Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (40 page)

1. Sofsky,
   The Order of Terror,
   228. See also Gibson, “Training People to Inflict Pain,” and David Hawk’s interview with Steve Heder, September 1982. See also CMR 99.14, “Summary from
   santebal,
   ” May 1977 (a self-criticism session): “A shortcoming: we fail to grasp the collective spirit of the proletariat. For example: we torture prisoners without grasping their activities, or their health. . . . the bad thing is that prisoners keep dying. Fourteen have done so in the last three months” (5).
   
2. CMR 69.30, Ma Meang Keng. See also CMR 88.3, Neo Kanha, a for-mer interrogator who declared in his confession that the modus operandi of his unit was to “ask when the enemies joined the CIA, and then to beat them for a couple of months.” Similarly, the interrogator’s notebook from 1976 (CMR 99.7, 65) admits in notes from a self-criticism session that “we go on the offensive but we see torture as more signifi than doing politics. . . . Our questions consist of screaming and yelling at the enemies.”
   
3. For Chinese parallels, see Lin Jing,
   The Red Guards’ Path to Violence;
   

   Walder and Gong Xiaoxia,
   Chinese Sociology and Anthropology;
   and Dittmer,
   

   “Thought Reform and Cultural Revolution.” The proportion of prisoners executed in China probably never reached that in the USSR under Stalin or in DK. MacFarquhar makes this point persuasively (
   Origins of the Cultural Revolution,
   3:473).
   

4. For a discussion of this confession, see chapter 3 and Duch to Ney Saran (alias Ya) memorandum, uncatalogued document dated 30 September 1976 in DC–Cam archive. Two days later, Duch wrote Pon: “With this Ya you can use the hot method for prolonged periods. Even if you slip and it kills him this won’t be a violation of the Organization’s discipline.” Pon notes in the margin: “Show to Ya so he can think it over” (trans. Steve Heder).
   

50. CMR 159.11.

1. Die Angkar.
   In Vann Nath’s interview with the author he mentioned that some prisoners at S-21 were placed in a wooden bathtub and shocked electrically while submerged.
   
2. CMR 3.24, Buth Heng. Heng’s wife, Chhay Phoeun, was a twenty-seven-year-old full-rights member of the CPK who was probably executed with him. Her personnel record sheet has survived.
   
3. Chan notebook, entry for 3 March 1978. “Pinching” may be a euphemism for sexual harrassment. For an example of sexual transgression by an interrogator, see CMR 183.27, Vong Samath, who confessed to inserting a piece of wood in female prisoner’s vagina during an interrogation, and CMR 17.13, Chea May, who confessed to having sex with a female prisoner and suggested that his superiors in the unit often did the same.
   
4. David Hawk’s interview with Ung Pech.
   
5. Die Angkar,
   frame 217.
   
6. Vann Nath in Niven and Riley,
   Killing Fields,
   96. See also People’s Republic of Kampuchea,
   The Extermination Camp of Tuol Sleng:
   “They used either electromagnetic devices with high tension but weak intensity or the domestic current of 380 volts. The electric wires were attached either to the foot or the tongue of the prisoner, or to his ears, fingers or to his sex” (4). In his interview with David Hawk, Nath said that he was “given shock by electric wire for a period of several hours.” CMR 13.5, Cheak Om, was also given repeated shocks. On the admonition to prisoners,
   Die Angkar,
   frame 273. Ten Chan, another survivor who received electric shock, told Chris Riley and Peter Maguire in 1994: “Sometimes they electrocuted me. That’s why to this day I feel something abnormal in my brain.”
   
7. CMR 46.5, Keth Chau; CMR 37.15, Hun Som Paun; CMR 64.5, Ly Phen; Duch notation to CMR 35.4, Heng Sauy; and CMR 179.8, Tae Hut. See also CMR 24, Sy Yan, with a note by Chan: “Torture her heavily until she stops saying that she went to Vietnam.”
   
8. Author’s interview with Vann Nath, December 1995. Nath’s memory is corroborated in CMR 105.39, Pal Lak Pheng, in which the interrogator writes that he showed the prisoner “the picture of a dog’s body with a man’s face.” See also CMR 87.16, Ngin Ing. Rittenberg and Bennett,
   The Man Who Stayed Behind,
   recalls a slogan used with prisoners in China in the Cultural Revolution: “Bow your dog’s head down” (340). See also Zhang Zhiyang, “Walls,” in
   China’s Cultural Revolution: Not a Dinner Party,
   ed. Michael Schoenhals
   

   (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 340–54, which notes that the Chinese character for “prisoner” contains a radical that means “dog.”
   

9. See Marston,
   Cambodia 1991–1994,
   84 ff. On the similar practice in Thailand, see D. Insor (pseud.),
   Thailand: A Political, Social and Economic Analysis
   (New York: Praeger, 1963), 68–69.
   
