Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (4 page)

copy confession texts and other materials. In the 1980s, the human rights activist David Hawk assembled a daunting collection of materials from Tuol Sleng that provided ample evidence of the extrajudicial crimes of the DK regime.
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His efforts and those of others to bring DK’s leaders to justice then and later were stymied by Thai intransigence and political considerations. Thoughts about bringing the Khmer Rouge leaders to trial gathered steam again in the 1990s as the Khmer Rouge movement lost momentum.
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After 1989, when the Vietnamese withdrew their troops from Cambodia, the fate of the archive, and even of the museum, looked uncertain. In 1991 Cornell University, noted for the richness of its Southeast Asian library holdings, proposed to catalogue and microfilm the S-21 archive, which came under the Ministry of Culture’s jurisdiction. The work was completed in two years. A full set of the microfi was deposited in the Cornell University library; another set was retained by the museum.

The microfilmed materials cover 210 reels of film, including eleven reels of retakes. The reels contain all the confession texts discovered at the site, including those by foreign prisoners (filmed on separate reels). Foreigners’ confessions were primarily those of Vietnamese prisoners of war but also included statements from Thai and Vietnamese fishermen, some Vietnamese civilians, and a handful of American, British, and Australian sailors who were arrested when their boats strayed too near the Cambodian coast.
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Among the most revealing confessions in the archive are those of seventy-nine former workers at the prison. Twenty-four of these prisoners had been interrogators, and twelve had been document workers. Most of the others had been guards. These texts provide valuable biographical data about the young men working at the prison. They are also helpful in documenting work patterns at S-21, the style of interrogations, and the practice of torture
(tearunikam)
there.

The microfi reels also reproduce a range of nonconfessional materials that were discovered at the prison. These include entry and execution records, typed summaries of confessions broken down by region, and military unit and government office and study notebooks that cover such diverse subjects as politics, aircraft identification, mathematics, medicine, artillery, and small arms. The nonconfessional materials also include copies of the CPK’s statutes, speeches, and directives from the Party Center and copies of DK’s theoretical journals,
Revolutionary Flags (Tung Padevat)
and
Revolutionary Youth,
distributed to

Party members. Materials stemming from the prison itself include a report for the first three months of 1977, written notes from interrogators reporting the torture of prisoners, rules for guards, and notes by Duch, the prison director, on a range of issues, including his analysis of the confession texts in a handwritten document probably written in early 1978, titled “The Last Plan.” Probably the most revealing nonconfessional text microfilmed by Cornell is a fifty-five-page study notebook compiled by an interrogator, prepared in 1976. This text is discussed in detail in chapter 5.
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When the microfi at S-21 was completed in 1993, it was thought that the reels included all the signifi surviving material from the prison. In 1995, however, another S-21 archive, held in the Cambodian Ministry of the Interior, was presented to the Documentation Center–Cambodia (DC–Cam), an affiliate of the Cambodia Genocide Program established by Yale University, with a grant from the U.S. Department of State, with a view to gathering documentation of the DK regime. The new material, held by DC–Cam in Phnom Penh, seems to be have been drawn from the archives of the DK minister of defense and national security, Son Sen, who also oversaw the operations of the prison. Over fifty confession texts in this collection contain annotations in Son Sen’s writing. Many of the confession cover sheets also bear handwritten annotations in Vietnamese, suggesting that they had been reviewed under the Vietnamese protectorate of Cambodia in the 1980s. The newly discovered materials included dozens of confessions that had not survived in the S-21 archive, as well as valuable administrative materials, such as notes from self-critical study sessions held for cadres at the prison and notebooks compiled by senior interrogators. DK materials unrelated to S-21 are also housed in DC–Cam and will

undoubtedly be of interest to scholars of the regime.

Several hundred documents from S-21 itself that were not microfi have also found their way into the DC–Cam collections since 1996. These include miscellaneous, fragmentary interrogation schedules, lists of prisoners who were ill, documents transmitted with prisoners to S-21, and over two hundred additional study notebooks. Two that are of special interest were prepared in 1977 and 1978 by the chief interrogator, Mam Nay (alias Chan) and, in a shared notebook, by two senior interrogators known by their pseudonyms Tuy and Pon (hence-forth the Tuy-Pon notebook).

Discovering S-21, in other words, is a process that began in January 1979 and is still under way. The mass of material now available seems

sufficient to support a detailed study of the prison. The Yugoslav writer Milovan Djilas has observed that “the way prisons are run and their inmates are treated gives a faithful picture of society, especially of the ideas and methods of those who dominate the society”—a remark that seems particularly appropriate to S-21 and Democratic Kampuchea.
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As we pore through the materials and listen to the voices of so many people living under extreme conditions, we may also learn something about ourselves.

I fi visited Tuol Sleng for less than an hour in August 1981. Since 1990, I have returned to the museum many times. In spite or perhaps because of the courtesy and friendliness of the staff, I am always disoriented by the place. On every visit, I’ve been struck by the contrast between the peaceful, sun-soaked compound and the horrific exhibits on display, between the whitewashed classrooms with their yellow and white tile floors and the instruments of torture they contain, between the children at play outside the buildings and the mug shots of other children en route to being killed.

