Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (31 page)

in the 1980s and that Pol Pot insisted on in his interview with Nate Thayer. The linguistic armor that encased workers at the prison and the “upper brothers” remained intact.

Excuses like those offered by Ieng Sary, Nuon Chea, and Khieu Samphan are easy to understand, perhaps, but there are limits to the con-textualizing of mass killing and terror. No “context” is spacious enough to contain Son Sen, Duch, and the “upper brothers.” No explanations can let the murderers of fourteen thousand people off the hook. Someone or several people acting in the name of the Party Center decided to murder the prisoners held by
santebal,
regardless of what they had done, so as to warn off potential opponents, protect the secrecy of the operation, and demonstrate the Party’s infallibility. Given the way DK was organized, a decision of this magnitude probably stemmed from Pol Pot, or at least met with his approval, even though no written proof of his approval has survived. The “upper brothers” who followed S-21’s operations and Son Sen and Duch, who were directly responsible for them, knew what they were doing and chose to do it. Conceivably they might have lessened the suffering of prisoners, released the hundreds of small children imprisoned with their parents, or curtailed the executions had they wished to do so. There were moments during the DK era when such choices could have been made and revolutionary justice been tempered with mercy. Indeed, many survivors of the DK era single out kindly or permissive cadres. At S-21, however, alternatives were never considered. Instead, Son Sen, Duch, and the people working under them inflicted enormous quantities of suffering on the prisoners coolly, systematically, and without remorse.

Writing about the Holocaust and modernity in the context of Milgram’s work, Zygmunt Bauman made a humane but devastating statement. “The most frightening news brought about by the Holocaust and what we learned of its perpetrators,” Bauman reminded us, “was not the likelihood that ‘this’ could be done to us, but the idea that we could do it.” If the signifi of S-21 (or the Holocaust, for that matter) could be reduced to a sentence, Bauman’s is the one I would choose. The psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, writing about Nazi medical personnel in the camps, makes a similar point when he remarks that “ordinary people can commit demonic acts.”
²⁶

Explanations for S-21 that place the blame for evil entirely on “evil people,” which is to say on others, fail to consider that what all of us share with perpetrators of evil is not a culture, a doctrine, or an innate tendency to kill but our similarity as human beings and, in particular,

our tendencies toward acculturation and obedience. Most of us, I suspect, could become accustomed to doing something (such as torturing or killing people) when people we respected told us to do it and when there were no institutional constraints on doing what we were told. For many of us the task would be made easier if the victims were branded as outsiders. Writing of his experiments, Milgram remarked: “A person is in a state of agency when he defines himself in a social situation in a manner that renders him open to regulation by a person of higher sta-tus.”
²⁷
The implication is that what is permitted, or commanded, however awful, is usually what occurs; resistance is rarer than compliance, and immorality, as Bauman cogently suggests, is often socially conditioned. Acts of defiance or uncalled-for mercy, on the other hand, stem from individual choices that run against the grain and are therefore rare. As Staub has reminded us in another context: “The courage that is required to limit violence is frequently not physical courage, the willingness to put one’s life on the line, but the courage to oppose one’s group and to endanger one’s status in the group or one’s career.”
²⁸

Recalling Bauman’s melancholy words, therefore, it seems that explanations for the cruelties of S-21, the killing fi of DK, cata-clysmic occurrences like the Holocaust, and the massacres in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Indonesia need to be sought not only among those inflicting the pain and giving the orders but also at a more generalized level, as Sereny and Bauman have proposed. In
Facing the Extreme,
Tzvetan Todorov rebuts charges that Sereny was too sympathetic to Stangl. “To understand all is to pardon all, as the saying goes,” Todorov writes. “Is that what we really want? Such reactions reveal the fear that one can feel in discovering that evildoers are not radically different from oneself.”
²⁹

Explanations for phenomena like S-21 are embedded in our capacities to order and obey each other, to bond with each other against strangers, to lose ourselves inside groups, to yearn for perfection and approval, and to vent our anger and confusion, especially when we are encouraged to do so by people we respect, onto other, often helpless people. To find the source of the evil that was enacted at S-21 on a daily basis, we need look no further than ourselves.

