Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (36 page)

1. 1. Author’s interviews with Kok Sros and Nhem En.
      
   2. The details of Sao Phim’s last days are from Kiernan, “Wild Chickens,” Richard Arant’s interview with Yi Yaun (an eyewitness), and Kiernan,
      The Pol Pot Regime,
      400.
      
   3. Kiernan,
      The Pol Pot Regime,
      405 ff., and Kiernan,
      Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacres.
      See also Heder’s interpretation of these events in “Racism, Marxism, Labelling,” 149–51. Because the Eastern Zone cadres “were skeptical about the wisdom and humanity of building socialism at a
      

      breakneck pace,” Heder argues, they were also, in the eyes of the Party Center, “objectively” Vietnamese, and, in Heder’s phrasing, “laxly organized, traitor-ously led and wrongly indoctrinated.”
      

   4. Confessions implicating Son Sen (all from late 1978) include CMR 21.25, Chhay Kim Hor; CMR 43.10, In Nat; CMR 159.11, Sun Ty; CMR 159.16, Soeung Kun; and CMR 165.17, Yang Kon. See also Heder, “Racism, Marxism, Labelling.”
      
   5. “Learning from Important Experiences in Fulfi the Party’s First Semester 1978 Tasks,”
      Tung Padevat,
      special issue, May–June 1978, 17–33, and “Guidelines from the Central Committee of the CPK 20 June 1978,” uncatalogued item in S-21 archive. See also Vickery,
      Cambodia 1975–1982,
      141.
      
   6. Steve Heder’s interview with Mey Mann.
      
   7. David Ashley’s translation of the tape-recorded trial of Pol Pot at Anlong Veng, 25 July 1997. I am grateful to Ashley for this text. For a description of the trial, see Thayer, “Brother Number Zero.”
      
   8. CMR 161.3,Yann. Similarly, CMR 56.3, Ky Chin, another former interrogator, noted: “Interrogations need not be clear because if they are the Organization will catch everybody.” In 1980 a survivor of the regime told Heder that the logic of the system would eventually have killed everyone in Cambodia except Pol Pot. For a Chinese parallel, see Stephen Averill, “The Origins of the Futian Incident,” in Saich and Van de Ven, eds.,
      New Perspectives,
      79–115. In passing Averill notes the “remarkable compatibility of moral purpose and mindless persecution” in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (109). Averill’s phrase applies nicely to
      santebal’
      s operations.
      

CHAPTER FOUR. FRAMING THE QUESTIONS

1. Vann Nath’s interview with Sara Colm. See also CMR 27.1, Em Yan, in which the interrogator notes, “He says he doesn’t know why he was arrested,” and CMR 33.14, Hang Nguon, in which the interrogator “asked him why the Organization had arrested him.” For similar formulations, see CMR 42.11, Im Som Ol; CMR 59.7, Keo Kun; CMR 62.12, Ly Hok Bay; CMR 150.13, Sim Yet; and CMR 151.35, Sok Sareth. CMR 59.16, Krin Lean, has Mam Nay’s notes under “reasons for arrest”: two of these suggestions are preceded by “perhaps.”
   
2. For other Communist examples, see Solzhenitsyn,
   Gulag Archipelago
   I, 137 ff., and Shentalinsky,
   Arrested Voices,
   24, which recounts Isaac Babel being asked in 1939: “How can you reconcile [your] declaration of innocence with the fact of your arrest?” See also Gilboa,
   Confess! Confess!
   128 ff., which describes Gilboa’s interrogator saying in 1941: “Cut the foolishness! The NKVD never makes mistakes. If you are here, that means that everything is known. . . . We know, but nevertheless you will say it; you will talk.” See also Rittenberg and Bennett,
   The Man Who Stayed Behind,
   392: “[In 1968 in Beijing] I was visited by a team of investigators [who] gave no clue about the charges against me. They simply admonished me to think about my guilt.” Similarly, Picq,
   Au delà du ciel,
   123, recalls the DK foreign minister, Ieng Sary, addressing a meeting of cadres: “As for the last traitor, it’s for you to find him!” Mouth Sophea (personal communication) has recalled “livelihood meetings” in Battambang between 1976 and
   

   1978 in which cadres would periodically single someone out and say, “The Organization knows all about your guilt. All you have to do is to tell the Organization about it.” See also Ofshe, “Coerced Confessions,” 1–15.
   