10. CMR 77.21, Moeung Doeur, and CMR 87.16, Ngin Ing.
    
11. CMR 158.26. Svang Kum was the wife of Chhe Samauk (alias Pang), a high-ranking CPK member and protégé of Pol Pot arrrested in 1978. By that point, Ho Chi Minh had been dead for nine years, and Lyndon Johnson had been out of office for a decade. See also CMR 33. 11, Heang Srun; CMR 58.19, Kot Prum; and CMR 88.44, Nhem Vann.
    
12. On 11 August 1978, the Tuy-Pon notebook suggested that interrogators should not inflict torture when they are angry, because if interrogators “forget themselves” the prisoners will produce “unclear answers”; CMR 99.7.
    
13. CMR 99.7. The translations that follow are drawn from pages 70–76.
    
14. I am reminded here of Gunther Lewy,
    America in Vietnam
    (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), quoting rules for U.S. participants in the Phoenix program in the Vietnam War, which aimed to “neutralize” the enemy’s infrastructure: “[Personnel] are specifically unauthorized to engage in assassinations” (283). The same sort of “control” applied to U.S. Marines’ behavior in Vietnam. See Solis,
    Son Thang,
    passim.
    
15. Chan notebook, entry for 10 February 1978. 66. CMR 99.10.
    

1. Bauman,
   Modernity and the Holocaust,
   21; Todorov,
   Facing the Extreme,
   158–78.
   
2. Kelman and Hamilton,
   Crimes of Obedience.
   See also Herbert C. Kel-man, “Violence without Moral Restraint,”
   Journal of Social Issues
   29 (1973): 29–61; Bauman,
   Modernity and the Holocaust,
   151–69; and Valentino, “Final Solutions.” Profiting from his reading of Milgram, Valentino argues that permission to kill, coming from people worthy of obedience, is the sine qua non of modern state-sponsored genocides.
   
3. Gordon A. Bennett and Ronald N. Montaperto,
   Red Guard: the Political Biography of Dai Hsiao-ai
   (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 28. See also Sutton, “(Dis)embodying Revolution,” in which a person who had committed ritualized cannibalism is recorded as saying, “Am I supposed to be afraid his ghost will get me? ha! ha! I am a revolutionary, my heart is red! Didn’t Chairman Mao teach us, ‘If we don’t kill them, they’ll kill us?’” (165 n.). “Redness” in these contexts may mean little more than loyalty to members of their group. The Marxism-Leninism of the workers at S-21 seems rarely to have extended beyond a facility with revolutionary jargon.
   
4. Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum,” 85.
   
5. Douglas Niven’s interview with Nhem En. Ten Chan had a similar mem-ory (interview with Peter Maguire and Chris Riley). See also Levi,
   The Drowned and the Saved,
   24, describing the choreographed arrival rituals at Auschwitz, and Mydans, “A Cambodian Woman’s Tale.”
   
6. Author’s interview with Kok Sros.
   
7. On the discovery of Choeung Ek in 1980, interviews by Sara Colm and Peter Maguire with Mai Lam. For vivid description of Choeung Ek as a tourist destination in the 1990s, see Kaplan,
   The Ends of the Earth,
   403–4.
   
8. See Mollica and Caspi-Yavin, “Assessing Torture.”
   
9. Améry,
   At the Mind’s Limits,
   27. Primo Levi, writing about Améry’s suicide eight years later and a year before his own, noted that the act permitted “a cloud of explanations” (
   The Drowned and the Saved,
   136). See also Paperno,
   Suicide as a Cultural Institution,
   and Cover, “Violence and the Word”: “The deliberate infl of pain in order to destroy the victim’s normative world and capacity to create shared realities we call torture. . . . The torturer and the victim end up creating their own terrible ‘world’ but this world derives its meaning from being imposed on the ashes of another. The logic of that world is complete destruction though the objective may not be realized” (98).
   

CHAPTER SIX. EXPLAINING S-21

1. In writing this chapter, I have benefi from conversations with Tom Cushman, Eleanor Hancock, and Eric Weitz. Benn, “Wickedness,” citing Schopenhauer, refers to “that delight in the suffering of others which does not spring from mere egoism but is disinterested and which constitutes wickedness proper, rising to the pitch of cruelty” (797). Some of Duch’s and Pon’s annotations and Tuy’s letter to Siet Chhe (alias Tum), accusing him of incest, fit neatly into this category. John Kekes speaks of “people habitually [causing] unde-served harm” (
   Facing Evil,
   7)—a choice of words that seems to fi Son Sen, Duch, and Pon as they worked proactively to obey the Party Center. See also Copjec, ed.,
   Radical Evil,
   and Dunn,
   Riffs and Reciprocities,
   22.
   
