Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (38 page)

1. Interestingly, landless people on the margins of prerevolutionary rural life—gamblers, cattle thieves, and drunkards—had frequently been recruited into the anti-French resistance (Thong Thel and Sok Pirun, personal communications). In this regard, see Wise, “Eradicating the Old Dandruff,” in which a former Cambodian schoolteacher, then a refugee in Thailand, is quoted: “M’sieur, Cambodia is governed by drunkards, thieves, savages, barbarians and classless illiterates.” May Ebihara (personal communication) notes that the litany refl clichéd views of “bad characters” in prerevolutionary, rural Cambodia.
   
2. See Chhin Chhum confession, BBK-Kh 418 in DC–Cam archive. 67. CMR 19.10.
   

68. CMR 24.8.

69. CMR 183.18.

70. CMR 88.2. See also CMR 48.8, Khom Khan: “In Vietnam, there are markets, women, and alcohol, as well as motorcycles to ride. No one is ordered around.” These statements were presumably allowed to stand because they provided evidence of the pro-Vietnamese bias of those who made them.

71. CMR 23.13.

72. CMR 55.5. CMR 26.32, E Che, a woman enrolled in the CPK by Son Sen’s wife, also played on the contrast between “rest” and “storming attacks.”

73. CMR 56.24.

1. CMR 56.14. See also CMR 55.5, Kae San: “Chhin said that having things the way they are means lots of hardship. His wife was in Phnom Penh and he was in Kompong Chhnang. What sort of happiness was there in going to see her once a year?” (trans. Steve Heder); CMR 141.20, Sav Kang, a veteran revolutionary who reported another party member saying that the separation of husbands from their wives was “very extreme” and that resistance to the policy might “lead to a second revolution.”
   
2. Scott,
   Domination and the Arts of Resistance.
   But see the adages quoted by CMR 108.2, Pech Ny, in 1978, as “current in Mondulkiri”: “The Vietnamese have taken all our land already, but the Organization says we’re winning,” and “Work all day, work all night, where does the strength to do the work come from?”
   
3. CMR 123.26. This confession is only two pages long.
   
4. CMR 35.2, 37. In the confession, Ho also attacked the collectivization of private property.
   

78. CMR 84.27.

1. CMR 173.16. See also CMR 128.9 for Srey Daung’s astute assessment: “The Party is moving too quickly to the left. I’ve stopped believing in it, I want to fight against it so it won’t go so fast.”
   
2. Douglas Niven’s interview with Nhem En.
   
3. CMR 39.25. The relatively frank biographical sketches prepared by Non Suon (CMR 13.28), while uncritical of Brothers Number One and Two, are exceptions to this rule.
   
4. CMR 123.2, as quoted in Steve Heder,
   Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan,
   22. Phuong went on to speak of the people’s “unbearable pain and burning sor-row” and to describe DK as a “black and stultifying state.”
   
5. CMR 12.22 (trans. Steve Heder). See also CMR 76.16, Mau Khem Nuon, a high-ranking cadre who quoted a colleague as saying, “Those who are discontented with the new arrangements amount to . . . more than half the population, a formidable force.”
   
6. Author’s interview with Vann Nath; Pha Thachan’s interview with Lionel Vairon.
   
7. Memorandum from Roeun of Division 801 to Brother 89 (Son Sen), 15 November 1976. Uncatalogued item in DC–Cam archive. See also CMR 99.19, “Summary of the Organization’s Views,” an undated speech, probably from late 1977, in which Pol Pot complained that “traitors [in the countryside] have destroyed fuel, machines, husked rice, clothes, coconut trees, and jackfruit. They have transplanted rice with the roots sticking up in the air.” In “The Last Plan,” in Jackson,
   Cambodia 1975–1978,
   Duch suggests that “banditry, vices, pacifism [and] rumor-spreading were encouraged so as to create feelings of insecurity among the people.”
   