appendix

Siet Chhe’s Denial of Incest

Siet Chhe (alias Tum) had been brought into the Communist movement while still a student by his teacher, Pol Pot, and by Pol Pot’s wife, Khieu Ponnary. For many years he served as an aide-de-camp for Brother Number One, accompanying him on his travels and nursing him when he was ill. Because of the positions of trust that he held, he rose inside the ranks of the CPK. By mid-1977, however, because of his links with the Eastern Zone and with intellectuals then being purged, he was brought to S-21. For several days he could not believe that he had been abandoned by Pol Pot, but by the time the interrogator Tuy questioned him in June 1977, he had been imprisoned for several weeks and severely tortured. In May, he had asked Duch’s permission to commit suicide. He had not yet “broken,” however, and Tuy wrote to him, masking his brutality with respect:

Respected Tum
(lok Tum):
Write out the story of [your] sexual activities with your own child in detail because from the standpoint of the masses, this [offense] has been clearly observed. You don’t need to deny this. Don’t let your body suffer more pain because of these petty matters.

Siet Chhe’s eloquent reply, translated by Richard Arant, appears below. It represents a rare attempt by a prisoner at S-21 to meet a false, highly personal accusation head-on. It also gives some idea of the loyalties that bound many Cambodian revolutionaries and their family members together.

157

This was apparently the last memorandum Siet Chhe was allowed to address to the Organization. For the next fi months, he confessed under torture to an ever-widening range of counterrevolutionary activities before being put to death. The charge of incest was never repeated, and his denial was neither contradicted nor withdrawn. The presence of his original memorandum in the archive suggests that it never left the prison, as Siet Chhe had hoped it would.

respects to the organization!

I ask to make a report to the Organization concerning the matter of my daughter (on the accusations against me).

My daughter was born in 1957, and named Seat Soupha (revolutionary name Sath). She was my first child. She is the only daughter among my four children.

I was taken with her more than the others from the time that she was small. When she was eight years old [in 1963–1964], I went into the forest. I was separated from my entire family for about seven years.

When her aunt met comrade Dam Cheng, her husband, my daughter was taken to live with her. She lived with comrade Dam Cheng and was as close to her uncle as she had been with [me]. Comrade Dam Cheng taught my daughter to sing many revolutionary songs. At twelve years of age, she still hugged her uncle closely. I met her again in late 1970, and saw her boyish character. With her three younger brothers, she was close as boys are with boys, as if she forgot she was a girl.

In 1968 [representatives of] the enemy knocked on the door and arrested her while she was asleep alone in the house. In late 1970 [after she was released] she arrived in the liberated area of Sector 22 with her aunt. When she first saw me, she embraced me in front of everybody. That evening I slept with my wife on a mat in the house of a comrade in the middle of a field. The owner of a nearby house guarded the door. My wife and all of my children slept with me on the same mat. My wife slept on one side of me, my daughter on the other, and the three boys nearby, all with deep remem-brances and feelings of warmth. Later, I sent my daughter, then about 13 or 14, to [work at] the Sector 22 hospital.

Around late 1974, I brought her back to work in the sector headquarters because the exchange of letters was not so good, and I suspected the activities of some traitors (as I saw in the content of the letters), but could not identify anyone.

In late April 1976, I withdrew her from Sector 22 and sent her to Koh Uknha Tei with her aunt. While living at Koh Uknha Tei, my daughter came to Tuol Kouk [in Phnom Penh] three or four times when taking her sick aunt to the hospital or traveling with her brothers to the hospital herself (when she had pneumonia and fainting spells).

The house in Tuol Kouk northern side was normally closed up because no one was there. Only my room was opened once in a while when I was there. The other rooms were open when there were visitors, and sealed when

Siet Chhe’s Denial of Incest 159

there were none. The downstairs was used for meetings, and all the windows and doors were kept closed.