3. Gay,
   Freud,
   172, 321. Gay calls Freud a “Schliemann of the mind” (326). See also Schorske, “Freud.” Irina Paperno kindly provided this reference.
   
4. For a discussion of these issues see Spence,
   Narrative Truth,
   81 ff.; Crews,
   The Memory Wars,
   and Ofshe and Watters,
   Making Monsters.
   When Crews writes that “the therapist’s and the patient’s joint biographical artifact becomes, as it were, the perfect crime—but with the patient also serving as victim of her own concoction” (26), he might have been speaking about interrogations at S-21.
   
5. Ofshe and Watters, 40; Kotkin,
   Magnetic Mountain,
   336. 6. CMR 157.9.
   

1. Trans. Steve Heder. Sbauv Hin’s wife, Prum Nhar (CMR 119.20), who had worked with him in Division 310, was arrested a month later. See also CMR 17.24, Chey Peng, who had worked before his arrest in the economic support unit of S-21. Told by the interrogator that if he told the truth he would be released, he knew the interrogator was lying and wrote, “I have no hope . . . with these fetters on, I’m as good as dead.”
   
2. CMR 140.12. The full passage reads, “With regard to the accusations of betrayal of the Party and the revolution, I do not concur. Even if I am going to die, I will die as someone who was loyal to the Party and the revolution. If I am to die, I ask the Party to seek justice for me. Only the Party knows my biography.”
   
3. Kundera,
   The Art of the Novel,
   84. The process described by Kundera ends with the “criminal” eager for punishment. Kundera is commenting on Kafka, remarking that “the court [in
   The Trial
   ] is impervious to proof.” By implication Kundera is dealing with post–1949 Czechoslovakian police procedures.
   
4. Horowitz,
   Taking Lives,
   185, citing Solzhenitsyn. Chan notebook, entry for 21 January 1978. See also Tuy-Pon notebook, entry for 18 September 1978: “We must trick [the enemy] so as to conceal our intentions, but we must know how to be inquisitive, and when questioning we must dig and claw from beginning to end.”
   
5. CMR 53.2. In a passage composed a month later, But adds: “As long as I was asked [about Son Sen] I was going to reply, because to conceal this [material] was very dangerous.” See also CMR 24.27, Duk Sambo, held for twenty-seven days in Battambang, where he gave security officers the names of his coconspirators before he was sent on to S-21.
   
6. CMR 182.13. By 1977, however, the code name was already known to a few outsiders. Uon Sokho, rummaging in his memory for an offense, confessed to telling someone else the location of S-21.
   
7. Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua,
   Pol Pot Plans the Future,
   312. Hu Nim cited the case of a colleague, Prom Samar, who had said at a self-criticism meeting: “I am an enemy whom the Party must smash.” Hu Nim continued: “The group that took part in the session concluded: ‘Prom Sam Ar is an enemy.’ Prom Sam Ar was then reported to the Organization and Brother Haem (Khieu Samphan) ordered further surveillance.” The culprit committed suicide before he could be arrested.
   
8. See Locard, “Le Goulag des khmers rouges,” an excellent summary of research so far. In 1978, Pol Pot told Belgian visitors: “We have no prisons and we
   

   do not even use the word ‘prison’” (FBIS, 26 September 1978); technically he was correct, in that prerevolutionary jails were not used by DK. See also Etcheson, “Centralized Terror in Democratic Kampuchea”; Locard and Moeung Son,
   Prisonnier de l’Angkar;
   and Kiernan,
   The Pol Pot Regime,
   346 ff. On the transmission of supplementary documents, see CMR 81.7, Nam Dul, whose interrogation from Sector 505 accompanied him to S-21, and document D-123, DC–Cam, 20 May 1977, a letter from Office 401 in Sector 32 to the Organization, transmitting fourteen serious offenders and listing thirty-fi less serious ones being held back for “education.” DC–Cam items 1066–68 transmit prisoners from Division 502; 1120 sends along three suspects from Kompong Thom, and N0001880 transmits some preliminary interrogations from Sector 21. The dossiers of CMR 87.37, Nuon, and CMR 166.13, Yos Thoeurn, include data forwarded to S-21 by the security office of Division 310, to which both men had belonged. CMR 80.30, Meas Em, and CMR 4.25, Buy Boeun, describe
   santebal
   operations in the Northwestern Zone. See also DC–Cam document L0045, in which Met, a cadre of Division 402, reports to Son Sen that he has sent “more than fi no-goods
   [puok min l’oo]
   to S-21”—a rare reference to the prison in a document produced outside its walls.
   

