Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (30 page)

destruction of “enemies” at S-21 was made easier because of the deference and respect that were traditionally due in Cambodia to those in power from those “below” them. This culture of exploitation, protection, obedience, and dependency had deep roots in Cambodian social practice and strengthened the grip of those in power in DK in spite or even because of the power-holders’ insistence that prerevolutionary power relations had been destroyed.
¹⁷
Hierarchies, patronage, and “paying homage,” so characteristic of “exploitative” society (the Cambodian phrase translated as “exploit,”
chi choan,
literally mans “ride on and kick”) had not been extinguished by the revolution. Instead, familiar, lopsided relationships involving a new set of masters and servants (however much they might be deemed “empowered” and designated as comrades), as well as a new set of victims, came into play. Under its discipline the population of S-21 was divided: on one side were those who commanded or put others to use
(neak prao)
and those who “listened”
(neak sdap)
and were put to use
(neak bomrao);
on the other side were their common victims. In some ways, the “new” society consisted of the same mixture as before and followed prerevolutionary patterns of authority and compliance.
¹⁸

Although interrogators at S-21 owed allegiance to those “above” them, and although the relationship between interrogators and prisoners in any institution is always complex, at S-21 the interrogators’ overriding advantage, as Pon remarked in his notebook, was that the prisoners were “in [the interrogators’] hands.” No constraints of law, no pressures from outside the government, and no deadlines operated in the prisoners’ favor. So long as they questioned prisoners energetically and tortured them sufficiently to obtain confessions, the interrogators were free to operate as they saw fit.
¹⁹

In a haunting fashion the power of the interrogators and the powerlessness of prisoners and the process of interrogation at S-21 call to mind La Fontaine’s fable about the wolf and the lamb. In the fable, a wolf encounters a lamb and proposes to kill it because the lamb, according to the wolf, had insulted the wolf “a year ago.” When the lamb replies that it had not been born a year ago, the wolf answers, “If it wasn’t you, it was your brother.” “I have none,” says the lamb. “Then it was some relative of yours, or a shepherd, or a dog,” the wolf retorts and devours the lamb.
²⁰

In chapter 5, we examined some precedents in Cambodia’s past for the violence at S-21 and the ways in which torture at the prison fell under Foucault’s rubric of the “vengeance of the sovereign.” We also

saw that the totality and thoroughness of S-21 drew on a range of peculiarly twentieth-century models, linked in part to Communist practice and in part to modern systems of surveillance. Models for S-21 included the Moscow show trials and purges in the 1930s and “reeducation” campaigns in Maoist China and Communist Vietnam. More distantly, S-21 drew on the notion of French “revolutionary justice.” In the 1790s revolutionary justice received much of its momentum, semantically, from the neologisms
counterrevolution
and
counterrevolutionary,
which allowed its proponents enormous freedom to maneuver. The significance of these two words could change from one day to the next.
²¹
At S-21, the word
enemy
had the same elastic character.

From other Communist regimes, the Party Center adopted the doctrine that the leaders of a Communist Party, unfettered by a “bourgeois” legal code or a capricious judicial system, were fully entitled to punish enemies of the state. They were empowered to do so because of their privileged relationship to historical laws. From Communist China and Vietnam came the somewhat contradictory idea that at least some enemies of the state could be reeducated and reformed—a notion that had deep roots in both countries but little resonance in Cambodia. Tools for this reformation included the practices of criticism and self-criticism, embodied in self-critical, publicly presented life-stories. At S-21 prisoners redeemed themselves and were reeducated by their confessions, that is, by the same texts that condemned them all to death. While what happened at S-21 was “Cambodian,” “Communist,” and “foreign” to varying degrees, the massive death toll in DK forces us to seek deeper explanations than these to account for the effects of the regime and for S-21 in particular. Ben Kiernan’s suggestion that one of the “two most important themes” of the Pol Pot era was “the race question” is helpful up to a point, and so is Michael Vickery’s proposal that the Cambodian revolution, far from being Marxist-Leninist, can best be described as a prolonged and largely uncontrollable outburst of

peasant rage.

Kiernan’s notion is helpful because the ferocity and indifference of S-21 displayed a belief that those killed were considered subhuman and therefore not of the same “race” as their assassins. Overt, anti-Vietnamese racism, shading into a sense of Khmer racial superiority, also dominated DK thinking, speeches, and behavior after 1977; in 1978, many prisoners at S-21, as enemies of the state, became for all intents and purposes Vietnamese.
²²
The ways in which some prisoners were made to pay homage to pictures of Ho Chi Minh and Lyndon Johnson

suggest that they were being erased from Pol Pot’s Cambodia in the same fashion that Nazism’s racial enemies, even before they were killed, were erased from Hitler’s Europe. Although most of the victims had been born into the same “race” as their assassins, racist mechanisms came into play in their arrest, torture, and execution. Turning the victims into “others,” in a racist fashion—and using words associated with animals to describe them—made them easier to mistreat and easier to kill. A similar process of distancing has been described by writers dealing with the Holocaust and the Indonesian massacres of 1965 and 1966.

