Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (3 page)

A Cambodian survivor of S-21, Ung Pech, became the director of the museum when it opened in 1980. He held the position for several years and traveled with Mai Lam to France, the USSR, and Eastern Europe in

the early 1980s to visit museums and exhibits memorializing the Holocaust. Although Mai Lam remained in Cambodia until 1988, working at Tuol Sleng much of the time, he concealed his “specialist-consultant” role from outsiders, creating the impression that the initiatives for the museum and its design had come from the Cambodian victims rather than from the Vietnamese—an impression that he was eager to correct in his interviews in the 1990s.
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Over the next few months, people working at the prison constructed a rough history of the facility, drawing on entry and execution records, memoranda by prison officials, and the memories of survivors. Between April 1975 and the first week of 1979, they discovered, at least fourteen thousand men, women, and children had been held by S-21. Because the entry records for several months of 1978 were incomplete, the true number of prisoners was undoubtedly higher. Of the documented prisoners, all but a dozen specially exempted ones, including Ung Pech, had been put to death. Since 1979, seven of these survivors have come forward. Their memories, corroborated by those of former workers at the prison, have been invaluable for this study.
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The records from S-21 also showed that most of the lower-ranking prisoners had been held for a few days or weeks, whereas more important ones, and lesser figures suspected of grave offenses, had been incarcerated for several months. Thousands of the prisoners, regardless of their importance, had undergone interrogation, prepared “answers” (
chomlaoy)
or confessions admitting counterrevolutionary crimes, and submitted lists of their associates, titled “strings” or “networks of traitors” (
khsae kbot),
that sometimes ran to several hundred names. The texts range from a single page to several hundred pages. Roughly 4,300 of them have so far come to light, including those of nearly all the important DK figures known to have been purged.
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Confession texts, survivors’ memories, and the grisly instruments discovered at the site made it clear that torture was widely inflicted at S-21. Tortured or threatened with torture, few prisoners maintained their innocence for long. Considered guilty from the moment they arrived—the traditional Cambodian phrase for prisoner,
neak thos,
translates literally as “guilty person”—thousands of these men and women were expected to confess their guilt in writing before they were taken off to be killed. This bizarre procedure drew some of its inspiration from the notion of revolutionary justice enshrined in the Reign of Terror in eighteenth-century France and enacted in the Moscow show trials in the 1930s and also from the land reform and “reeducation”

campaigns in China in the 1940s and in Vietnam a decade later. In spite or perhaps because of these manifold influences, no precise or overriding foreign model for S-21 can be identified. Moreover, the severity of practices at S-21 and the literalness with which interrogators went about their business also reflected prerevolutionary Cambodian punitive traditions, by which prisoners were never considered innocent and crimes of lèse-majesté were mercilessly punished.

Although DK’s economic and social policies do not fit into a fascist framework, the resemblances between S-21 and Nazi death camps are striking. Works discussing the Holocaust provide insights into the psychology of torturers, administrators, and victims at the prison, as do more recent works that deal with torturers in the “dirty war” in Argentina in the 1970s and early 1980s. The list of materials that I have found useful for comparative purposes could easily be extended.
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The most striking difference between the German and Cambodian cases lies in the extent of the documentation produced at S-21. Prisoners both under the Nazis and in DK were removed from any semblance of legal protection; but whereas those in the Nazi death camps were simply exploited for physical labor while awaiting execution, those in S-21 were treated almost as if they were subject to a judicial system and their confessions were to provide evidence for a court of law. In this respect they resemble the alleged counterrevolutionaries who went on “trial” in the Soviet Union in large numbers in the 1930s. In Nazi Germany, political prisoners were kept in separate camps from those targeted for execution and were somewhat better treated. At S-21, all were charged with political offenses, and all were to be killed.

Like the Nazi extermination camps and the Argentine torture facilities, S-21 was a secret facility, and the need for secrecy influenced much of what happened inside its walls. The prison’s existence was known only to those who worked or were imprisoned there and to a handful of high-ranking cadres, known as the Party Center, who reviewed the documents emerging from S-21 and selected the individuals and the military and other units to be purged. Interrogators, clerks, photographers, guards, and cooks at the prison were forbidden to mingle with workers elsewhere, and the compound soon earned an eerie reputation. A factory worker in a nearby compound, interviewed in 1989, referred to S-21 as “the place where people went in but never came out.”
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The factory workers were uncertain about what went on inside its walls but were ready to think the worst. Party leaders never referred to S-21 by name. In 1997, when questioned by the journalist Nate Thayer, Pol Pot

denied any knowledge of “Tuol Sleng,” hinting that the museum and its archive were Vietnamese concoctions. “I was at the top,” he said:

