Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (32 page)

1. Ong Thong Hoeung (Heder interviews, 14) claims that in late 1979 he was asked to join committees for drafting the PRK Constitution and for writing “an official government history text”: “The Vietnamese asked me to use the Vietnamese Constitution as a model for the Cambodian constitution and they also asked me to completely ignore French sources . . . and to write in such a way that the basic point was historical solidarity between Vietnam and Cambodia.” On this issue, see Frings,
   Allied and Equal.
   
2. Lionel Vairon’s interview with Pha Thachan, which begs the question of
   

   whether killing “foreigners” is acceptable. See also Bui Tin,
   Following Ho Chi Minh:
   “In reality [the Khmer Rouge genocidal policy] was much more cruel and lethal than that carried out by the Nazis in the Second World War. But it was beautifully cloaked under the form of communism, pure communism, the purest form of communism” (131). Drawing on Rubie Watson’s work, Ledgerwood points out that the Chinese have failed to provide a satisfying “meta-narrative” for the Cultural Revolution. On this point, see also Lu Xiuyuan, “A Step toward Understanding Popular Violence.”
   

3. Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum,” 91. The days of hate were celebrated on 20 May, commemorating the day in 1973 when the CPK had inaugurated collectivization in those parts of Cambodia under its control: see Heder interviews, 35.
   
4. See Hannum and Hawk,
   The Case against the Standing Committee,
   and Hawk, “The Cambodian Genocide.” On the propaganda value of S-21, see Chanda,
   Brother Enemy,
   382.
   
5. See, for example,
   New York Times,
   27 April 1998. Efforts to prosecute the top Khmer Rouge came close to fruition just before Pol Pot’s apparent suicide in April 1998 and gathered momentum again after Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan defected to the Phnom Penh government in December 1998. See Richburg, “Support Grows for Trial of Khmer Rouge,” and Adams, “Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory.” If such a trial ever takes place, documents from the S-21 archive now housed in DC–Cam are certain to be used in evidence. The concepts of justice, forgiveness, mercy, and revenge are perhaps hopelessly tangled in the minds of DK survivors. Unfortunately, this book had gone to press when I learned of Martha Minow’s well-received comparative study of these issues,
   Between Vengeance and Forgiveness.
   
6. These young men prepared confessions, written in English, alleging that they were career CIA agents and had been paid enormous sums of money to spy on DK. They were among the last prisoners to be executed at the prison. On American prisoners, see Bryson, “Cambodia Rakes the Ashes of Her Ruin.” Peter Maguire’s research has revealed that the four Americans, who had known each other in high school in California, were caught off the Cambodian coast when they were heading from Singapore to Bangkok to pick up cargoes of processed marijuana that they planned to deliver to Hawaii. Because they had a high-school classmate working for U.S. intelligence services in Thailand, it is conceivable that they were taking commissioned photographs of the coastline when they were arrested.
   
7. The nonconfessional reels are CMR 93–103, 112–15, 187–88, and 198. The interrogators’ manual, discussed in detail in chapter 5, is CMR 99.7. For a
   

   partial translation, see Hawk, “The Tuol Sleng Extermination Centre,” 27. The “Last Plan” (CMR 99.13) is translated in Jackson,
   Cambodia 1975–1978,
   299–314.
   

8. Djilas,
   Of Prisons and Ideas,
   139.
   
9. As Robert Moeller has suggested (personal communication), the mug shots also brought news (in the form of facial expressions, clothing, and, by implication, memories) from outside the prison. They depict the faces of people crossing into a total institution. Niven and Riley,
   Killing Fields,
   contains a haunting selection of the mug shots. Niven and Riley’s Photo Archive Group cleaned, developed, and archived over six thousand negatives found at the museum in 1994 and 1995. Most of these photographs can be accessed on the CD-ROM prepared by the Cambodia Genocide Program at Yale University. Lindsay French, “Exhibiting Terror,” discusses an exhibit of the photos at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1997. Vann Nath has recalled painting the torture pictures “in September 1979, when the government started to open [S-21] as a museum.” Chameau, “No. 55 Delivers His Verdict.”
   