9. Steve Heder’s transcribed conversation in 1985 about S-21 with David Hawk. I am grateful to Hawk for providing me with a copy of the transcript.
   

16. CMR 43.11.

17. CMR 120.4.

18. CMR 126.20.

1. On sustained fatigue and suggestibility in interrogations, see Feldman,
   Formations of Violence.
   Regarding the prisoner telling lies, the parallel with psychoanalysis, although fortuitous, is interesting, for, as Janet Malcolm has remarked in
   The Purloined Clinic,
   “Lies are of the deepest interest to analysts. They are like dreams. They lead somewhere. . . . Mistrust is the analyst’s stock in trade, an attitude from which he can never relent” (41). See also G. Gudjonsson
   , “
   The Application of Interrogative Suggestibility to Police Interviewing,” in Schumaker, ed.,
   Human Suggestibility,
   280–88.
   
2. CMR 99.7. See also CMR 87.11, Nong Chan, in which the interrogator lists “what was already asked” before he came to S-21: “Biography; why did the Organization arrest him; is he an enemy or not; has he had political training?” See also an uncatalogued notebook from S-21, dated 1976 and 1977, in which a proposed sequence of questions for interrogators reads: “Are you a traitor? A traitor since when? Background and age? Activities over the years? Why are you a traitor?”
   
3. Author’s interview with Kok Sros; Lionel Vairon’s interview with Pha Thachan. See also Tuy-Pon notebook, entry for 8 October 1978, which notes that workers at the prison were still being encouraged to “insult the prisoners and press them hard; then the questions will become easier.”
   
4. Moise,
   Land Reform in China and Vietnam,
   246. Although it seems likely that many Cambodians were trained in such methods by the Vietnamese in the 1950s and 1960s, when the two parties were close, no documentation for this training has come to light.
   
5. CMR 174.2, Thong Vann, wrote later: “I know that the Organization is quick-witted and just. Respected Party Organization! I am living in total dark—
   

   ness and have lost mastery.” For another vivid example of Communist interrogation techniques, including both questions and answers, see Brankov, “János Kádar,” drawn from a tape recording.
   

6. CMR 138.11, trans. Richard Aran. Using the Khmer text, I have slightly altered the translation.
   
7. CMR 118.20, trans. Richard Arant. See also item N0001880 in DC–Cam archive, refl two sessions with Chaom Savat in Sector 21 on 4–5 June 1976. These implicate numerous personnel from the sector as well as Keo Meas, Ney Sarann, Chhouk, Koy Thuon, and Tiv Ol. In CMR 67.13, Loeung Souk, 96 of the 170 people named in the “string of traitors” had already been arrested.
   
8. Tuy-Pon notebook, entry for 18 December 1977. The same aphorism is found in the unsigned notebook from the period “Lothi Mak-Lenin,” 73.
   
9. CMR 99.7. CMR 99.14, “The New Plan,” probably from 1977, gives S-21’s motto as: “Make storming attacks as mightily as possible so as to serve the movement, the masses, and the splendid great leap forward.” The text seems to echo CMR 96.4, “Building and Expanding the Party in Accordance with Certain Marxist-Leninist Teachings,” undated, but pre-1975. The four “laws” of dialectical materialism discussed in CMR 96.4 were that everything is inter-related, everything changes, everything undergoes transformation, and everything is contradictory. Mouth Sophea has pointed out (personal communication) that the first two “laws” resembled well-known Buddhist teachings and employ Buddhist philosophical terms.