8. CMR 174.9. Tuy-Pon notebook, entry for 19 July 1978, continues: “If we can catch the hidden Vietnamese, that would be a great victory. If we catch the traitors who are hiding them, that would be a small victory. However, if we catch lots of traitors who are concealing Vietnamese, that would amount to a large victory.” See also CMR 16.4, Chea Sin, which lists the Vietnamese hidden in Sector 20 by name; presumably these were real people who could be rounded up. The fears of hidden Vietnamese outlasted the DK regime. In 1992 a Cambodian official told Serge Thion that “the Vietnamese are most dangerous when they are invisible.”
   
9. For examples of prisoners who confessed to concealing Vietnamese, see CMR 57.28, Kim Sok; CMR 58.3, Kong Phoeur; CMR 67.22, Leng Chhang; CMR 67.24, Lot Sophon; CMR 166.11, Yin Yum; and CMR 184.27, Ven Vean, a low-ranking medical official who “planned” not only to carry out a coup d’état but also to “conceal Vietnamese, to conceal Thais, and to conceal medicine.” Tuy-Pon notebook, entry for 18 June 1978.
   

88. CMR 164.13.

89. CMR 84.8. See also CMR 144.3, Sam Huoy (alias Meas Tal; trans. Steve Heder): “We must have destructive stratagems, such as shooting revolutionary cadres, surreptitiously throwing grenades and placing mines surreptitiously firing pistols or using poison in various forms. Cadres at any level must be killed if they don’t belong to us.”

90. CMR 104.23; CMR 79.19; CMR 107.14. See also CMR 24.5, Dong

Kin, who confessed to “trading cloth and firing a single shot for fun,” and CMR 34.18, Hul Kim Huat, who “encouraged immorality and cooked in private.”

1. Confession contained in DC–Cam 846 BBK-Kh (not microfilmed).
   
2. CMR 56.21, Khim Yu; CMR 7.14, An Huot; CMR 26.4, Chhuon.
   
3. Forty seven summaries of confessions, divided by those from military units, government offices, and sectors and zones, are contained in CMR 102, 103, 113, and 114. Some of these texts list all the names that appear in confessions from a targeted unit or region. Most of the summaries run to less than forty pages, but the one dealing with Division 310, purged in 1976, is over a thousand pages long.
   
4. On Cambodian historiography, see Chandler,
   Facing the Cambodian Past,
   189–204; Claude Jacques, “Nouvelles orientations pour l’étude de l’histoire du pays khmer,”
   Asie du sud-est et monde insulindien
   XIII, 1–4 (1982): 39–57, and Vickery,
   Cambodia after Angkor.
   For Soviet parallels, see also Tucker, “Stalin, Bukharin, and History as Conspiracy,” in his
   Soviet Political Mind.
   
5. CMR 99.14, undated but probably from 1977.
   
6. For examples of Party histories, see Jackson,
   Cambodia 1975–1979,
   251–68. For discussions, see Chandler, “Seeing Red,” and Liu Chao Ch’i, “Liquidation of Menshevik Thought in the Party,” in Compton,
   Mao’s China,
   267: “The history of the Party is the history of the struggle with [Menshevism] and its subjugation and annihilation.” See also Saich, “Where Does Correct Party History Come From?” Saich’s title, of course, echoes Mao’s essay, “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?” in which Mao equates “correct” ideas with those that have successful outcomes.
   
7. Spence,
   Narrative Truth,
   263–78, deals interestingly with Freud’s notion of “archaeology” and its relation to what Spence, a psychiatrist, calls “narrative truth.” For Freud’s notions, see chapter 3. Spence writes, “A life story is often so loosely constituted that almost any datum can find a home” (268). See also Ofshe and Watters,
   Making Monsters,
   especially 15–44 and 289–304, passages that deal with the vexed question of “recovered” memories of sexual abuse.
   