Organization, I love my daughter a little more than I love my three sons. Because she is the only girl in the family and was more responsible than her brothers.

When I went to the forest, she knew what was happening and was with her mother when the enemy agents persecuted them in my absence.

She was put in prison by the enemy when she was 12 during the events of 1968 along with her uncle (Dam Cheng) and her aunt.

This all causes me to pity her and love her the most. When I saw her dur-ing my travels, I touched her on the head or shoulders with the love and pity of a father for his child.

In the matter of sexual morality, I am certain that she is a proper child who can be trusted. From then until now, I am certain she is a virgin with no moral blemishes with me or any other man. The accusations that I took advantage of my own child are ridiculous.

I love my daughter and want her to be pure so that in the future she will meet and live her life with a revolutionary who is pure both politically and morally.

If anything I have reported here is mistaken, I request the Organization’s kind forgiveness.

5/6/77

Tum

Notes

ABBREVIATIONS

The following abbreviations are used in the notes:

CMR Cornell Microfilm Reel

DC–Cam Documentation Center–Cambodia

FBIS U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service

Heder Steve Heder, “Interviews with Kampuchean Refugees, at Thai-interviews Cambodia Border, February–March 1980,” unpublished document

CHAPTER ONE. DISCOVERING S-21

1. See Bui Tin,
   Following Ho Chi Minh,
   117 ff., an eyewitness account. For background to the conflict, see Elliott, ed.,
   The Third Indochina Conflict.
   For a contemporary overview of the campaign, see Chanda, “Cambodia: Fifteen Days.”
   
2. The best general accounts of the Khmer Rouge period are probably three of the earliest: Becker,
   When the War Was Over;
   Etcheson,
   The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea;
   and Ponchaud,
   Cambodia Year Zero.
   Subsequent studies include Burgler,
   The Eyes of the Pineapple,
   and Kiernan,
   The Pol Pot Regime.
   Two collections of essays dealing with the period are Chandler and Kiernan, eds.,
   Revolution and Its Aftermath,
   and Jackson, ed.,
   Cambodia 1975–1978.
   
3. Author’s interviews with Nhem En and with Kok Sros. These S-21 workers spent 7 January 1979 in hiding before walking out of the city the next day.
   
4. On the appearance of Phnom Penh in the DK era, see Becker,
   When the War Was Over,
   420 ff. Becker visited the city in December 1978. See also Pilger,
   

   161
   

   Heroes,
   380 ff. Pilger came to Phnom Penh in the summer of 1979 and apparently first saw S-21 a year later. When I was there in August 1981 prerevolutionary banknotes could still be picked up off the streets. The notion of “year zero,” drawn from the French Revolution, was never explicitly adopted by the Khmer Rouge, who followed the Christian calendar throughout their time in power.
   

5. Author’s interview with Chey Saphon, October 1997.
   
6. Chanda, “The Cambodian Holocaust,” includes a photograph of a “sinister school building” and one of the pictures taken of corpses discovered there “by the invading Vietnamese forces on 8 January 1979.” On the smell, see Rivero,
   Infi
   24. For a useful history of the site, see Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum.”
   
7. The placard is shown in the 1981 East German documentary fi
   Die Angkar.
   I am grateful to Peter Maguire for providing me with a copy of the book containing the storyboards for the film and a transcript of his 1995 interview with the filmmaker, the late Gerhard Schuemann. Maguire arranged for a showing of the film at Bard College in October 1998, which I attended. Many of the still photographs used in the fi which were found at Tuol Sleng in 1979 and 1980, have apparently disappeared.
   
8. These details come from People’s Republic of Kampuchea, People’s Revolutionary Tribunal,
   The Extermination Camp of Tuol Sleng.
   The original, French-language text was prepared by Ung Pech, an S-21 survivor and the first director of the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes.
   
9. Douglas Niven’s interview with Ho van Thay. Kok Sros, a former guard at S-21, recalled that “about twenty” prisoners were murdered at S-21 just before the Vietnamese invasion (author’s interview). From other sources we know that by 1978 the southernmost building had become a “special prison”
   (kuk pises)
   where high-ranking prisoners were confi Several confessions were transcribed on 6 January 1979, either just before or shortly after the last prisoners were killed.
   
