Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (8 page)

Several medical study notebooks were recovered at S-21, but the teachers, students, and locations of the medical lessons are unknown. A pocket-sized notebook discovered near the prison suggests that bizarre experiments were sometimes carried out by prison personnel. These included bleeding prisoners to death and seeing how long dead bodies took to rise to the surface of a tank of water. Elsewhere in the country, fatal surgery was sometimes carried out on anaesthetized prisoners to teach anatomy to medical cadres. It is possible that experiments of this kind were also conducted on prisoners at S-21 and hardly surprising if the records have not survived.
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Profile of Prison Personnel

What kinds of people worked in the units at the prison? Duch, Chan, and Pon were Sino-Cambodians in their thirties who had worked as schoolteachers; the senior interrogators Pu and Tuy probably came from similar backgrounds. Most of their subordinates at S-21 were young ethnic Khmer from rural areas. Before joining the revolution in the civil war they had been students in primary school, apprentice monks, or helpers on their parents’ farms. Hardly any had lived in cities or worked for pay.

Of some 166 S-21 employees who completed biographical statements in 1976 when they came to work at the prison, 44 classifi themselves as “poor peasants,” 99 as “lower middle peasants,” 16 as “middle peasants,” 1 as a “worker,” and 6 as “petty bourgeois.” Five of the latter had been students when they joined the revolutionary ranks; the sixth had been a teacher. Allowing for a male gender bias in the sample, the profile of workers at S-21 replicated the class structure of prerevolutionary rural Khmer society, in which the vast majority of rural families owned land, and would have been categorized as “mid-dle” peasants.
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The Khmer Rouge, like its counterpart in Mao’s China, made virtues of inexperience and ignorance, preferring young people who were, in Mao’s phrase, “poor and blank” to those corrupted by capitalism or extensive schooling. In praising the “poor and blank” Mao asserted that “a sheet of blank paper carries no burden, and the most beautiful characters can be written on it, the most beautiful pictures painted.” In Cambodia, the “upper brothers” were in charge of such inscriptions, and the “brothers” who ran the prison, accustomed to commanding respect—a respect derived in several cases from their own extensive

schooling—enjoyed inscribing their ideas on others. They chose their subordinates from the least-trained members of society and demanded their respect.
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Duch, Chan, Ho, and Pon were indeed “older brothers” to most of their subordinates. Only twenty-five of those completing the S-21 personnel forms in 1976 were over twenty-fi years old; twenty were under eighteen. One hundred eight were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Kok Sros, who was twenty-five when he came to S-21, has said that guards recruited after mid-1977 were markedly younger than those assigned to the prison earlier.

Nearly all of the lower-ranking workers at the prison were young, unmarried men. Throughout world history, young men have been easily uprooted or have uprooted themselves to pursue new lives among oth-ers of their own age. Stints of travel, military service, religious life, banditry, pilgrimage, wage labor, and university study have often served to mark the transition between childhood and maturity. In the Cambodian revolution thousands of young women were also “liberated” to take up duties as soldiers, cadres, and district leaders—positions unthinkable for Khmer women in prerevolutionary times. Many young Cambodians fighting on both sides had found the war exciting, and while several soldiers confined to S-21 had deserted the ranks because they “missed their mothers and fathers,” one prisoner in his confession claimed to have joined the revolution because he was angry with his parents. Many survivors of the DK era, now in their mid-thirties, enjoyed the freedom of moving around the country as teenagers, much as the young Red Guards in Maoist China had done.
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Many of the S-21 workers had “joined the revolution”
(choul padevat)
when they were very young. Nhem En was only ten. Six years later, when he came to S-21, others his age were working there. Photographs of these self-satisfied, smiling teenagers, many wearing oversized Mao-style caps, adorn the walls of the Museum of Genocidal Crimes. For many of them, the “Organization” had replaced their mothers and fathers. Responding to its desires, fi through the commands of their “older brothers,” they were often capable of extreme cruelty.
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Adolescents have earned a reputation in many countries for their malleability, idealism, their hunger for approval, and their aptitude for violence. Talking to Philip Gourevitch in 1996, the psychiatrist Richard Mollica discussed the Hutu warriors in Rwanda, whose age and background resembled those of the workforce at S-21. “In my opinion,” he said, “the psychology of young people is not that complicated, and

most of the people who commit most of the atrocities in these situa-tions are young males. Young males are really the most dangerous people on the planet, because they easily respond to authority and they want approval. They are given the rewards for getting into the hierarchical system, and they’re given to believe they’re building heaven on earth. . . . Young people are very idealistic and the powers prey on them.”
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Problems arose at the prison with young people precisely because they were “poor and blank.” Their exposure to revolutionary discipline, to say nothing of Marxist-Leninist ideas, had been hortatory, brief, and haphazard. What they had learned in study sessions was no guarantee of good work habits. Their raw energy, so attractive in its revolutionary potential, was difficult for older people to harness. In the short time they were at DK’s disposal, many of these boys and girls were impossible to educate. As a Party spokesman noted ruefully at a cabinet meeting in May 1975:

Speaking of young, untrained people, they are honest, dedicated, and vigorous. These are their strong points. As for shortcomings, our young brothers and sisters play around too much; their culture is weak and they are illiterate and innumerate to the extent that the places where they work encounter difficulties.
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After the regime collapsed, Ieng Sary explained the disastrous history of DK to the American journalist Henry Kamm. “We did not choose our public servants well,” he said disingenuously. “We lost some control.” He neglected to say that DK “chose” its “public servants” from among the least qualifi people in the country after all the incumbents had been dismissed and thousands of them had been summarily put to death.
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Very few of the workers at S-21 had been “revolutionaries” for long. Only twenty-nine of those completing personnel forms in 1976 had “entered the revolution” before 1973, when Vietnamese forces withdrew from Cambodia and a massive U.S. bombing campaign forestalled Khmer Rouge attacks on Phnom Penh. Fifty-eight of the workers joined in that year, forty-three in 1974, and forty-two in the first few months of 1975. The remaining five had “joined the revolution” after the capture of Phnom Penh. The only training that any of them received for working at S-21 was a two-week session of studying “politics”
(nayobay)
at a “technical school” run at Ta Khmau in Sector 25 by “Brother [Kim] Tuy,” who later became an interrogator and administrator at S-21.

