Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (35 page)

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Authors: David P. Chandler

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BOOK: Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison
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  1. For a translation of these notes, see Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua,
    Pol Pot Plans the Future,
    164–76.
  2. Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua,
    Pol Pot Plans the Future,
    171.
  3. CMR 80.36. The pages that survive in Ney Saran’s writing are almost illegible, and his full confession, if it ever existed, may have been passed along to the “upper brothers,” whose archive has disappeared. A substantial text may have existed at some point, however, for Ney Saran’s former bodyguard, interviewed in Ratanakiri by Sara Colm in 1996 on condition of anonymity, recalled Khieu Samphan reading aloud from Saran’s confession “for three hours” at a Party meeting (Colm, personal communication). On the other hand, Duch’s and Pon’s notes to the partial confession that survives suggest that Ney Saran was a very stubborn prisoner whom the Party Center wanted swiftly out of the way. He may well have been killed without providing a detailed confession. See also Kampuchea Démocratique,
    Livre noir,
    57 n., which claims that Ney Saran was “a double agent, working both for the Vietnamese and the CIA” to destroy DK.
  4. CMR 50.14, in eight sections, dated 25 September–10 October 1976.
  5. CMR 50.14, the 27-page document in Keo Meas’s handwriting, “Speaking Clearly about the Contradiction in Hanoi about Whether to Fix the Party’s Birthday in 1951 or 1960.”
  6. Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua,
    Pol Pot Plans the Future,
    4. Steve Heder (personal communication) has suggested that the CPK’s birthday was also discussed at the CPK Party Congress earlier in the year. Keo Meas, under surveillance much of the time, would not have been privy to these discussions.
  7. See Steve Heder’s unpublished interview with Tiounn Mumm, 4 August 1980: “[In 1973] we took 1951 as the Party’s foundation date, but notice that no day or month from 1951 is referred to. Instead we took the day and month of the 1960 Congress.” I am grateful to Heder for providing a copy of this interview.
  8. FBIS (Vietnam Service), 31 October 1978, before the Vietnamese had access to the S-21 archives. The defector went on to report a massive purge in April 1977. No copies of the circular invalidating CPK membership before 1960 have come to light.
  9. Tung Padevat,
    special issue, September–October 1976, 4, following on
    Revolutionary Youth,
    September 1976, 3. See also Chandler, “Revising the Past in Democratic Kampuchea.”
  10. CMR 13.28. On Non Suon’s arrest, see Heder interviews, 29. The anonymous speaker, a former courier for Non Suon, told Heder that news of Suon’s arrest in 1976 had baffled him because “I never heard [Suon] expressing any dissatisfaction with the Party’s line either in terms of national construction or . . . national defense.” Non Suon’s 394-page confession includes biographical sketches of Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Sao Phim, Ta Mok, and Son Sen. The sketches accused Ta Mok, the secretary of the Southwestern Zone, of “individualism and nepotism” and of having an “obdurate and boastful personality”—a reputation that has endured into the 1990s. Non Suon also noted the “rich peasant” backgrounds of Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary and the “landlord” background of Son Sen. It is unclear why these criticisms were solicited or volunteered. They survive only in a handwritten, original text and may never have been forwarded to the Party Center.
  11. The December speech urged Cambodians to “make long-term preparations for guerrilla war.” Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua,
    Pol Pot Plans the Future,

 

