When the War Was Over (55 page)

The balance had shifted. The party began to suspect old people and party members of plotting against the revolution. The purge of the new people was ending, the purge of the old people and party faithful just beginning. This first massacre in Komphot's cooperative marked the change with gruesome fidelity. Thereafter, Komphot had less and less reason to fear for his life. Party members like Phat, the young communist recruit, were now in trouble.

During the war Phat had risen to become second in command of Sector 103 in northerly Preah Uihear province. He had married while he was still in the east. So Phim, the zone's secretary, had officiated at the ceremony. Phat was one of the bright young warriors of the army. He left his wife and children behind and went off to Sector 103, where he served well. He had become an executioner, he admitted, in the heat of the war. All of the Khmer communists who returned from Hanoi after 1970 and found themselves in his sector were murdered, or as he put it, “all the contemptible ones from Hanoi disappeared by 1974.”

There were a few blotches on Phat's record. At the beginning of 1974 the Khmer Rouge had mounted a full-scale attack on Phnom Penh and a large number of Northern Zone soldiers had been sent down to help in the siege. A flank was exposed in Kompong Thom province, and Khmer Republic soldiers took advantage of the weakness and broke through. They freed nearly 30,000 civilians living in the zone. Those people then told the first stories to the world press about life in the Khmer Rouge zones, and the stories were not pleasant. Phat's sector had been partially responsible for the breach. He
lost some fifty Khmer Rouge soldiers in the battle to close the gap; forty-three of them were captured alive. A superior warned Phat at the time: “An error like this cannot be resolved by a life-view struggle session.”

In other words, this could not be considered a mistake that could be corrected with a lecture and an admission of failure. But Phat was not the superior in charge of the sector and he was not held directly responsible for what was the greatest breach in Khmer Rouge defenses during the war. The onus fell on his superior—Comrade Man. Man died, “mysteriously,” a few months later on April 21, 1974, in what sounds very much like a Centerordered execution. Phat was promoted to take his place and became secretary of the sector, a position he retained even after the reorganization of the zones and the purge of Koy Thuon.

Koy Thuon's purge, nonetheless, sparked fear in Phat. As Komphot remembered correctly, the Center accused Koy Thuon of being a secret agent for the American Central Intelligence Agency and made him confess to an elaborate plot, alleging that he had joined the CIA in 1958 and infiltrated the communist party in 1060. True, Koy Thuon was the most “bourgeois” of the zone leaders, hence the most likely to be chosen as a “traitor.” On the other hand, if Koy Thuon, who had been trusted with guarding the central committee during the war, could be murdered, who was safe?

Shortly after Nuon Chea opened the party school in Phnom Penh in 1976, Phat was sent for studies on orders of the party. The day before classes began he had a strange encounter with the deputy director of the school, Comrade Pang, a man considered extremely close to Pol Pot. “Comrade Pang met me and asked me how my family and I were getting along and he told me: ‘A lot of traitors have implicated you.' I asked him back, ‘Who in the world implicated me?' He said, ‘How could you expect me to tell you the names?' Then he continued, saying, ‘How could you expect for them not to implicate you given the fact that you were living with them?' I said that there was nothing to be afraid of as long as one did not betray.”

The network system had been instituted by the party and used by the security police exactly to “implicate” people like Phat. Phat may have known he had been nothing but loyal to the Communist Party of Kampuchea, but he failed to understand that his loyalty was irrelevant. The Northern Zone was being purged. As Pang had said, Phat had lived with people condemned as traitors. Moreover, class warfare was under way. Phat began to worry whether he would be blamed for the behavior of his siblings. He was especially worried about his brother, Tith, who had cared for him when he first moved to Phnom Penh and who had been an officer in Sihanouk's army. “I
thought that in terms of class composition I had an older brother who was an officer for the enemy.”

The rest of his family had stayed on the family farm; they were not a threat to his class standing. But another woman was—a young woman he had met in Ratanakiri province when he was stationed there with Pol Pot and the central committee. He had a brief affair with her and was worried now, with the puritanical, Spartan morals campaign, that he would be discovered to have had “negative moral qualities with a young woman.”

Phat finished his coursework and returned north. Nuon Chea traveled there to convene the inaugural assembly for the new Northern Zone. Phat, already nervous, was becoming paranoid. Chea, known as Brother Number Two in party parlance, made a speech that included a warning Phat felt directed at him. “When Brother Number Two mentioned the affair of the missing tens of thousands of meters of recording tape, I was frightened that he was mad at me.”

Apparently recording tape had been mislaid at the zone offices, and at this stage of the revolution this was considered an error, not a mistake. Someone may have stolen it, although recording tape was not sought after like cloth and rice. Party people, and the old people, were beginning to be held to the same “standards” that they had applied to new people and suspected traitors. From their earliest days, Khmer Rouge had taught that “accidents” might be errors that exposed traitorous intention. Phat was quite right to fear reprisal. He had punished others for lesser offenses. He could not have helped but notice how the Center was reducing the revolution to questions about breaking a plow's steel tip, whether a cooperative reached its rice quota, and why recording tape was missing.