2. For stimulating discussions of these issues, see Gourevitch,
   We Wish to Inform You;
   A. Rosenbaum, ed.,
   Is the Holocaust Unique?;
   Horowitz,
   Taking Lives;
   Harff and Gurr, “Toward an Empirical Theory of Genocides and Politicides”; and Valentino, “Final Solutions.” See also Nagengast’s helpful essay, “Violence, Terror, and the Crisis of the State,” and John M. Darley’s two stimulating papers, “Social Organization for the Production of Evil” and “Constructive and Destructive Obedience: a Taxonomy of Principal-Agent Relations.” The chapter also benefits from discussions with students in my seminar on state-sponsored terror at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1998.
   
3. Corrèze and Forest,
   Cambodge à deux voix,
   72.
   
4. Cited in Tucker,
   Stalinism,
   212.
   
5. J. Spence, “In China’s Gulag.” The difficulty of writing about large emotional experiences, especially those experienced at fi hand, is taken up by Rosaldo in “Grief and the Headhunter’s Rage.”
   
6. Shklar,
   Ordinary Vices,
   44.
   
7. Shklar,
   Ordinary Vices,
   22. See also LaCapra,
   History and Memory,
   182 n.: “Empathy itself . . . raises knotty perplexities, for it is difficult to see how one may be empathetic without intrusively arrogating to oneself the victim’s experience or undergoing . . . surrogate victimage,” a sentence that seems to suggest that indifference or hostility are less problematic. For a subtle analysis
   

   of the problems that interviewers encounter with perpetrators and victims, see Robben, “The Politics of Truth and Emotion among Victims and Perpetrators of Violence.”
   

8. Suárez-Orozco, “A Grammar of Terror.” See also Suárez-Orozco, “Speaking of the Unspeakable”; Taussig,
   The Nervous System;
   and Robben and Nordstrom, “Introduction” to
   Fieldwork under Fire,
   which also speaks of the quotidian nature of violence.
   
9. Browning,
   Ordinary Men.
   See also Christopher Browning, “Ordinary Men or Ordinary Germans,” and Milgram,
   Obedience to Authority,
   10: “Tyrannies are perpetuated by diffident men.”
   
10. Douglas Niven’s interview with Kok Sros. Talking to Seth Mydans in 1999, the former S-21 guard Neang Kin said: “They trained us to follow the path of the revolution correctly. If you didn’t believe, they killed you.” Mydans, “A Cambodian Woman’s Tale.”
    
11. Sereny,
    Into That Darkness,
    200. See also Todorov,
    Facing the Extreme,
    

    158–78, a chapter titled “Fragmentation.”
    

12. Sereny,
    Into That Darkness,
    101. Stangl told her, “The only way I could live was by compartmentalizing my thinking” (64)—a process described by several former employees of S-21. See the insightful discussion of Sereny’s book in Todorov,
    Facing the Extreme,
    278–82.
    
13. See Joffe, “Goldhagen in Germany”: “Central to [Goldhagen’s] book . . . is the sense that trembling and terror are necessary to the perception of a morally comprehensible universe. This is the evil that was done; this is who did it; here is why they did it and how they felt.” A differently labeled Manichean model prevailed in DK at the official level. See the 1978 speech titled “The Need to Distinguish between Patriotism and Treason”: “Without a clear line between ourselves and other people, little by little the enemy’s ideology will seep into your minds and make you lose all sense of distinction between ourselves and the enemy. This is very dangerous.” Cited by Stubbings, “Rationality, Closure and the Monopoly of Power.”
    
14. Levi,
    The Drowned and the Saved,
    77, and Sofsky,
    The Order of Power,
    

    130–44, discuss the issue of “frontiers.” Browning, “Ordinary Men,” 67.
    

15. See Zimbardo, Haney et al., “The Psychology of Imprisonment”; Zimbardo, “The Mind is a Formidable Jailer”; and Haney et al., “Interpersonal Dynamics.” Sofsky,
    The Order of Terror,
    makes the point succinctly: “The guards flogged, tormented and killed prisoners—not because they had to, but because they were allowed to, no holds barred” (115). Whether the orders were “legal” or not, a point made in defining war crimes or crimes against humanity, seems not to have occurred to many perpetrators at S-21.
    
16. See Milgram,
    Obedience to Authority,
    which draws analogies between his experiments and the behavior of personnel in the Nazi death camps and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968. Milgram’s findings were both praised and criticized at the time, but most of them seem to have weathered well. See A. Miller,
    The Obedience Experiments,
    and A. Miller et al.,
    Perspectives on Obedience to Authority.
    
