Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (5 page)

The existence of S-21, the location of the Party Center, and the identity of those inside it were closely guarded secrets. Talking to the Danes, Nuon Chea insisted that “it is secret work that is fundamental. We no longer use the terms ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’; we use the terms ‘secret’ and ‘open.’ Secret work is fundamental to all we do.... Only through secrecy can we be masters of the situation and win victory over the enemy who cannot fi out who is who.”
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Secrecy was always fundamental at S-21. In mid-1976, when a prisoner managed to escape from S-21, a study document prepared at the prison viewed the incident with alarm:

Secrecy was broken. The secrecy we had maintained for the last 3–4 months has been pierced. When there’s no secrecy, there can be no
santebal,
the term has lost its meaning. . . . If they were to escape they would talk about their confessions. The secrecy of
santebal
would be broken at exactly the point where it must not be broken.
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Secrecy was maintained at S-21 by keeping outsiders away from the compound, clearing the neighborhood, limiting the distribution of the documents produced, burning papers instead of throwing them away, blindfolding prisoners when they were moved from place to place, and forbidding contact between the interrogation and document groups in the prison on the one hand and less privileged employees on the other. Guards were forbidden to talk to prisoners, and prisoners were forbidden to talk to one another. High-ranking prisoners were held and interrogated in buildings separate from the main complex. Finally, nearly all interrogations took place in buildings to the east of the compound, supposedly out of earshot of prisoners and personnel. An S-21 document from September 1976, setting up day and night guard rosters, noted that guards were not allowed to follow interrogators into interrogation rooms or to “open windows to look at enemies” being questioned.

Most brutally, secrecy about S-21 was maintained by killing nearly all the prisoners.
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S-21’s existence was known only to those who worked or were con-fi there, to a handful of high-ranking Party fi and to cadres charged with
santebal
duties in the zones and sectors. When briefi their subordinates, Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Son Sen, and Ta Mok—by 1978, Brothers One through Four—occasionally named important “enemies” who we know had already been interrogated at S-21 and had confessed to counterrevolutionary crimes. None of these statements, however, ever referred to S-21 or
santebal
by name.

No documentary evidence survives to tell us when, why, by whom, and under what guidelines
santebal
was formally established. Predecessor units existed in the Khmer Rouge army during the Cambodian civil war (1970–1975); S-21’s immediate forebear, it seems, had operated in Sector 25 north of the capital from 1973 to 1975. The two men most intimately concerned with such operations at that time were Son Sen (1930–1997, alias Brother 89 and Khieu), a ranking military commander, and his subordinate, a former schoolteacher named Kang Keck Ieu (c.1942–, alias Duch), charged with security matters. Under DK, Son Sen was the deputy prime minister, responsible for defense and national security.
Santebal
was one of his responsibilities. Duch, who reported to him, was the commandant of S-21 itself.

Workers at S-21

S-21 had three main units: interrogation, documentation, and defense. A photography subunit operated within the documentation unit. Subunits operating within the defense unit, the largest at S-21, included one that guarded the prisoners, another that brought prisoners in and took them to be executed, a third that provided rudimentary medical services, and a fourth that was responsible for economic support.

A helpful guide to the higher-ranking personnel at S-21 is an internal telephone directory containing forty-six names. It must have been prepared before November 1978, when one of the interrogators listed in it, Chea Mai, was arrested.
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The directory lists twenty-four names in a “hot”
(kdau)
section of the interrogation unit, fourteen in “documents,” five in a “separate” (administrative) category, and six others, probably also interrogators, in an unlabeled group.

The titles that preceded names in the telephone directory paralleled the three-tiered ranking system that operated within the CPK, whereby Party

members progressed from belonging to the Communist Youth League
(yuv’kok)
through candidate membership
(triem)
to “full-rights” membership
(penh set).
The names in the directory proceed in seniority from eight people listed by their full names, with no ranking prefi through ten whose revolutionary pseudonyms are prefi with the word
mit
(friend or comrade), to nine whose pseudonyms appear with the prefix
bong
(older brother). The last category was reserved for people with the greatest authority. An even more respectful classifi
ta
(grandfather), was used for Duch in a few documents, even though he was only in his thirties. Freed from the “exploiting classes” of the past, CPK members and workers at the prison followed deferential rules that were as complex, hierarchical, and baffling as those they might have encountered on their fi day of school or as Buddhist novice monks. The analogies are appropriate because Duch and his colleagues in the interrogation unit had been schoolteachers for many years, and nearly all the workers at the prison were males in their late teens and early twenties, just the age when many of them, in prerevolutionary times, would have spent some time as monks. Moreover, those in charge of the prison, like Buddhist monks, were accustomed as teachers to unquestioning respect. The discipline of S-21 was based on the memorization of rules; it induced rev—

erence for authority and unquestioning obedience.

The hierarchy of the names in the telephone directory suggests that Duch and his close associates were unwilling or unable to forsake the rankings and the deference that had marked prerevolutionary Khmer society and that the revolution had promised to overturn. Those beneath them might also have been reluctant to see the ranks abolished. The former guard Kok Sros, for example, recalled that on one occasion, “Duch told me I had done a good job, and I felt that he liked me. I was pretty sure from then on that I was going to survive, because I had been admired from above.”
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With the constraints of hierarchy in mind, we can examine the lives and characters of Son Sen and Duch before turning to the people in charge of the various units at the prison.

