Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (39 page)

422. This text formed the basis for Robert K. Headley Jr.,
Cambodian-English Dictionary,
2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1977); Headley’s entry for
tearunikam
is at 380. See also Wit Thiengburanathan,
Thai-English Dictionary
(Bangkok: n.p., 1992), 583 and 615. Ian Mabbett informs me that Sanskrit has a wide range of words for torture and that judicial torture was widely practiced in classical India. The Cambodian compound verb trans-latable as “to harm”
(tvoeu bap)
means literally to “perform demerit.”

1. On interrogations and confessions in premodern China, see Susan Naquin, “True Confessions,” MacCormack,
   Traditional Chinese Penal Law,
   and Dutton,
   Policing and Punishment in China.
   Peters,
   Torture,
   93, briefly discusses judicial torture in Japan. Physical torture for evidentiary purposes, rare for years in Maoist China (it was not used, for example, on United Nations prisoners of war in the Korean conflict) was revived during the Cultural Revolution (Michael Schoenhals, personal communication). The Vietnamese term for interrogation contains no undertones of violence (Ton-that Quynh-Du, personal communication).
   
2. Peters,
   Torture,
   66; Asad, “Notes on Body Pain,” 305. See also Millett,
   The Politics of Cruelty,
   296 ff., and Hanson, “Torture and Truth.” Allen Feldman, writing about interrogations and torture in the 1980s in Northern Ireland, suggests that “the past act of transgression and a knowledge of the past are defined by interrogators as an absence hidden by the presence of the body within its own depths and recesses. . . . The body is unfolded in order to expose the past” (
   Formations of Violence,
   136). Feldman adds, “The confession text signifies the erasure of the body.”
   
3. On the bas-reliefs at Angkor Wat, see Eleanor Mannika,
   Angkor Wat: Time, Space and Kingship
   (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 155–60. The concepts of heaven and hell came to Angkorean Cambodia from Buddhist cosmology; see Coedes and Archaimbault,
   Les trois mondes.
   On the guide’s comments in 1981, Gough, “Roots of the Pol Pot Regime,” 155–56. Interestingly, bas-reliefs on the gateway to Wat Promruot in the city of Siem Reap, erected in 1990, depict the Buddha being tempted by evil forces dressed in Khmer Rouge military costume.
   
4. Author’s interview with Vann Nath, December 1995. On the Theravada notion of “unbelievers”
   (thmil),
   see Kapferer,
   Legends of People,
   and Southwold, “Buddhism and Evil.” See also Ulmonen, “Responses to Revolutionary Change,” 36, in which villagers in the 1990s call the Khmer Rouge
   thmil.
   Demonization and dehumanization went hand in hand; for medieval European examples, see Bauman,
   Modernity and the Holocaust,
   40 ff. A similar process was at work in the Indonesian massacres of suspected Communists in 1965–1966, discussed in Fein, “Revolutionary and Anti-revolutionary Genocides.” See also Staub, “The Psychology and Culture of Torture and Torturers,” in Suedfeld, ed.,
   Psychology and Torture,
   52 ff. The final quotation from Pol Pot is from FBIS, October 4, 1977, H 28.
   
5. See, for example, Ivan Turgenev, “The Execution of Tropman” (1871), reprinted in Lopate, ed.,
   The Art of the Personal Essay.
   See also Spierenburg,
   The Spectacle of Suffering,
   188 ff. Public executions were staged occasionally in Cambodia under Sihanouk in the 1960s. In a twentieth-century twist, the killings were replayed as newsreels for several weeks.
   
6. Leclère, trans.,
   Les codes cambodgiens,
   vol. 1, 234–36. See also Imbert,
   

   Histoire des institutions khmeres,
   112 ff.
   

7. See Som,
   Tum Taev,
   130–31. See also Uk Samet,
   Suksa katha Tum Taev
   (A brief study of Tum Taev). In Thai-administered Battambang in the early twentieth century, public executions were frequent and brutal. In the DK era, the wives and children of several important prisoners were executed with them to foreclose revenge. The murder of Son Sen and fourteen dependents, including small children, in June 1997 at Pol Pot’s behest and the murders of over fifty opponents of Prime Minister Hun Sen a month later indicate the endurance of this tradition. For Thai parallels, see Reynolds, “Sedition in Thai History.”
   
8. Foucault,
   Discipline and Punish,
   87. See also Miller,
   The Passion of Michel Foucault,
   208 ff. Punitive torture and “modern” penology went hand-in-hand in Argentina in the 1970s, although the documentation that characterizes S-21 was lacking. See Gregory and Timerman, “Rituals of the Modern State,” 68.
   
9. On the links between torture and secrecy, see Améry,
   At the Mind’s Lim-its,
   23–24. For a discussion of twentieth-century judicial torture, see Peters,
   Torture,
   116 ff.
   
10. See Chandler, “The Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea.” Mass condemnation of class enemies, of the sort practiced by “people’s courts” in revolutionary China and Vietnam, never seems to have taken hold in DK, although the establishment of something similar for the show trial of Pol Pot in 1997 suggests that such courts had occasionally been convened in the DK era.
    
11. See Locard, “Le Goulag des khmers rouges.”
    
12. Sara Colm’s interview with Vann Nath; CMR 118.20, Baen Chhae; and CMR 66.18, Long Muy, who described having been tortured at Wat Phnom before being taken across the city to Tuol Sleng.
    
13. Alexander Hinton’s interview with Vann Nath.
    
14. Quoted in Todorov,
    Facing the Extreme,
    159. See also DC–Cam document N0001880, a memorandum from the security office in sector 21 in the Eastern Zone, which uses the classifi “head”
    (kbal)
    for the noun “traitor”
    

    (kbot);
    the classifier is normally applied to animals. The same demeaning classifiers were also used for prisoners under the post-DK regime (Judy Ledgerwood, personal communication).
    