I made only big decisions on big issues. I want to tell you—Tuol Sleng was a Vietnamese exhibition. A journalist wrote that. People talk about Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng. . . . When I first heard about Tuol Sleng it was on the Voice of America. I listened twice.
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Guided tours of S-21 were fi organized in March 1979, but for over a year, as the museum took shape, only foreigners were admitted because, as a PRK Ministry of Culture, Information, and Propaganda document from 1980 asserted, the site was intended primarily “to show . . . international guests the cruel torture committed by the traitors to the Khmer people.” In the meantime, Mai Lam and his associates were slowly transforming the site into a museum. In July 1980 the ban on Cambodian visitors was lifted, and tens of thousands visited S-21, many of them seeking information about relatives who had disappeared. They consulted hundreds of enlarged mug shots of prisoners on view on the ground floor of the prison, which formed a major com-ponent of the museum display. As Judy Ledgerwood has written, many of the visitors were also “searching for meaning, for some explanation of what had happened. A visit would not have been an easy task; people who went through the museum in the first year said that the stench of the place was overwhelming.”
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Some thirty-two thousand people visited the museum in the first week it was open to the public. By October 1980, over three hundred thousand Cambodians and eleven thousand foreigners had passed through the facility.
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Mai Lam always had high ambitions for S-21. He wanted to establish a museum and organize an archive that would be useful to the Cambodian people and would prevent them from forgetting what had happened under “the contemptible Pot”
(a-Pot).
One of his more melo-dramatic exhibits was a large map of Cambodia, composed of skulls with the rivers shown in blood red. In the early 1980s, after S-21’s killing field at Choeung Ek, west of the capital, had been excavated under his direction, he supervised the exhumation of thousands of bodies and ordered the construction of memorial stupa at the site, fronted with glass and filled with skulls. Talking to Sara Colm in 1995, Mai Lam said:

For seven years I studied . . . to build up the Museum . . . for the Cambodian people to help them study the war and the many aspects of war crimes. . . . For the regular people who cannot understand, the museum can help them.

Even though they suffered from the regime, as a researcher I want them to go [to the museum]. Even though it makes them cry. . . . The Cambodian people who suffered the war could not understand the war—and the new generation also cannot understand.
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For many Cambodians, as Ledgerwood points out, there are problems of “authenticity” in a museum established by foreigners to press home fortuitous parallels between the “genocidal regime” of DK and Hitler’s Germany. At the same time, for the survivors the vast and seemingly random cruelties of the DK regime easily became encapsulated in the museum’s displays. Nazism seemed as good a label as any other for the horrors that the survivors of the regime had undergone. The indifference of DK officials to their victims, exhibited in room after room, recurs in the memories of many survivors. Cambodians’ interpretations of the Pol Pot era slip easily into Manichean frameworks that make poor history but are emotionally satisfying and consistent with much of what they remember. This point has been driven home by the French psychiatrists Jean-Pierre Hiegel and Colette Landrac, who worked in Khmer Rouge refugee camps in Thailand in the 1980s:

It is always more comfortable to have a Manichean vision of the world, for that allows us not to ask too many questions or at least to have the answer readily at hand. In this fashion, representing the Khmer Rouge as an homoge-nous group of indoctrinated fanatics, the incarnation of absolute evil, responsible for all the unhappiness of the Khmer people, is a reductive vision of a complex phenomenon but one which a good many people find satisfying.
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Within just such a Manichean framework, the PRK regime worked hard to focus people’s anger onto the “genocidal clique” that had governed Cambodia between April 1975 and January 1979. While the new government based its legitimacy on the fact that it had come to power by toppling the Khmer Rouge, it was in no position to condemn the entire movement, since so many prominent PRK fi had been Khmer Rouge themselves until they defected to Vietnam in 1977 and 1978. The continuing existence of DK’s leaders and their armed followers on the Thai-Cambodian border, however, gave the Vietnamese a rationale for keeping their troops in the country and allowed the PRK to label its political opponents as Khmer Rouge.

Like their predecessors in other Cambodian regimes, PRK spokes-men arranged history to suit their day-to-day requirements. In their formulations, the Cambodian Communist movement had been an authentic revolutionary one, up to and including the liberation of Phnom Penh

in 1975, when the movement had suddenly and inexplicably spun out of control. This contorted narrative enabled the PRK to celebrate the socialist “triumph” of 17 April 1975 while condemning the people who brought it about. PRK historiography also stressed a longstanding official friendship between Khmer and Vietnamese movements and regimes that was hard to locate in the historical record.
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These tangled readings of the past made sense to Party faithful. After all, only an authentic revolutionary movement could have defeated the United States; and, once the wheel of history had turned, no such movement could have been so cruel to ordinary people or could have opposed the genuinely revolutionary Vietnamese. These ex post facto explanations, however, were of little interest to most nonrevolutionary Khmer. They found it easier to focus their memories on “the contemptible Pot,” whose bizarre, unpardonable crime was not that he had been a Communist (or a “fascist”) but that he had presided over the deaths of so many of his own people. If the Vietnamese wanted to call Pol Pot a fascist, people would go along with it, without knowing much about the subject. Thus, talking with Lionel Vairon in 1995, the S-21 survivor Pha Thachan, by then a general in the Cambodian army, stated:

Yes, what happened under Pol Pot was “Communism,” but it was of a “fascist” kind, and it surpassed fascism. In fascism the Germans never killed their own people, they only killed foreigners. They killed French and Poles and so on. Pol Pot on the other hand killed his own people, three million of them. The fascists never did this.
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In annual “days of hate,” the government mobilized public opinion and refreshed people’s memories of the DK period. On these occasions, anti–Pol Pot demonstrations were organized for school children, PRK officials made speeches condemning the DK, and Vann Nath and other survivors of S-21 were called on to recite their experiences at the prison.
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By the mid-1980s visitors to the archive, relocated to the second floor of one of the western buildings at Tuol Sleng, were impressed by the mass of documentation collected there. Many of the dossiers were over a foot thick. Hundreds were typed and duplicated. Glass-fronted cabinets in the archive were stuffed with cadre notebooks recording political meetings, military seminars, and sessions of paramedical training. Stapled “summaries” of confessions, stacked in piles, sometimes ran to hundreds of pages. Journalists and scholars were encouraged to photo—