8. Quoted in Crews,
   Memory Wars,
   209, citing Freud,
   Collected Writings,
   Standard Edition, Volume 2, 279–80. The passage could easily have been written by an official at S-21. So could another passage cited by Crews: “We must not be led astray by initial denials. . . . We shall in the end conquer any resistance by emphasizing the unshakable nature of our convictions” (116 n. 8). See also Taussig, “Culture of Terror”: “It is also clear that the victimizer needs the victim for the purpose of making truth, objectifying the victimizer’s fantasies in the discourse of the other.” Tucker and Cohen, eds.,
   The Great Purge Trial,
   characterize forced confessions in the Stalin period as “vehicles for the acting out of . . . a paranoid delusional system complete with a central theme (the great conspiracy) and a malevolent pseudo-community” (xxii). See also Hanson, “Torture and
   

   Truth in Renaissance England.” Catholic critics of Protestant-administered torture, Hanson argues, claimed that instead of looking for hidden truth the torturers were forcing prisoners to invent the truth the torturers wanted.
   

9. CMR 99.7. An interrogator’s notes to a confession (CMR 105.4, Oum Chhan) state that “when there were points he didn’t mention I beat him, according to the weaknesses in his story.” Another interrogator notes (on CMR 126.20, Re Sim), “I tortured him some more, concentrating on hidden stories. If he was hiding small stories, he must be hiding large ones as well.”
   
10. For a stimulating survey of the phenomenon of surveillance in nineteenth-century Europe, see Holquist, “Information is the Alpha and Omega.’”
    
11. See Chandler,
    Brother Number One,
    187; the second quotation was given to me by David Ashley. The idea that “learning to walk” might entail the unwarranted deaths of uncalculated numbers of innocent people calls to mind the arrogance of Mao’s inscribing “beautiful lines” onto people who were “poor and blank.” In his 1997 interview with Nate Thayer, Pol Pot admitted some “mistakes,” but blamed major disasters on outside “agents” and on the Vietnamese.
    

CHAPTER FIVE. FORCING THE ANSWERS

1. Sofsky,
   The Order of Terror,
   224. See also Todorov,
   Facing the Extreme,
   

   179–93 (“The Enjoyment of Power”).
   

2. CMR 57.24. For another sequence of tortures, see CMR 122.9, Pol Piseth, in which the interrogator claims to have beaten the prisoner, used electric shock, and force-fed him
   (chrok bobong),
   after which the prisoner “stam-mered” his confession.
   
3. Foucault,
   Discipline and Punish.
   23. On Foucault’s attitudes to torture, see Miller,
   The Passion of Michel Foucault,
   165–207, and Foucault, “Why Study Power,” especially 220–21, on violence. See also “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,” an interview in which Foucault compares sadomasochism to a “chess game in the sense that one can win and the other can lose. The master can lose... if he finds he is unable to respond to the needs of his victim. Conversely the servant can lose if he fails to act or can’t stand meeting the challenge thrown at him by the master.” See also Zulaika and Douglass,
   Terror and Taboo,
   190 ff.
   
4. CMR 105.4, Oum Chhan. See also Levi,
   The Drowned and the Saved,
   

   77–78.
   

5. On the lack of a universally valid definition of torture, see Mollica and Caspi-Yavin, “Assessing Torture,” 582. For one definition of the practice, see
   

   U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,
   Convention against Torture.
   On “unspeakability,” see Améry,
   At the Mind’s Limits,
   24 and 33. For theoretical perspectives, see Daniel,
   Charred Lullabies,
   135–53; Rejali,
   Torture and Modernity,
   160–76; Scarry,
   The Body in Pain,
   27–59; and Certeau, “Corps torturés, paroles capturées.” He writes: “Torture is the technical process whereby tyrannical power obtains that impalpable primary material which it has itself destroyed and which it lacks: authority or, if one prefers, a capacity to make itself believed” (65). Appalled by French tortures in the Algerian war, Certeau
   

   was writing about genuine opponents of those administering the torture; not all the prisoners at S-21 can be classified in this way. See also Mellor,
   La torture.
   