CHAPTER TWO. S-21: A TOTAL INSTITUTION

1. Goffman,
   Asylums,
   11. See also Boesche, “The Prison”; Horowitz,
   Tak-ing Lives,
   27; Foucault,
   Discipline and Punish;
   and Solzhenitsyn,
   The Gulag Archipelago,
   vol. 1, chapter 14, “Totalitarianism as a Penal Colony.”
   
2. Goffman,
   Asylums,
   22.
   
3. Foucault,
   Discipline and Punish,
   302–3: “In its function, the power to pun-ish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.” All three activities took place at S-21. See also Kinzie, “The ‘Concentration Camp’ Syndrome.” Bauman,
   Modernity and the Holocaust,
   compares a society operating under these conditions to a “garden to be designed and kept in the planned shape by force” where “plants” are taken care of and “weeds [are] exterminated” (18).
   
4. Cited in Frame,
   Dialectical Historicism and Terror,
   71. S-21 was arguably the most important institution in DK. According to Nhem En (author’s interview), Son Sen, the man in charge of DK’s national security, referred to S-21 as the “nation’s breath”
   (donghaom cheat).
   See also CMR 99.7, interrogators’ notebook from 1976: “The work of the Special Branch is class struggle work, achieving the smashing of the exploiting classes, uprooting them completely so as to defend the party, the proletariat, DK, and the line of independence-mastery. . . . No enemy agents can do things the way we do them!”
   
5. Ieng Sary told Steve Heder in 1996 that a “Military-Security Commission”
   (kanak kammathikar yothea-santesok)
   composed of Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Son Sen, and Sao Phim, with Son Sen’s wife, Yun Yat, participating on an informal basis, “oversaw arrest detention and execution at S-21” (Steve Heder, personal communication). The only corroboration of Sary’s statement so far is CMR 71.10, Meas Mon (alias Keo Sithun), written in June 1978, after Sao Phim’s suicide, which quotes Sao Phim in 1976 as saying, to reassure his interlocutor, that he was still a member of the “central military commission.” Speaking to a journalist in 1997, Ieng Sary claimed that only “two people knew [about S-21] for certain . . . Nuon Chea, who was responsible for party security,
   

   and Son Sen, who was responsible for state security” (Kamm,
   Cambodia,
   14). It seems likely that some high-ranking military cadres in Phnom Penh also knew of the prison’s existence, because delegates from S-21, so designated in the minutes, attended meetings convened by Son Sen for such people.
   

6. Summers, “The CPK: Secret Vanguard.”
   
7. Tung Padevat,
   December 1977–January 1978, 16.
   
8. Summers, “The CPK: Secret Vanguard,” 11. See also Pol Pot, “Long Live the Seventeenth Anniversary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea,” speech of 29 September 1977, FBIS, 2 October 1977, which noted that “secret work was the fundamental thing. It allowed us to defend the revolution and allowed us to arouse the people.”
   
9. CMR 99.7. The document goes on to say that “nourishing secrecy is the heart and soul of
   santebal
   work.”
   
10. “The Party’s Plan for 4.8.78.” Uncatalogued, one-page item from S-21
    

    archive.
    

11. The telephone directory is CMR 187.9. The dormitories for the interrogation and document units had their own telephone extensions. Duch had two. Communications outside the prison were maintained by radio telephone.
    
12. Douglas Niven’s interview with Kok Sros.
    
13. On the Chinese automobile, author’s interview with Neak Ek Bunan. On Office 100, see Chandler,
    Brother Number One,
    71 ff.; CMR 42.21, Ing Cheng Im; CMR 53.27, Kheang Sim Horn; and CMR 138.11, Siet Chhe (alias Tum).
    
14. Jackson,
    Cambodia 1975–1978,
    88 n. On “bourgeois” see CMR 134.28, Chey Suon, one of several biographical sketches of CPK fi that form a segment of the confession. Chey Suon went on to suggest that in his view Son Sen might profitably “refashion his personality . . . to make him into a worker-peasant in his speech and everyday life.” After this outburst, he added, “I ask him to forgive me if this is erroneous” (trans. Steve Heder).
    
15. Author’s interview with Nhem En, who claimed that Son Sen visited S-21 on a weekly basis; “Son Sen to Duch” memorandum of October 1977. CMR 67.25, Loeung Ly, contains a note from Son Sen to Duch. The staff of the DC–Cam archive have identified eighty-four S-21 documents—all but four of them from 1977—that bear notes in Son Sen’s writing.
    