Son Sen

In 1975 Son Sen was a slender, bespectacled man in his mid-forties. Like DK’s foreign minister, Ieng Sary, he had been born into the Cambodian community in southern Vietnam, where his parents were prosperous landowners. After moving to Phnom Penh as a boy, Son Sen

soon attracted attention for his academic talent. He received a scholarship for study in France in 1950, shortly after Saloth Sar (later known as Pol Pot) had been awarded one. As a student of philosophy and history in Paris, Son Sen joined the French Communist Party alongside Saloth Sar, Ieng Sary, and several other Khmer. Returning home in 1956, he embarked on a teaching career and became part of the clandestine Cambodian Communist movement. In the early 1960s he was the director of studies of the Pedagogical Institute attached to the University of Phnom Penh. He was dismissed from his post in 1962 for his anti-Sihanouk views but was allowed to continue teaching.

In 1963, after Saloth Sar had been named secretary of a reconstituted Communist Party, Son Sen joined him on the newly formed, concealed central committee. In 1964 he was spirited out of the capital in the trunk of a Chinese diplomatic vehicle and joined Saloth Sar and a handful of others in a Vietnamese Communist military base known as “Office 100,” which moved back and forth across the Cambodian-Vietnamese border in response to battle conditions in Vietnam.
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Son Sen did not return to Phnom Penh until April 1975. During his twelve years in the maquis he bonded with the men and women who would later make up the Party Center, several of whom he had known in France. When armed struggle against Sihanouk broke out in 1968, Son Sen became a fi commander. He soon revealed a talent for battlefield operations. By early 1972, he was chief of the general staff. His colleagues in the Party sometimes found him peremptory and his point of view “bourgeois,”
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but by August 1975 he was given responsibility for Cambodia’s security and defense.

His new responsibilities included
santebal.
Son Sen monitored its operations closely. He read and annotated many confessions from the prison and ran study sessions for S-21 cadres in which he discussed its goals, the interrogations, and the use of torture. Three sets of notes by S-21 officials from these sessions have survived. They suggest that Son Sen’s interest in history, cultivated in France, persisted into the DK era. Like many Cambodians born in Vietnam, Son Sen also seemed to find it easy (or prudent) to be stridently anti-Vietnamese.
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Many documents routed from S-21 to the Party Center passed through Son Sen’s hands, and dozens of memoranda addressed to him by Duch have survived. So have many of his replies. These display a schoolmasterish attention to detail and unflinching revolutionary zeal. Son Sen’s wife, Yun Yat (alias At), also a former teacher, worked closely with him and had access to some of the confessions.

In 1975 and 1976, Son Sen worked hard to mold the regionally based units that had won the civil war into a national army. In 1977 and 1978, he took charge of the fighting with Vietnam and supervised the purges of “disloyal” cadres in the Eastern Zone. In the closing months of the regime, when the war went badly, he came under suspicion himself. Had the Vietnamese invasion been delayed, he might have been cut down by the “upper brothers” and by his own remorseless institution.
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However, Son Sen retained his balance and in 1979 resumed command of the Khmer Rouge military forces after their defeat. In the aftermath of the Paris Peace Accords in 1991 he emerged as the “public face” of the Khmer Rouge, but he faded from view when his superiors decided to stonewall the United Nations–sponsored national elections. He never regained his former status. In a brutal case of poetic justice Son Sen, his wife, Yun Yat, and a dozen of their dependents were murdered on Pol Pot’s orders in northern Cambodia in June 1997, accused of being “spies” for the Phnom Penh regime.
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Duch

Kang Keck Ieu (alias Duch), the commandant of S-21 throughout its operation, was born around 1942 into a poor Sino-Cambodian family in Kompong Chen (Kompong Thom). Like Son Sen, he attracted attention as a boy for his intellectual abilities. His mother, interviewed in 1980, said that her son’s head was “always in a book.” Aided by a local entrepreneur he earned a scholarship to the Lycée Sisowath. Specializ-ing in mathematics, he ranked second in the national
baccalauréat
examinations in 1959. In those days, a classmate has recalled, he was a studious young man with no hobbies or political interests.
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For the next few years, he taught mathematics at the
lycée
in Kompong Thom. One of his former students later recalled that “he was known for the precision of his lectures as if he were copying texts from his mind onto the board.” One of his colleagues at the school, who taught biology, was an exceptionally tall, almost albino Cambodian named Mam Nay (alias Chan). Years later, when both men were members of the CPK, Duch invited him to head the interrogation unit at the prison. Duch and Chan emerge from the record as strict, fastidious, totally dedicated teachers—characteristics that they carried with them, to altered purposes, when they worked together at the prison.
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In 1964, Duch was rewarded with a posting to the Pedagogical Institute. Son Sen had already left. According to Duch’s Lycée Sisowath

classmate, Nek Bun An, the young mathematician was drawn toward Communism by a group of Chinese exchange students enrolled to study Khmer at the University of Phnom Penh. Duch was inspired and politi-cized by these sharply focused, idealistic young men and women, all of whom were to play important roles in Sino-Cambodian relations dur-ing the DK era and beyond.
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