6. Author’s interview with Him Huy, January 1997. Huy has also been
   

   interviewed by Ben Kiernan, Peter Maguire, Youk Chhang, and Douglas Niven. The S-21 interrogators quoted briefl in the 1981 documentary
   Die Angkar
   have not been located since. See also Mydans, “A Tale of a Cambodian Woman.” On the paucity of perpetrators’ testimony, Goldhagen muses in
   Hitler’s Willing Executioners:
   “It is remarkable how little is known about the perpetrators of other genocides [than the Holocaust]. A review of the literature reveals little about their identities, the character of their lives or their motiva-tions” (596 n. 78). When one considers how few perpetrators outside Germany and, more recently, Rwanda have ever been brought to trial, how most have spent their lives in hiding, and how risky it would be for them to reveal themselves, Goldhagen’s observation is absurd. Moreover, “truth commissions” in such countries as South Africa and El Salvador, and amnesties in such nations as Argentina, have encouraged former perpetrators to talk freely, further undermining Goldhagen’s assertion that we know little about them. For valuable testimony by perpetrators, see Feitlowitz,
   Lexicon of Terror,
   193–256, and Huggins, “Brazilian Political Violence.”
   

7. Browning,
   Ordinary Men;
   Goldhagen,
   Hitler’s Willing Executioners;
   Raul Hilberg, “Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders”; J. Timerman,
   Prisoner without a Name;
   Levi,
   The Drowned and the Saved;
   Sereny,
   Into That Darkness;
   and Solzhenitsyn,
   The Gulag Archipelago.
   See also Michael Taussig, “Terror as Usual: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of History as a State of Siege,” in
   The Nervous System,
   11–35. Authors working in Latin America have been able to draw heavily on perpetrators’ testimony. See Corradi, Fagen, et al.,
   Fear at the Edge,
   39–120; Huggins, “Brazilian Political Violence,” which includes extensive interviews with former torturers; and Feitlowitz,
   Lexicon of Terror.
   For information on a Greek torturer, see Gibson and Harotos-Fatouros, “The Education of a Torturer.”
   
8. On the notion of “rehumanizing” victims of DK, see Hinton, “Agents of Death,” and Daniel,
   Charred Lullabies,
   194–212.
   
9. Rejali,
   Torture and Modernity,
   176; Zulaika and Douglass,
   Terror and
   

   Taboo,
   193. See also Bauman,
   Modernity and the Holocaust,
   and Gregory and Timerman, “Rituals of the Modern State.” These authors all argue that torturers are “ritual specialists” and that torture sessions resemble rites of passage. Bauman writes: “Violence has been turned into a technique. Like all techniques, it is free from emotions and purely rational” (98). Certeau sees torture as “a collusion between the technician’s rationality and the violence of power,” with power seeking assent to its peculiar “language” at all costs (“Corps torturés, paroles capturées,” 64).
   

10. On permission needed to beat, CMR 22.33, Chau Kut; CMR 49.2, Khun Khom; and CMR 99.7 (the interrogators’ notebook), 68. The prisoners who were not beaten were CMR 36.10, Hin Sinan; CMR 54.13, Kenh Yim; CMR 57.32, Keo Phat; CMR 67.27, Liv Chheam; CMR 68.30, May Len; CMR 80.22, Mok Khon; CMR 157.29, Seng Sopheat; and CMR 171.3, Tep Meng.
    
11. See CMR 86.1, Ngel Kong.
    
12. CMR 99.7, the interrogators’ manual, is partially translated in Hawk, “The Tuol Sleng Extermination Center,” and the same translation is included in Peters,
    Torture,
    270–72. In the quotations that follow I draw on the Khmer original. The second quotation is from Tuy-Pon notebook, entry for 20 May 1978.
    
13. Sofsky,
    The Order of Terror,
    226.
    
14. Peter Maguire and Chris Riley’s interview with Ten Chan. See also People’s Republic of Kampuchea,
    The Extermination Camp of Tuol Sleng,
    6, quoting Ten Chan.
    
15. DC–Cam, BBK-Kh 675, not microfi by Cornell. The cover sheet bears a notation from Duch: “This is the one who beat Bun Than to death.” Bun Than’s incomplete confession is CMR 3.10.
    
16. Collins, “Three Faces of Evil.”
    
17. Note from Pon to Duch, 27 September 1976, uncatalogued item in DC–Cam archive.
    
18. Institut Bouddhique,
    Dictionnaire cambodgien
    (Phnom Penh: 1967),