In the museum, the eyes of the mounted mug shots, and especially those of the women and children, seem to follow me. Knowing as we do, and as they did not, that every one of them was facing death when the photographs were taken gives the photos an unnerving quality that is more affecting, for me at least, than the photographs of dead prisoners or the grisly portrayals of torture painted after 1979 by the S-21 survivor, Vann Nath, that are also included in the display.
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On most of my visits mynah birds have hopped along the overgrown paths. Roosters have crowed around the neighborhood, the sound competing with the hum of traffic on Monivong Boulevard to the east or, in the dry season, with music broadcast over loudspeakers from Buddhist wedding celebrations nearby. The noises in the 1970s were different. Almost every night in the pitch-dark, silent city, workers at the prison who were quartered on the boulevard heard the screams of people being tortured. Indeed, all the survivors and people who worked at the prison share the memory of hearing people crying out in pain at night.

Moving through the museum, absorbing its archive and listening to survivors and to people who worked at the prison, we can still hear many of these ghostly voices. They control the narrative that follows.

chapter two

S-21: A Total Institution

The sociologist Erving Goffman, in his illuminating book
Asylums,
defi a total institution as “a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.”
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Goffman goes on to call such institutions—which can include schools, monasteries, prisons, hospitals, military units and so on—“forcing houses for changing persons; each is a natural experiment on what can be done to the self.”
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Under the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), which was itself a total institution par excellence, all of Cambodia soon became what Irv-ing Louis Horowitz has called a “sealed environment,” cut off from the outside world. The country was administered by a handful of politically obsessive men and women, many of them former schoolteachers, who saw it as their long-term duty to oversee, punish, and transform the people under their control. The cadres in charge of S-21, in turn, were under the surveillance of the Party Center
(mochhim pak),
similarly concealed from view, and, as members of an independent regiment, they worked under military discipline. S-21, the Party Center, the CPK, and the state of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), in other words, can be seen as successively more inclusive “forcing houses for changing persons.”

By Goffman’s defi S-21 was an extreme example of a total institution. Its mission was to protect the Party Center. It accomplished this task in part by killing all the prisoners and in part by altering their autobi-

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ographies to align them with the requirements and suspicions of the Party. Control over biographies, inmates, and the personnel working at S-21 was absolute and followed a complex “discipline”
(viney)
that enabled the keepers to dominate the kept and to preside over their refashioning.
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S-21 combined incarceration, investigative, judicial, and counteres-pionage functions. Some documents refer to it as a “ministry”
(kro-suong),
others as an “office”
(munthi).
Counterparts of
santebal
in other Communist countries would be the Soviet NKVD, the East Ger-man Stasi, and the Central Case Examination Group in China. Parallels also exist between S-21 and such bodies as the American FBI and the British MI5. In fact, most twentieth-century nations have a national security apparatus. Unlike many of its counterparts, however, S-21 deployed no agents in the countryside or overseas and had no central policymaking office. After mid-1976, its functions were carried out almost entirely at Tuol Sleng. For these reasons I use the names “S-21,”

santebal,
and Tuol Sleng interchangeably.

Although S-21’s mission and the duties of people working there were not spelled out in law, for DK had no legal code and no judicial system, they resembled those of the Soviet secret police, empowered by the Soviet law of February 1936 “to uncover and combat all tendencies and developments inimical to the state and to take for this end all measures deemed necessary and expedient.”
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Strictly speaking, S-21 was an interrogation and torture facility rather than a prison. Although people were confi and punished there, no one was ever released. The facility served primarily as an anteroom to death.

The two men who ran
santebal
reported directly to the collective leadership of DK, known as the Upper Organization
(angkar loeu),
the Organization
(angkar),
or the “upper brothers”
(bong khang loeu)
to outsiders and as the Party Center
(mochhim pak)
or leading apparatus
(kbal masin)
to members of the CPK. The Party Center was the nerve center of the country. Its membership altered over time, but its highest-ranking members, who were also those most directly concerned with the operations of S-21—Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ta Mok, Son Sen, and Khieu Samphan— remained members throughout the regime and, indeed, into the 1990s.
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Secrecy at S-21

S-21’s task of defending the Party Center was given the highest priority by DK’s leaders. Speaking to sympathetic Danish visitors in July 1978,

the Deputy Secretary of the CPK, Nuon Chea (“Brother Number Two”), explained: “The leadership apparatus must be defended at any price. If we lose members but retain the leadership, we can continue to win victories. . . . There can be no comparison between losing two or three leading cadres and 200–300 members. Rather the latter than the former. Otherwise the Party has no head and cannot lead the struggle.”
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The Party’s theoretical journal,
Tung Padevat
(Revolutionary Flags) had taken a similar position earlier in the year when an editorial had asserted, “If there is damage to the Center, the damage is big. . . . The leading
apparati (kbal masin)
must be defended absolutely. If we can defend them, we can defend everything else.”
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