs (all from 1978) Paying homage to the wall

Paying homage to the table Paying homage to the chair Having fingernails pulled out Scratching

Shoving

Suffocation with plastic bag Water tortures

immersion

drops of water onto forehead

The list does not include many of the tortures that are depicted in Vann Nath’s paintings. Talking to East German fi about S-21 in 1981, Nath recalled:

This is the room I used to work in. Sometimes I could see through a crack in the window what was happening outside. So I saw them submerging prisoners in water. Others were brought to interrogation stark naked. Whatever I observed in secret I tried to record [later] in my pictures.
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Of the twenty-one interrogators listed in the 1978 telephone directory for S-21, eighteen were implicated in torture in their own comments to prisoners’ confessions, in other interrogators’ confessions, or in self-critical study sessions conducted for prison staff. Of the twenty-four interrogators at S-21 who were later arrested, eighteen admitted torturing prisoners. Eleven confessed to beating prisoners to death, as did one of the guards. Some of the confessions implicated others on the staff whose confessions have not survived. The archive suggests that certain interrogators resorted to torture more readily than others. One of them, Buth Heng, who was eventually arrested, confessed to a series of bar-baric sexual assaults and to beating several prisoners to death, including one who had already been severely injured after a suicide attempt.
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Sexual violations of female prisoners probably occurred frequently, but sexual references seldom surface in the confessions of S-21 personnel. Such offenses were certainly frowned on by the men administering

the prison, as an entry in Chan’s notebook suggests:

When questioning females, there must always be two people asking the questions. Don’t lie down [with them?], and don’t pinch their hair or their cheeks.
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All the survivors remember being beaten, and, as the S-21 survivor Ung Pech told David Hawk, “For beating, anything that fell into [the interrogators’] hands was used: different kinds of tree branches, bamboo, whips hurriedly made from electric wire.”
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Electric shock was administered to prisoners so commonly that a list of instructions drawn up for all prisoners included a request not to scream when electric shocks were applied. The penalty for disobeying an interrogator, said the instructions, could be ten strokes of a whip or “five electric shocks.”
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Vann Nath’s memories of electric shock were probably typical:

[The interrogator] tied an electric wire around my handcuffs and connected the other end to my trousers with a safety pin. Then he sat down again.

“Now do you remember? Who collaborated with you to betray [the Organization]?” he asked. I couldn’t think of anything to say. He connected the wire to the electric power, plugged it in, and shocked me. I passed out. I don’t know how many times he shocked me, but when I came to, I could hear a distant voice asking over and over who my connection was. I couldn’t get any words out. They shocked me so severely that I collapsed on the fl , my shirt completely drenched with sweat.... To this day I don’t understand why they arrested me.
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Interrogators’ notes to some confessions suggest that prisoners often physically collapsed and confessed “fully” when threatened with electric shock. Others succumbed after the shock had been inflicted. One prisoner, the interrogator wrote, “says he can’t withstand [any more] electric shock, that his liver and gall bladder have dissolved.” Other prisoners were tougher. One of them, an interrogator remarked, “would respond only after strong torture,” and another, when “strong torture was applied, refused to talk.” Ly Phen, a veteran revolutionary, “refused to say anything about his activities, so I applied torture,” his interrogator noted. “When he regained consciousness, all he could do was vomit.” Interrogators found one female prisoner “very lascivious”
(khul khoch nah).
“Unable to withstand torture, she removed her sarong and pretended to be sick.” Toward anyone offering resistance Duch was merciless, telling an interrogator on one occasion, “Beat [the prisoner] until he tells everything, beat him to get at the deep things.”
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Another frequently imposed torture at S-21 was that of “paying homage.” Vann Nath remembered a drawing of a dog’s body with Ho Chi Minh’s head tacked to the wall of an interrogation room and recalled interrogators talking about it.
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Thvay bongkum,
or “paying homage,” as John Marston has argued, is a more “explicit declaration of hierarchy” than the normal Cambodian greeting, with palms together, known as
sompeah.
Both terms were used to describe this particular torture. In prerevolutionary society, the
thvay bongkum
gesture, which involves raising the joined palms above one’s head and also occasionally prostrating oneself, was reserved for greeting royalty or Buddhist monks or paying homage to an image of the Buddha.
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At S-21, the gesture probably involved assuming a painful, groveling posture, perhaps related to the infamous “airplane” that prisoners were made to mimic in the Cultural Revolution in China. One interrogator’s note tells of making a prisoner pay homage for half an hour, and another mentions the torture being repeated “fi times.” “Paying homage” was