17. Hinton, “Why Did You Kill?” and
    Cambodia’s Shadow.
    Hinton argues that various cultural pressures worked on Cambodians to make them peculiarly
    

    prone to obedience (and, for that matter, to giving orders). As Sofsky suggests, “Servility and obedience leave total power untouched” (
    The Order of Terror,
    139). See also Tannenbaum,
    Who Can Compete against the World?
    a perceptive reassessment of the vexed concept of patronage in mainland Southeast Asia. Marston,
    Cambodia 1991–1994,
    especially chapter 4, deftly places the phenomenon of hierarchy in a contemporary Cambodian setting.
    

18. The verb
    sdap,
    often translated as “to listen” or “to hear,” has strong overtones of “to understand” and “to obey,” while the participle
    bomrao,
    usually translated as “serve,” is better translated by “commanded.” Hinton,
    Cambodia’s Shadow,
    passim; Hinton, “Why Did You Kill?” 99; and Chandler, “Normative Poems
    (
    C
    hbab
    ) and PreColonial Cambodian Society,” in
    Facing the Cambodian Past,
    45–60. As Milgram puts it: “Obedience arises out of the perceived inequalities of human relationships” (
    Obedience to Authority,
    207). Signifi , Son Sen, Duch, Chan, and Pon had all been trained as teachers and were accustomed less to listening or sharing than to giving orders, demanding compliance, setting agendas and, in a nutshell, being heard.
    
19. See Zimbardo, “The Psychology of Police Confessions.”
    
20. La Fontaine,
    The Complete Fables,
    22–23. La Fontaine used the fable to illustrate the adage “Le raison le plus fort est toujours le meilleur
    ”
    (the strongest argument is always best), which might have served as a motto for S-21. Ironically, the Party Center justified its treatment of its “enemies” in part as a defense against what it perceived as the wolf-like behavior of the Vietnamese toward the lamb-like, sinned-against Khmer.
    
21. See Chu, “The CounterRevolution”; Dispot,
    La machine à terreur;
    and Baker, ed.,
    The French Revolution.
    See also Griffin,
    The Chinese Communist Treatment of CounterRevolutionaries,
    quoting a Chinese revolutionary from the 1930s: “Law develops in accord with the needs of the revolution and whatever benefi the revolution is law” (141). One is reminded of Mao’s essay, “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?” in which he asserts that “correct” ideas, by and large, are the ones that succeed.
    
22. See the annexes to CMR 57.3, Ke Nanh (May 1978), which supply the names of soldiers in Division 280 in the Eastern Zone alleged to have Vietnamese blood, who were to be purged. Kiernan,
    The Pol Pot Regime,
    argues that racist policies rather than misreadings of socialist ideas were central to DK (26). His argument is weakened but not contradicted by the fact that the vast majority of people executed in the DK era were ethnic Khmer. Certain Buddhist ideas related to “unbelievers,” millenarian privileges that accrue to rebels, and echoes of monastic discipline (as these affected workers at the prison) may have well have played a part in reading prisoners out of the Cambodian “race.” See Southwold, “Buddhism and Evil,” Ponchaud, “Social Change in the Vortex of Revolution,” and Keyes, “Communist Revolution and the Buddhist Past,” 43–74. In the Indonesian massacres of 1965 and 1966, the supposed Communists who were killed in such large numbers were also seen as quintessential “others,” easily whited out.
    
23. Heder, “Racism, Marxism, Labelling,” 152.
    
24. Vickery,
    Cambodia 1975–1982,
    concluding chapter. See also Vickery, “Violence in Democratic Kampuchea,” and the essays by Anthony Barnett and
    

    Serge Thion in Chandler and Kiernan,
    Revolution and Its Aftermath,
    with Barnett arguing for a greater amount of centralized control (and more Marxism-Leninism) and Thion for less. Vickery’s overall argument rests on the assumption that genuine Marxist-Leninists would not have acted as savagely and ineptly as the Khmer Rouge did and on the notion that the voracious nationalism of the Khmer Rouge was at odds with the internationalist thrust of Marxism-Leninism. Neither issue is discussed in any detail in Kiernan,
    The Pol Pot Regime.
    See Ashley, “The Voice of the Khmer Rouge,” 27 ff., for a judicious summary of Vickery’s arguments. Ironically, the Khmer Rouge movement probably became most purely peasantist in the 1990s, when Ta Mok became its effective leader. Pol Pot’s July 1997 trial, seen from this perspective, was a ritual enactment of peasant rage. I would argue that peasant rage was an important ingredient of DK ideology but not the regime’s moving force. See also Hinton, “A Head for an Eye,” which stresses the importance of revenge in Cambodian culture.
    

25. Uncatalogued item from S-21 archive, 18 February 1976.
    
26. Bauman,
    Modernity and the Holocaust,
    152. Lifton,
    The Nazi Doctors,