16. See Steve Heder, “Racism, Marxism, Labelling,” 127 ff. Confessions in the S-21 archive that implicate Son Sen include CMR 20.34, Chea Samath; CMR 21.25, Chhay Kim Huor; and CMR 21.26, Chan Kim.
    
17. When Pol Pot was “tried” at the Khmer Rouge base in Anlong Veng in July 1997, he was charged with ordering the murder of Son Sen and sentenced to life imprisonment. In his interview with Nate Thayer three months later, Pol Pot took responsibility for killing Son Sen but regretted the deaths of the children assassinated with him. See Thayer, “Day of Reckoning.”
    
18. Author’s interviews with Neak Ek Bunan. See also Pringle, “Pol Pot’s Hatchet Man”; Kiernan,
    The Pol Pot Regime,
    31; and Becker,
    When the War Was Over,
    272 ff. and Dunlop and Thayer, “Duch Confesses.”
    
19. On the blackboard, Jeremy Stone’s interview with Ly Sorsane, in
    Fellowship of Atomic Scientists Public Interest Report
    424 (April 1989). On Chan, author’s interview with Lach Vorleak Kaliyan.
    
20. Author’s interviews with Nek Bunan and with a former Chinese student who requested anonymity and who confirmed that all but one of his colleagues who had studied in Phnom Penh in the 1960s had remained “Cambodia experts.”
    
21. Author’s interview with François Bizot. See also Swain,
    River of Time,
    258–61, and Vickery,
    Cambodia 1975–1982,
    152. Le Carré,
    The Secret Pilgrim,
    255 ff., gives a fi rendering of Bizot’s captivity. Two years later Duch surfaced at a meeting for “intellectuals” in the Special Zone; a visitor noted at the time that he appeared “thin and ill” (Carney, ed.,
    Communist Party Power in Kampuchea,
    12). Duch’s wife, Rom, whom he had married in Amleang, was then in charge of a “clothes making shop.”
    
22. Kiernan,
    How Pol Pot Came to Power,
    331–35. See also Chandler,
    

    Tragedy,
    359 n. 77, and Heder interviews, 25–27.
    

23. For Duch annotations, see, for example, CMR 53.13, Koy Suon; CMR 90.23, Oum Soeun; CMR 117.112, Prum Khoeun; and CMR 139.9, Sman Sles. An uncatalogued item from DC–Cam, dated 20 January 1976, refers to “M-21,” where “M” presumably stands for
    munthi,
    or “office,” and lists Duch as chairman. I am grateful to Steve Heder for this reference.
    
24. On the Ta Khmau location, CMR 24.11, Duong Khoeurn.
    
25. Data based on interviews by author, Ben Kiernan, and Peter Maguire with him, and Alexander Hinton’s interview with Khieu Lohr. Duch’s self-criticisms are contained in notes from a “livelihood meeting” in Mam Nay’s script dated 18 February 1976 (uncatalogued item, S-21 archive), in which Duch admitted that he was “disorganized,” relied too much on his own efforts, neglected the “collectivity,” and occasionally “lost mastery and felt despair.” Kok Sros, who was interviewed about S-21 for the first time in 1997, harbors memories of Duch that seem to be unaffected by the demonization of the man in Phnom Penh since 1979; in his interview, he said that Duch was relatively “easygoing.”
    
26. CMR 99.13. For an English translation, see Jackson,
    Cambodia 1975–1978,
    299–314.
    
27. On Duch’s departure, author’s interviews with Him Huy, Nhem En, and Vann Nath and Ben Kiernan’s interview with Him Huy. In 1998, Nhem En stated categorically that Duch was dead. On Duch’s dramatic reappearance in 1999, see Dunlop and Thayer, “Duch Confesses” and Seth Mydans, “70s Torturer in Cambodia ‘Now Doing God’s Work.’”
    
28. Author’s interview with Kok Sros. The former document worker Suos Thi told Seth Mydans in 1996: “I was very afraid of Ho. I was afraid even to look at his face, In my dreams, he was like a tiger” (Mydans, “Cambodian Killers’ Careful Records”). Him Huy told Douglas Niven and Peter Maguire that on one occasion after Ho had cursed him, “I sat by myself and cried. I wanted to shoot myself.”
    