In Steve Heder’s view, the racism displayed by DK toward its enemies was linked to its leaders’ feelings of superiority not so much over other races as over those individuals unwilling or unable to carry out a Marxist-Leninist revolution with the same uncompromising fervor as the Party Center. Those targeted as incompetent or as counterrevolutionaries were often labeled “Vietnamese.” Heder writes: “Democratic Kampuchea racism was a by-product of efforts to advance an historic world view based on unexamined and unsubstantiated assumptions about the potentialities of the Cambodian nationality and ‘race’ to make a contribution to the modern world via rapid construction of a highly advanced socialism.”
²³

It is tempting to agree with Vickery, however, that the savagery of the Cambodian revolution owed less to racism or to Marxism-Leninism than to peasant anger. Vickery argues that the Party Center was swept along, perhaps to some extent against its will, by the fervor of class hatred from “below.” Vickery’s argument, which proceeds by analogy with such violent non-Marxist movements as Spanish anarchism, can be applied to the purges that swept the country in mid-1975 and to the vicious treatment of “new people” by DK cadres later on, particularly in the northwest. Peasantism was indeed an ingredient of the Cambodian revolution, as it was in China, and so was the mobilization of hatred, which characterizes all revolutionary movements. Vickery’s explanation is not especially helpful, however, when we face the mountain of DK documentation including theoretical journals, the leaders’ speeches, and the notebooks recording self-criticism sessions. His argument breaks down further before the methodical, Communist-inspired procedures of interrogation and “confession” that were followed so fastidiously at S-21. For the argument to work, Duch, Chan, and Pon, all intellectuals, would have had to be refl the passions of their subordinates, rather than the reverse.
²⁴

At S-21, as we have seen, traditional Cambodian punitive practices and others inspired by Communist models blended with other twentieth-century techniques of surveillance, documentation, and control discussed so eloquently in Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish
and, from another perspective, in Orwell’s
1984.
The contradictory ingredients that constituted “S-21” were tempered in turn by notions of intrinsic Khmer superiority that pervaded the thinking of the Party Center, provided a triumphalist language for its pronouncements, and insulated its members from reality. These notions of innate superiority, in turn, came in part from DK readings of Cambodian history and in part from the windfall empowerment of a small segment of Cambodia’s rural poor, whose supposedly revolutionary energies, harnessed for economic programs, found expression more frequently in fl newly won power, claiming privileges, and humiliating and exterminating “class enemies” when they were asked to do so.

S-21, therefore, like DK itself, was a Cambodian, Communist, imported, twentieth-century phenomenon. As an amalgam, it was unique. For this reason, prolonged comparisons with facilities in other times and places are not especially rewarding. In spite of its “Cambodian” character, a jailer from prerevolutionary Cambodia would have been baffled by S-21. While the physical abuse, chains, fetters, poor food, and mercilessness would have been familiar to him, its infl and totality, its isolation from the outside world, and the masses of documentation assembled there were without precedent. Similarly, while Prey So can be compared with the “reeducation” facilities in China and Vietnam, the mercilessness of S-21 is unmatched in either country, while the interrogations at S-21, so central to its operations, set the place apart from the Nazi extermination camps to which it has often been compared.

From the sources I have examined it is impossible to say whether any-one working at S-21 or any of their superiors was ever distressed or dis-oriented by what they were doing. Misgivings were luxuries that workers at the prison and the leaders of the country could not afford. Kok Sros told Douglas Niven, however, that interrogators who hesitated to use torture were arrested, suggesting that hesitations occasionally did occur, and in a “livelihood meeting” convened by Chan for S-21 staff in February 1976, Duch himself is recorded as saying to his colleagues:

You must rid yourselves of the view that beating the prisoners is cruel
[kho khau].
Kindness is misplaced [in such cases]. You must beat [them] for national reasons, class reasons, and international reasons.
²⁵

Interestingly, Duch’s comment dated from the early months of
santebal
’s operations, at precisely the phase in which Christopher Browning

and other students of the Holocaust have recorded the highest levels of hesitation, revulsion, and alarm among those charged with executing people en masse. In the early stages of S-21’s existence, a natural reluctance to torture and kill the prisoners, like the one Duch warned against, needed to be overcome. As time went on the workers at S-21, like their Nazi counterparts, insulated themselves from their own behavior, the smell of death, the woeful appearance of the prisoners, and their screams.

Insulation of this kind is understandable, but the perpetrators’ indifference to the pain of others retains a capacity to shock. We wait in vain for hints that what the workers did damaged their relations with each other, jarred their calligraphy, or disturbed their sleep. To Duch and his associates, the prisoners were “less than garbage.” Extracting confessions from them was crucial to protecting the revolution and was no more complicated or distressing, it seems, than hosing down a pave-ment or plowing up a field. The violence that the perpetrators inflicted met with indifference from their superiors or was noted with approval, and there is no way of telling when the cruelty so heavily documented in the archive became an end in itself or how much the perpetrators may have come to enjoy what they were doing. None of the former workers at the prison, in their interviews, complained of nightmares after 1979; all the surviving prisoners did.

We can only speculate on how interrogators felt when they were working at S-21 because none of them has come forward. If any of these people were ever to be brought to justice, they would probably argue that they were obeying legitimate orders under wartime conditions and that beatings and torture, however unpalatable, accelerated the discern-ment of the truth, protected the Party Center, and saved the nation from being swallowed up by “the contemptible Vietnamese consumers of territory.” Like Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, and, more recently, the Khmer Rouge defectors Ieng Sary, Nuon Chea, and Khieu Samphan, the former workers might also claim in their defense that then was then and now is now. “Let bygones be bygones,” said Khieu Samphan at a press conference in December 1998, in halting English. The cruelty and violence of S-21, they might add, were by-products of the all-consuming war visited on DK from abroad by its enemies and were incidental to the fight for survival of the intrinsically innocent and victimized Cambodian “race.” In keeping with this Manichean view of the world, any “mistakes” or excesses committed at the prison must have been the work of “Vietnamese agents.” This is the line that Khieu Samphan took