10. Shawcross,
    The Quality of Mercy.
    Shawcross first visited the prison in 1980. On feces, see Rivero,
    Infierno,
    24.
    
11. Some writers have assumed that “S” stood for
    santebal,
    but the prefix recurs in reference to other DK entities: S-71, the Party school, and S-8, the Party’s logistical headquarters. See Hawk, “The Tuol Sleng Extermination Cen-tre,” in which “21” is fancifully explained by Ung Pech as representing the “Second Bureau” (intelligence) reporting to “Number One” (Pol Pot). The fact that Vietnamese prisoners of war were held and interrogated at S-21 in 1978 suggests that it was not only a counterintelligence operation aimed at internal enemies but also a military prison.
    
12. On Ponhea Yat, see Vickery,
    Cambodia after Angkor,
    492 ff. Serge Thion, who has written widely about Cambodia, taught at the Ponhea Yat
    lycée
    in 1966 and 1967.
    
13. Chhang Youk, “The Poisonous Hill.”
    
14. People’s Republic of Kampuchea,
    The Extermination Camp of Tuol Sleng,
    lists these
    santebal
    sites as “the camp of Ta Khmau, formerly a psychiatric hospital, the former National Police headquarters south of the new mar-ket, the former Lycée Descartes, Wat Phnom in the former Navy Officers’ building, the former Lycée Sangkum and the camp of Prey Sar west of Phnom Penh in Kandal province.” Corroboration that
    santebal
    operated at these locations occurs in several S-21 confession texts and in Douglas Niven’s interview with Nhem En, a photographer for
    santebal.
    
15. See Document N0001223, “Summary of 3 May 1976,” a memorandum from Pheap of Regiment 588 to “Brother 89” (Son Sen, the DK minister of defense, in charge of military and security affairs) in the DC–Cam archive, Phnom Penh. The memorandum reports that “at the Tuol Svay Prey School a 20-man party cleaned up two levels of the facility, removed 250 tables, and cut 20 square meters of grass.” When S-21 received its first prisoners is not known. On its closing days, see interviews with Kok Sros, Nhem En, and Him Huy. In late 1978 some of the functions of S-21 may have been transferred to Division 502, refl suspicions inside the Party Center directed at Son Sen (Steve Heder, personal communication).
    
16. Rivero,
    Infi
    25. For another journalist’s report from 1979, see Mate,
    Genocide in Cambodia.
    Rivero’s fi observation may have refl wishful thinking, for no Cambodian edition of the
    Little Red Book
    was ever published. According to Kiernan,
    The Pol Pot Regime,
    465, S-21 was introduced to nonsocialist readers by Wilfred Burchett in the
    Guardian
    (London), 11 May 1979.
    
17. Hawk, “Cambodia: A Report from Phnom Penh,”
    New Republic,
    15 November 1981. Mai Lam, now in his seventies, was interviewed on two occasions in Vietnam by Sara Colm and once by Peter Maguire and Chris Riley. I am grateful to them for providing transcripts of their interviews.
    
18. Maguire and Riley, interview with Mai Lam. Talking to Sara Colm, Mai Lam suggested that certain Cambodian cultural elements kept Cambodians from understanding what had happened to them under DK. “The Cambodian people’s nature is that they want to stay in a quiet, peaceful atmosphere—Buddhist temple, rice farm, village,” he said. “They are very nostalgic about the quiet times they had.” Mai Lam’s attitude toward the Khmer fi into what Christopher Goscha has called the “evangelistic” tendency in Vietnamese relations with Cambodia and Laos (personal communication).
    
19. Serge Thion, “Genocide as a Political Commodity,” in Kiernan, ed.,
    

    Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia,
    184.
    