15. On these social categories, see Jackson,
    Cambodia 1975–1978,
    84. On dehumanization, see Kelman and Hamilton,
    Crimes of Obedience,
    19 ff. (the book deals in depth with the My Lai massacre); Solis,
    Son Thang;
    and Gregory and Timerman, “Rituals of the Modern State,” 66 ff., who label as
    cosificación
    the process by which the inmates of Argentine prisons became things.
    
16. A good introduction to the copious literature about the show trials is Leites and Bernaut,
    Ritual of Liquidation.
    See also Beck and Godin,
    Russian Purge;
    Khlevnyuk, “The Objectives of the Great Terror”; and Nikita Khrushchev, “Secret Report to the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU,” in Ali,
    The Stalinist Legacy,
    243 ff. On torture, Solzhenitsyn argues that physical torture was widely used in the 1930s in the USSR but was kept secret (
    The Gulag Archipelago,
    I, 102 ff.). Conquest concurs (
    The Great Terror,
    120 ff.). These methods of interrogation, dubbed “brainwashing” in the West in the 1950s, were adapted and improved by Western police forces and came to be known as KGB methods. See Shallice, “The Ulster Depth Interrogation Techniques.”
    
17. See Hodos,
    Show Trials;
    Leites and Bernaut,
    Ritual of Liquidation,
    351–82; and Steve Heder’s 1997 interview with Mey Mann, a Khmer who studied in Paris. Moloney, “Psychic Self-Abandon,” 53–60, contains an interesting interview with the U.S. businessman Robert Vogeler, who was accused of spy-ing in Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s and was groomed by his interrogators to make a full-scale confession in the manner of the show trials.
    
18. On the Chinese purges, see Compton, ed.,
    Mao’s China;
    Teiwes,
    Politics and Purges in China;
    Seybolt, “Terror and Conformity”; and Dai Qing,
    Wang Shiwei and the “Wild Lilies.”
    May Ebihara has suggested (personal communication) that in prerevolutionary Cambodia a former offender, having apolo-gized in some fashion and having learned to “behave,” could on occasion be reintegrated into the ruling strata of society. The 1997 “defection” of Ieng Sary, who had been condemned to death in 1979, is a case in point, although in Ieng Sary’s case no reeducation was called for or undertaken.
    
19. Berger and Luckmann,
    The Social Construction of Reality.
    See also Clark, “Revolutionary Ritual.” On Vietnam, see Moise,
    Land Reform in China and Vietnam,
    and Boudarel,
    Cent fleurs eclosés,
    145–231.
    
20. For the amnesty, see CMR 96.10, “Guidance from the CPK Party Cen-ter On the Policies of the Party toward Confused People.”
    
21. CMR 60.3, Kim Chen.
    
22. Chan notebook, entry for 23 July 1978. Confessions that refer to S-21 as a
    sala kay pray
    are CMR 17.5, Chey Rong; CMR 36.10, Hin Sinan; and CMR 67.27, Liv Chhem—all from 1978. The Tuy-Pon notebook entry for 8 October 1978 discusses the name change, which also involved gentler methods of interrogation.
    
23. On K’ang Sheng, see Apter and Saich,
    Revolutionary Discourse,
    280 ff; Byron and Pack,
    The Claws of the Dragon;
    MacFarquhar,
    Origins of the Cultural Revolution,
    3:291–94; and Faligot and Kauffer,
    The Chinese Secret Service,
    which claims, without citing a source, that Pol Pot “took training courses
    

    with K’ang Sheng’s special services in 1965
    (sic)
    and 1969” (410). See also Hu Yao-ping, “Problems Concerning the Purge of K’ang Sheng,” and Schoenhls “Mao’s Great Inquisition: The Central Case Examination Group, 1966–1979,”
    Chinese Law and Government,
    May–June 1996. The CCEG, which functioned throughout the DK period, may have provided some inspiration for S-21. Until his death in 1975, K’ang Sheng was closely associated with it.
    

24. On Pol Pot’s friendship with K’ang Sheng, author’s interview with a for-mer Chinese official, speaking on condition of anonymity. According to the official, Pol Pot’s 1971 visit to China was kept secret from Sihanouk (who was in Beijing at the time) until films of the visit were shown to the prince in Phnom Penh in 1976. The Chinese official’s story is difficult to corroborate and fits as neatly into the demonization of K’ang Sheng after 1976 as it does into the eagerness of many (myself included) to seek some of the origins of the Khmer Rouge outside Indochina.
    
25. Memories of people’s cries under torture crop up in Douglas Niven’s interviews with Nhem En and Kok Sros, Alexander Hinton’s with Khieu Lohr, and Lionel Vairon’s with Pha Tachan. See also Terzani, “I Still Hear Screams in the Night.” Terzani’s title derives from his interview with Ung Pech, who told him: “I think those screams will make me deaf.” Vann Nath, interviewed by David Hawk in 1983, said, “You heard screams all the time: screams of terror, screams of fear and screams of asphyxiation, near death.” The recurrence of these memories suggests not only that torture at S-21 was far more widespread than the scattered archival references to it might imply but also that it was the feature of life at S-21 that burned itself most deeply into people’s minds.
    
26. Tuy-Pon notebook, entry for 11 August 1978.
    
27. Aristotle,
    The Art of Rhetoric,
    I.xv, 26: “Those under compulsion are as likely to give false evidence as true, some being ready to endure everything rather than tell the truth while others are equally ready to make false charges against others, in the hope of being released sooner from torture.” Mellor, discussing this passage and other classical references to torture, points out that no classical authors expressed
    moral
    objections to the practice (
    La torture,
    65).