29. On Peng, Alexander Hinton’s interview with Khieu Lohr, Ben Kiernan’s interview with Him Huy, Youk Chhang’s interview with Him Huy, and Sara Colm’s interview with Vann Nath. See also Item D-15, DC–Cam archive, an interview with Him Huy dated 1987. An uncatalogued document from DC–Cam dated 30 May 1978 contains the names of eighteen prisoners, some
    

    as young as nine, annotated by Duch: “Uncle Peng: Discard [kill] every last one.”
    

30. Kiernan,
    The Pol Pot Regime,
    315. Interrogations of Vietnamese in Chan’s writing, all in CMR 18, are numbered 1, 2, 4, 22–24, 29–31, 35, 37–44, 51–57, 64–67, 74–75, 78–99, 102–6, and 110–14. Nhem En said that Chan interrogated “all the Vietnamese prisoners” (author’s interview, February 1997), and an untitled notebook containing Chan’s thumbnail biographies of several Vietnamese prisoners has survived in Box 13, DC–Cam. In 1990 Nate Thayer watched him interrogating supposedly Vietnamese prisoners on the Thai-Cambodian border (personal communication). On the 1996 sighting, Christophe Peschoux (personal communication).
    
31. See “Chivavoas padevat reboh mit Pon” (Comrade Pon’s revolutionary outlook), uncatalogued 21-page document in DC–Cam archive, 7–12 December 1976. In the document, Pon regarded his repeated use of force against prisoners as a “shortcoming,” but no reprimands for this behavior surfaced in the archive. In Chan’s notebook entry for 26 December 1977, probably after another self-criticism session, Pon is praised for “scrupulously following the wishes of the Higher Organization.”
    
32. Tuy-Pon notebook, uncatalogued item in DC–Cam archive, entry for 9 September 1978.
    
33. See Suos Thi’s self-critical autobiography, dated 6 June 1977, in DC–Cam archive; Chris Riley and Peter Maguire’s interview with him in 1996; and Mydans, “Cambodian Killers’ Careful Records.”
    
34. Peter Maguire’s interview with Suos Thi.
    
35. Sara Colm’s interview with Vann Nath, author’s interview with Him Huy, Douglas Niven and Peter Maguire’s interview with Vann Nath, author’s interviews with Nhem En, and document D-15, DC–Cam archive, dated 1987. See also Nath,
    Prison Portrait
    (110), Him Huy’s self-critical autobiography, uncatalogued in DC–Cam archive, and Molly O’Kane, “The Eradication of Year Zero,”
    Guardian Weekend,
    26 July 1997. I am grateful to Victoria Smith for drawing my attention to this article.
    
36. “Ricefield” Huy’s confession is at CMR 83.2. On study sessions, CMR 97.2, Lon Kim Ay’s political notebook from 1976. Huy’s wife’s self-critical autobiography is Document 96 ST, DC–Cam archive; her confession has not survived. Kok Sros stated that only high-ranking cadres such as Duch, Ho, and Chan were allowed to house their families near the compound (author’s interview).
    
37. Kach
    group: CMR 87.2, Nop Nuon.
    Slout:
    cf. 1067 DC–Cam, 1 June 1977. On the prohibition of
    slout
    interrogators to torture, CMR 92.11, Ouch Orn. On
    trocheak
    group, CMR 159.2, Sok Ngim; confession of Chhim Chhun BBK-Kh 418 (not microfilmed) in DC–Cam; and uncatalogued lists of prisoners from DC–Cam dated 30 March and 27 May 1978.
    Angkhiem
    and
    trocheak
    groups are identified in several loose, uncatalogued sheets from the DC–Cam archive dated 2 June 1978. Prisoners interrogated by the “chewing” group were often middle-ranking cadres from the zones. In February 1978, fifty-one prisoners were being questioned by this group; a month later, the group was dealing with fourteen. For
    kdau,
    see uncatalogued DC–Cam document dated 2 June
    

    1978 and uncatalogued items from DC–Cam archive from February and 30 March 1978. Seybolt, “Terror and Conformity,” mentions “soft” and “hard” interrogation groups in Yan’an in 1943.