20. Mai Lam’s interviews with Colm, Maguire, and Riley, and Ung Pech’s interview with David Hawk. See also Heder interviews, 10–11 and 14 ff., with Ong Thong Hoeung, a Cambodian intellectual who worked in the S-21 archive between June and November 1979. Hoeung told Heder that “ten other Vietnamese” worked with Mai Lam at S-21 at that time. See also Ong Thong Hoeung, “Le 30 novembre j’ai quitté Phnom Penh precipitamment,” in Scalabrino, ed.,
    Affaires cambodgiennes,
    121–28.
    
21. See in particular Vann Nath,
    Prison Portrait.
    I am grateful to Sara Colm
    

    for introducing me to Vann Nath in 1995. Another survivor, Ten Chan, was also interviewed on several occasions, as was the late Ung Pech. See also Lionel Vairon’s interview with Pha Thachan, who became a typist at S-21, and DC–Cam document D-17, 4 December 1985, an interview with Ruy Nikon, who worked as a carpenter at S-21 from 1976 until the Vietnamese invasion.
    

22. It is impossible to determine what percentage of the total number of confession texts has survived. If every prisoner produced a confession, then as many as ten thousand texts must have disappeared, which seems unlikely. While as many as half this number of confessions may well have disappeared, it seems more probable that several thousand of the prisoners at S-21 never prepared confessions. Two key confessions that apparently have disappeared are those of Chau Seng, a leftist intellectual who served as information minister under Sihanouk, and Chea San, DK’s ambassador to the USSR and Romania, whose Tuol Sleng mug shot from February 1978 appears in
    Die Angkar.
    
23. The Holocaust-oriented texts that have most inspired me are Améry,
    At
    

    the Mind’s Limits;
    Bauman,
    The Holocaust and Modernity;
    Browning,
    Ordinary Men;
    Levi,
    The Drowned and the Saved;
    Sereny,
    Into That Darkness;
    Sof-sky,
    The Order of Terror;
    and Todorov,
    Facing the Extreme.
    On Argentina, see Feitlowitz,
    A Lexicon of Terror,
    and Graziano,
    Divine Violence.
    The books by Sereny and Feitlowitz contain extended interviews with perpetrators. Studies on the massacres in Indonesia in 1965–1966 and on state-sponsored violence in the Cultural Revolution in China have also been useful, and my discussion of S-21 from a comparative standpoint benefits from comments by students at the University of Wisconsin in 1998 who attended my seminar on twentieth-century political killings.
    

24. Author’s interview with Taing Kim Men. See also the confession of Seat Chhe (alias Tum), CMR 138.11, in which he writes to the prison director, Duch: “I understand that as for entering S-21, there is only one entry. As for leaving, that never happens.” CMR 179.16, Tot Ry, expresses a similar idea.
    
25. Thayer, “Day of Reckoning.” Pol Pot would have known Tuol Sleng by its code name, S-21. See Christine Chameau’s interview with Ieng Sary, “Rehabilitation Completed,” in which Sary said: “I said I never heard of Tuol Sleng.... We were always talking in code names and security was S-21.” Asked who gave orders for S-21, Sary replied, “For political things like that, Khieu Samphan.” There is no corroboration in the archive for this assertion.
    
26. Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum,” 90. Cambodians are still looking. See Seth Mydans, “Twenty Years On.”
    
27. Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum,” 88, quoting the Ministry of Culture report. Ledgerwood adds that “the museum was open to the public every Sunday . . . [while] organized visits by foreign and local groups took place on weekdays.”
    
28. Sara Colm interview with Mai Lam. Asked why some Cambodians preferred to blame foreigners for the atrocities of the DK period, Mai Lam added: “They don’t want to open their minds. . . . They’re tired, they don’t want to think.” As a historian, Mai Lam had no qualms about what he was doing. Moreover, without his dedication and hard work, the museum would never have existed, nor would this book have been possible. On manipulations of memory under Marxist-Leninist regimes, see Watson, ed.,
    Memory, History and Opposition.
    
29. Hiegel and Landrac, “Les khmers rouges,” 65. See also Hiegel and Landrac, “Revolution des khmers rouges,” and Levi,
    The Drowned and the Saved,
    36–37.