For many, the school may have been their first encounter with a total institution. If study sessions from the DK era serve as any guide, those that Kim Tuy conducted would have involved listening to hortatory lectures, memorizing slogans, and preparing brief, self-critical autobiographies. Students would have marched from place to place singing revolutionary songs. They would have been allowed very little sleep. Like newly enrolled members of a religious movement, they were expected to emerge from the school with an intensified focus and a shared sense of exaltation.
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The cohort of workers at the prison appears geographically cohe-sive. Of those who completed biographical statements, one hundred one of the men and thirty-two of the women had been born and raised in the region designated as Sector 25, north of Phnom Penh, while twenty-nine came from Sector 31, three from Sector 32, thirteen from Sector 33—all northwest of the capital—and one from Sector 41, to the north. They were drawn from military units that were relocated to the capital in 1975.

Sector 25 was a thickly settled, relatively prosperous area housing thousands of Chinese and Sino-Khmer market gardeners and town dwellers as well as a majority of ethnic Khmer rice farmers. In the 1960s the region had been represented in the National Assembly by Khieu Samphan, who was popular in the electorate and encouraged followers to join the clandestine Communist Party. “Everyone in the region loved Khieu Samphan,” Him Huy has recalled. Four years after his flight to the maquis in 1967, when many had thought him dead, Samphan became a key member of the Party Center. Until his defection to the Phnom Penh government in 1998, he was a formidable, malevolent survivor.
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In summary, making an exception for the “older brothers,” most of whom sprang from Cambodia’s minuscule intelligentsia, S-21 workers were of similar age, class, experience, and geographic origins. They also resembled the majority of the people incarcerated in the prison.

Prisoners at S-21

The number of prisoners at S-21 varied, reflecting the waxing and wan-ing of the purges that swept through DK from mid-1976 onward. These are discussed in detail in chapter 3. The prison’s maximum capacity, reached in 1977, was around 1,500 prisoners. On 20 April of that year, the prison held 1,242 prisoners, of whom 105 were female. It was probably in this period that Nhem En saw truckloads of prisoners arrive at S-21 and be taken off almost immediately to be killed, without being photographed or interrogated, presumably because they were considered unimportant and there was no space in the prison.
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At other times, S-21 held only a few hundred people. In 1975, fewer than 200 people were held by
santebal.
The number rose to 1,622 in 1976, with more than three-quarters of these arrested between May, when serious purges began and the Tuol Sleng facility was brought into operation, and the end of the year. In 1977, when many DK government offices and all geographic zones were purged, at least 6,300 people entered the prison. On some days, more than 300 prisoners were brought to the prison; on others, none came in.
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From mid-February to mid-April 1977 alone, 1,249 men and women were brought in dur-ing purges of the Northern and Northwestern Zones.

In 1978 prisoners’ photographs included placards giving their names and numbers in a monthly admission sequence. Entry records, although incomplete, suggest that at least 4,352 prisoners came to S-21 in 1978. Only 59 prisoners are listed in the scattered records for May, although the mug shot numbers for that month go up to 791. Although there are many lacunae in the photo archive for 1978, the highest number for all the months except May and August (for which no photographs survive) corresponds roughly with the entry records. I have added 732 to the recorded May entries, to arrive at a total estimate of 5,084 prisoners in 1978.

The high intake from April through June reflected the purges in the eastern part of Cambodia. By the end of the year, the prison population had dropped dramatically. In December 1978, as a note from Huy to Duch suggests, there were 279 prisoners in the “big prison” (presumably the main, western buildings), as well as 45 “Vietnamese,” undoubtedly prisoners of war, and 33 other prisoners in the “special prison.” There were also 14 prisoners “working” at that time. These would have included the 7 men known to have survived incarceration at S-21. Although the totals listed here come to only 13,206, given the lacunae in the data it seems prudent to estimate the prison population between 1975 and 1979 as approximately 14,000.
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The vast majority of prisoners at S-21 were young, ethnic Khmer males from rural backgrounds. They were socially and ethnically indistinguishable from the people who held them captive. With some exceptions, people labeled “class enemies” or “new people” and those suspected of minor crimes were generally held in provincial prisons.
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Only

238 of the prisoners whose confessions survive, or 6.4 percent, were women. This disparity can be explained by the fact that far fewer women than men served in the military units so heavily targeted by
santebal,
and very few held positions of responsibility in DK and so could be accused of serious counterrevolutionary crimes. The number of women in the prison population, however, was undoubtedly higher than the number of women’s confessions would suggest. We know that dozens of higher-ranking prisoners’ wives and even some of their mothers were incarcerated at S-21 and put to death, often without undergoing interrogation. Those female prisoners who wrote confessions, on the other hand, included several holding high rank, such as district chiefs, factory and hospital administrators, and military cadres, as well as representatives of more traditional female callings such as nurses and cooks.
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