  1. See also Kiernan,
    The Pol Pot Regime,
    357 ff. DK hostility toward Vietnam may well have been fueled by the decision taken at the Fourth Congress of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party in December 1976 to forge ahead with establishing “special relationships” with Laos and Cambodia. The CPK does not seem to have been consulted about this decision: see Chen,
    China’s War with Vietnam,
    33 ff. Vairon’s magisterial “Du Parti Indochinois” provides informed speculation about this crucial period, drawing on interviews with Khmer and Vietnamese participants.
    1. CMR 139.15, Sean An, and CMR 35.10, Hak Seang Lay Ni. See also CMR 35.28, Hak Padet, confession of Hak Seang Lay Ni’s wife, and CMR 174.14, Touch Kamdoeun, a DK diplomat who had studied in France and confessed that “students in France learned to be happy like Europeans and hence how to oppress people.” Kamdoeun, the brother of the senior DK official Touch Phoeun, “died of illness” in S-21. Picq,
      Au-delà du ciel,
      99–100, recounts a study session presided over by Ieng Sary in early 1977 in which these offenders were lumped together with Koy Thuon, Sua Va Si, and Touch Phoeun, who were incarcerated in S-21 at the time. See also Picq, “I Remember What Ieng Sary Did.”
    2. Jackson,
      Cambodia 1975–1978,
      307. When he was brought to Phnom Penh in early 1976, Koy Thuon was grilled at first about his sexual transgres-sions. CMR 140.12, Sbauv Hin, the former secretary of (northern) Division 310, names twenty women who had “immoral encounters” with Koy Thuon, and in Thuon’s wife’s confession (CMR 162.18,Yun) she refers to him as “the contemptible Thuon”
      (a-Thuon)
      and complains of his infidelities.
    3. “The Last Plan,” in Jackson,
      Cambodia 1975–1978,
      307. The insults suggest that Koy Thuon may have inspired genuine affection among his followers.
    4. As microfilmed, Koy Thuon’s confession (CMR 50.19) covers only 34 pages, drawn from three interrogation sessions in early March 1977. The text held as items 916–20 at DC–Cam, on the other hand, is over 600 pages, drawn from 45 interrogation sessions from February to April 1977. The DC–Cam copy, which includes the material microfi by Cornell, has copious notations by Duch and Son Sen. The confession text from S-21 has been severely
      culled. Even so, the longer text in DC–Cam may still be incomplete, for several pages of retyped material, obtained from a confi source in 1997, that purported to come from a Koy Thuon confession text held in yet another archive, do not duplicate material in the DC–Cam copy.
    5. Heder, “Racism, Marxism, Labelling,” 126 ff., argues this case in detail. So-called “democracy activists” not mentioned already included Mau Khem Nuon (alias Phom), secretary of S-71, the CPK school, Phok Chhay (alias Toch), who worked in Office 870, and Siet Chhe (alias Tum), who had been the secretary of Sector 22 in the Eastern Zone and later worked under Son Sen in the military general staff.
    6. On these uprisings, see Paul, “Plot Details Filter Through”; Burgler,
      Eyes of the Pineapple,
      118–19; Kiernan,
      The Pol Pot Regime,
      342 ff.; and Quinn, “The Pattern and Scope of Violence,” 200 ff. It is possible that refugees interviewed by Paul in 1978 recalled accusations made in cadre study sessions. See also DC–Cam document L0001414, a memorandum from Office 401 summarizing purges in the Northern Zone in 1977.
    7. The latter group included the nationalist intellectual Han Tun Hak, who had attended the Lycée Sisowath with Koy Thuon and became prime minister of the Lon Nol government in 1972. According to one of his parliamentary colleagues, Hak had been active in pro-Chinese circles, alongside Hu Nim, Phok Chay, and Koy Thuon, in the 1960s (author’s interview with Keuky Lim). As prime minister, he had tried to open negotiations with the Khmer Rouge using these pre-1970 connections. At S-21 his rebuffed initiatives became acts of betrayal set in motion by Koy Thuon.
    8. Tuy-Pon notebook entry for 25 July 1978.
    9. See “The Last Plan” in Jackson,
      Cambodia 1975–1978,
      309: “Koy Thuon was uncovered, dismissed and replaced by another traitor.”
    10. Heder,
      Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan,
      suggests that Samphan was the driving force behind the 1977 purges of “democracy activists” whose life stories resembled his own. By 15 April 1977, indeed, Samphan was speaking of the necessity to “suppress all stripes of enemies at all times” (Barnett, Kiernan, and Boua, “Bureaucracy of Death,” 669). Samphan defected to the Phnom Penh government in December 1998.
    11. See Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua,
      Pol Pot Plans the Future,
      227–318. The Cambodian text is CMR 34.19. Hu Nim’s cell at S-21 is the only one identified with a particular prisoner at the Museum of Genocidal Crimes.
    12. Kiernan,
      The Pol Pot Regime,
      351.
    13. Burgler,
      Eyes of the Pineapple,
      120 ff.; Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua,
      Pol Pot Plans the Future,
      291.
    14. Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua,
      Pol Pot Plans the Future,
      293. Hu Nim’s wife, Yar Law (CMR 185.8), arrested with him, asked the CPK to spare her small child, “who is still unable to read,” and offered the child to the Party.
    15. I am grateful to Richard Arant for pointing out this segment of Siet Chhe’s confession and for providing a draft translation. Siet Chhe’s wife, Pun Sothea (CMR 121.2), was arrested in early 1978. For Siet Chhe’s confession, see appendix.
    16. Heder,
      Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan,
      17.
    17. See for example CMR 12.4, Chim Chun, who “allowed cattle to eat rice”: CMR 16.15, Chan Oeun, who confessed to burning and fl rice fields, killing five hundred cows, ruining six hundred hectares of rice land, and allowing people to fl to Thailand; and CMR 127.12, Roeun Run, who “didn’t allow people to grow rice.”