Missing tape could be translated to lack of control over an office or a sector, to disobedience to the Center, to sabotage against the economy and the revolution. It is a short jump to betrayal. Increasingly important party people were being hauled into Tuol Sleng. Phat's name had to have been mentioned by a number of the purged cadre from the north. He remembered Pang's warning the year before that traitors had implicated him. By the end of 1977, Phat's time came. The Center was about to launch its bloodiest purge—against the Eastern Zone. Phat was connected to that zone and the old Northern Zone. Tuol Sleng was now killing more officials of the communist regime than of the former society.

On New Year's Day 1978, a courier arrived at Phat's office with a letter asking him to attend a meeting of the zone's standing committee called to work out the annual plan for the zone and organize an assembly to condemn
the Vietnamese. Phat arrived in Siem Reap the next afternoon, accompanied by two bodyguards. The meeting started the following morning. At dawn a car was sent to fetch Phat and another official. The two men joined the zone secretary and went through the annual plan district by district. A few hours later, about nine in the morning, a jeep pulled up in front of the office. The secretary looked out and said these were “fraternal compatriots from the Air Force.” Everyone rose, including Phat, who got up to shake hands.

“I thought,” Phat remembered, “that they were only fraternal compatriots, people whom I had known. And that they were grabbing me to embrace me, but then, when the embrace tightened and I began to squirm, our friends said to hold still. They produced the handcuffs and put them on me. They blindfolded me with a scarf. I feared that I was dead already. The first thing I thought was that there really must be a lot of enemies who had implicated me. . . .”

The men, who were acting on instructions from Duch of the security service, and with the knowledge and approval of Phat's superiors, asked Phat to identify himself. He did and then said: “Before I live or die I want to meet the Organization [Angka] first.”

They answered: “That's where you're going now—to meet the Organization.”

Phat was put in the jeep and driven to Phnom Penh. He was booked in Tuol Sleng on January 4. He wrote his biography the next day, filled with confusion and remorse for a crime he knew he had not committed. He wrote: “Since I was taken into custody I have seen only one path ahead of me: I must die because I saw the Party's reaction to me—its use of ultimate measures. I thought to myself that I must make sure that I don't allow anything to negatively affect my health along the way. So that I will be able to find out what problem it was that had led to my arrest by the Security Service. . . .”

After weeks of torture Phat gave Duch a handwritten confession of his “activities of betrayal” that was more than eight pages long. Later, in February, he admitted to moral crimes as well. “Moral errors with women” was the title of one list he gave naming all the women with whom he had supposedly had sex before and during his marriage. In March he wrote by hand a sixty-four-page document which he signed at the bottom of each page, confessing to an elaborate but simple-minded spy network operated at times by the CIA, at other times by the Vietnamese.

Phat, yesterday's executioner, finally discovered the secret of all of those conspiracies uncovered by the party, those traitors whom he had pointed out for the security police, those bourgeois new people, all whom he had thought actively involved in plots against the revolution because the party or Angka had said they were of the wrong class or had been uncovered through network investigations. He discovered underneath it all there was nothing but lies, lies beaten out of people to satisfy the Center's fears.

After completing the sixty-four-page confession, Phat's mission for the party was over. His file was closed. His body was disposed of.

What went through the minds of the men who tortured and killed the victims of Tuol Sleng? How could one revolutionary torture and kill another; how was the party able to convince the cadre at Tuol Sleng that their revolutionary duty required them to whip and slash men who only yesterday were considered heroes? The answer is preserved in the notebooks kept by one of the cadre at Tuol Sleng. He was a literate, conscientious young man, and he kept a record of his work schedule, his instructions on interrogation and torture, and the political motivation behind it all. The only item missing is his name, perhaps the sign of fear or guilt.

The day began at 5:30 in the morning and was punctuated by three prisoner interrogation periods: The first started at 6:45 in the morning, the next at 1:45 in the afternoon, and the last at 6:45 in the evening. As soon as the
prisoners were booked at Tuol Sleng, their status changed entirely. They were called either enemies or convicts. In his notes, the cadre normally calls the revolutionary prisoners “enemies” because they are the most dangerous. “They use slogans and use communism to destroy communism.”

In the notebooks there are straightforward procedures for interrogation and torture. “We put them in irons and chains. We check what they have on them and when we are interrogating we place no objects near them for fear that they may take these objects and use them as weapons.” Later, the cadre writes: “It is important to do torture by hand.” Except against women. “The party has us beat women convicts with whips and absolutely not beat them with our hands.”

They were warned against excessive beatings. “Once we have pounded on the enemies for a long time they are in pain even when not beaten. They are in pain and get so skinny that it is no longer possible to beat them. The result is we only get a little. . . . If the enemies are in pain to the point they are unable to open their mouths, [it] would be annoying to the party.”

But torture is the main pursuit at Tuol Sleng, and the question over technique persists in the young cadre's notes. His instructors tell him: “The purpose of torturing is to get answers. It's not something we do for the fun of it. . . . Sometimes we go blind with rage at them [the prisoners] and this causes us to lose mastery. . . . [Sometimes] our questions consist of screaming and yelling at the enemy and when the enemies respond in a way that fits with the desires of our questions, we get so happy we laugh and have a good time. . . .”