    18. See the discussions in Vickery, “Democratic Kampuchea,” 116–22, and Kiernan,
      The Pol Pot Regime,
      216–50. On Samlaut, see Chandler,
      Tragedy,
      163–67, and the detailed account in Kiernan and Boua,
      Peasants and Politics,
      166–205.
    19. On Khek Pen, see CMR 48.20 and Kiernan,
      The Pol Pot Regime,
      245.
      Tung Padevat,
      October–November 1977, 4. In “The Last Plan,” Khek Pen was castigated for using “new people” who were “all CIA agents” to “run various technical services, control mobile units,
      etc.
      In so doing, they tried to establish a treacherous state administration . . . or to create a state within a state.” Jackson,
      Cambodia 1975–1978,
      312.
    20. Nhem Ros’s confession (CMR 78.21) in the archive is only thirty pages long and may well have been culled after 1979. Nhem Ros had worked with his fellow northwesterners Sieu Heng and Nuon Chea in the northwest in the first Indochina war and visited communist cadres in Office 100 in 1964.
    21. Vickery,
      Cambodia 1975–1982,
      121.
    22. Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua,
      Pol Pot Plans the Future,
      56. As Kiernan points out (
      Pol Pot Regime,
      246
      ),
      the Northwest Zone was expected to produce the bulk of the nation’s rice under the Four-Year Plan. Unlike the other zones, however, it was not allocated a quota of its harvests for local consumption.
    23. Becker,
      When the War Was Over,
      246–47.
    24. CMR 118.11, trans. Steve Heder. See also
      Tung Padevat,
      July 1978, “Pay Attention to Purging the Hidden Enemies Boring from Within”: “[Enemies] have starved the people and made them thirsty, caused them to have nothing to wear and no place to stay. They wreck water, seed rice, compost, draft animals, plows and harrows, digging tools, spoons, plates and pots, wreck everything . . . as long as doing so makes our people hunger” (13). See also CMR 124.17, Von Vet, speaking of industrial cadres: “Some of the time [the workers] could be provoked to work too hard and this made them sick and tired of the collective regime.” In Sector 4, in the Northwest Zone, people who complained about inadequate food were accused of being “free” (CMR 37.2, Hang Bun).
    25. On purges in the Northwest Zone in 1977 and 1978, see Jackson,
      Cambodia 1975–1978,
      105–7.
    26. See, for example, Kamm, “Cambodian Refugees”; Kamm,
      Cambodia,
      130 ff.; and Kramer, “Cambodia’s Communist Regime.”
    27. Burchett,
      The China, Cambodia, Vietnam Triangle,
      160.
    28. FBIS, 4 October 1977. Interestingly, only two other members of the Party Center, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, were named in the speech. Heder, “Racism, Marxism, Labelling,” 139, 142. The September attacks, proposed by Sao Phim and Ta Mok, had been approved by the Party Center and arguably backfi when the Vietnamese launched a larger and better-coordinated counter-offensive in November. See also Chanda,
      Brother Enemy,
      84 ff.
    29. CMR 96.20, a seventeen-page leaflet dated 3 January 1978, titled “How to Defeat the Vietnamese.” The target of Vietnamese to be killed was also broadcast over Phnom Penh radio: Kiernan,
      The Pol Pot Regime,
      393–94. See also CMR 96.10, a shorter leaflet from Office 870 offering a general amnesty in an effort to gain support for the war. The first leaflet is discussed in Kiernan,
      The Pol Pot Regime,
      387–88. Tuy-Pon notebook, entry for 21 May 1978, discussing the 1977–1978 campaign, notes that Khmer “who sacrificed their lives” (
      poli,
      a respectful term, favored by DK) were outnumbered ten to one by Vietnamese “heads” (
      kbal,
      a classifi usually reserved for animals) who had “croaked”
      (n’goap,
      a slang word rarely used for human deaths
      ).
    30. Tuy-Pon notebook, entry for 3 June 1978, referring to an earlier document.
    31. Kiernan,
      The Pol Pot Regime,
      386–90; Heder, “Racism, Marxism, Labelling,” 138 ff. and
      Kampuchea Dossier
      I. See also Richard Arant’s interview with Lay Samon, a “Hanoi Khmer” who began training on the Cambodian border in February 1978.
      Livre noir,
      75: “[The Vietnamese] were able to advance rapidly thanks to their agents in the interior of Kampuchea.”
    32. For a discussion of this image, see chapter 5. See also “Pay Attention to Sweeping out Concealed Enemies,”
      Tung Padevat,
      July 1978: “The concealed enemies who were running-dog agents of the Vietnamese . . . were noxious to the uttermost and of the uttermost danger” (4).
    33. Heder,
      Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan,
      21, citing evidence from the confessions of Sok Thuok (alias Von Vet, CMR 124.17) and Chou Chet (CMR 12.22). See also Kampuchea Démocratique,
      Livre noir,
      76–77.
    34. CMR 124.17, Sok Thuok, trans. Steve Heder. See also Chandler,
      Tragedy,
      296, citing survivors’ memories, and Von Vet’s confession (CMR 124.17) quoting Sao Phim as saying, “We must work secretly and with care to establish a Party which is the reverse of the CPK. We plan to spend money again; there will be salaries and badges of rank. There will be markets. These are our goals.”
    35. For a colleague’s assessment of Sao Phim’s psychology at this time, see Richard Arant’s interview with Yi Yaun; Kiernan, “Wild Chickens,” 188–89; and Kiernan,
      The Pol Pot Regime,
      392 ff.
    36. It is possible that Chou Chet (CMR 12.22) had been involved in plot—
      ting a military uprising in the zone. See Kiernan,
      The Pol Pot Regime,
      391 ff. Different portions of his wife’s confession are filed under Im Ly (CMR 39.23) and Im Nan (CMR 41.8). Proud of her years of service to the Party, she courageously praised her mentor, Keo Meas. The “string of traitors” attached to CMR 41.8 is over two hundred names long. See also “The Last Plan,” which names Chou Chet as a coconspirator with Sao Phim and Nhem Ros.

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