New Book on Cambodia

Title: Voices from S-21 - Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison

Author: David Chandler

Publisher: University of California Press, Berkeley, CA 94720

ISBN: 0 520 22247 4

Excerpt from "Preface":

Preface

In April 1975 armed Cambodian radicals, known to the outside world as the
Khmer Rouge, were victorious in a five-year-long civil war. Almost at
once, and without explaining their rationale, the Khmer Rouge forcibly
emptied Cambodia's towns and cities, abolished money, schools, private
property, law courts, and markets, forbade religious practices, and set
almost everybody to work in the countryside growing food. We now know that
these decisions were made by the hidden, all powerful Communist Party of
Kampuchea (CPK) as part of its plan to preside over a radical
Marxist-Leninist revolution. The Khmer Rouge regime of Democratic
Kampuchea (DK), led by a former schoolteacher using the pseudonym Pol Pot,
was swept from power by a Vietnamese invasion in January 1979. By then,
perhaps as many as 1.5 million Cambodians were dead from malnutrition,
overwork, and misdiagnosed and mistreated diseases. At least another
200,000 people, and probably thousands more, had been executed without
trial as "class enemies." Overall, roughly one in five Cambodians died as a
result of the regime. Because so many of the victims were ethnic
Cambodians or Khmer, the French author jean Lacouture coined the term
autogenocide to describe the process.

In August 1981, two years after the collapse of the Pol Pot regime I
traveled to Phnom Penh with four academic colleagues. It was the first
times in ten years I had been in the city. During our three-day sojourn we
were struck by the way that the city and recovering from their catastrophic
foreign invasions, a ruinous civil war, and the Khmer Rouge regime had
successively swept through Cambodia with typhoon force. The people's
courage and resilience in 1981, however, could not diminish the horrors of
the Khmer Rouge era.

On our second day in Phnom Penh, we were taken to see the Tuol Sleng Museum
of Genocidal Crimes, located in a southern section of the city. The museum
had been set up by the pro-Vietnamese regime that had replaced the Khmer
Rouge. It had been open to the public for about a year and was a prominent
feature of government-organized tours for foreign visitors. In
prerevolutionary times, we learned, a high school had occupied the site.
Under the Khmer Rouge the abandoned school became the headquarters of the
regime's internal security police or santebal. This secret facility, known
as S-21, was an interrogation center where over fourteen thousand "enemies"
were questioned, tortured, and made to confess to counterrevolutionary
crimes. All but a handful were put to death. The existence of S-21 was
known in the DK era only to the people inside it and to the country's
leaders, who were themselves concealed from view. . . .

Excerpt from page 18 to page 23:

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, leng 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.

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 field
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," 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
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.

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 Sell 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 supervise 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. 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
emerge 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.

Duch

Kang Keck leu (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. Specializing in mathematics,
he ranked second in the national bacc examinations in 1959. In those days,
a classmate has recalled, he was a studious young man with no hobbies or
political interests.

For the next few years, he taught mathematics at the lycée in Kampong Thom.
One of his former students later recalled that "he was known for the
precision of his lectures as if he were copying text his mind onto the
board." One of his colleagues at the school, who taught biology, was an
exceptionally tall, almost albino Cambodian named Main 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 to altered purposes, when they worked together at
the prison.

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 politicized by these sharply focused,
idealistic young men and women, all of whom were to play important roles in
Sino-Cambodian relations during the DK era and beyond.

After leaving the Institute, he taught briefly at Chhoeung Prey lycée in
Kompong Cha,, where he enrolled at least one of his students, Ky Suk Hy,
into the revolutionary movement and was soon arrested as a "Communist" by
Sihanouk's police. He was held without trial for several months - a normal
procedure for political prisoners at the time but he managed to obtain his
release through the intervention of his childhood patron. Soon after
Sihanouk was overthrown, Kang Keck Ieu had gone into the maquis.

In the early 1970s, known as Duch, he was in charge of security in Sector
33, north of Phnom Penh. A French ethnographer, François Bizot, was
arrested by Communist guerrillas there in 1970. Duch interrogated Bizot
repeatedly for two months, accusing him of being a CIA agent and making him
write several detailed autobiographies before allowing him to go free.
Bizot came away chastened by Duch's fanaticism. In his view, "Duch
believed Cambodians of differing viewpoints to be traitors and liars. He
personally beat prisoners who would not tell the 'truth.' "

In 1973 Duch moved to Sector 25, north of Phnom Penh. His superior there
was Sok Thuok (alias Von Vet), a Communist militant since the 1950s who was
executed at S-21 in 1978. Sok Thuok's deputy in 1973, charged with
military affairs, was Son Sen, whose favorable attention Duch probably
attracted at this time.

Duch picked up his expertise in security matters as he went along; there is
no evidence that he ever traveled abroad or received any training from
foreign experts. He may well have developed his elaborate notions of
treachery involving "strings of traitors" between 1972 and 1973, when a
secret operation was set up by the Khmer Rouge to purge the so called Hanoi
Khmers-Cambodians who had come south in 1970 after years of self-imposed
exile in North Vietnam, ostensibly to help the revolution. Hundreds of
them were secretly arrested and put to death in 1973, after the Vietnamese
had withdrawn the bulk of their troops from Cambodia. A few managed to
escape to Vietnam after detention; and others were arrested after April
1975. Many were arrested in the Special Zone. The stealth and
mercilessness of the campaign may have owed something to Duch's emerging
administrative style. The campaign, indeed, foreshadowed the modus
operandi of S-21.

Santebal operations were transferred to the capital soon after the Khmer
Rouge victory in April 1975, but for several months the entity went under
the name of Office 15; annotations by Duch appear on documents emanating
from this office. The earliest documents connecting Duch with S-21 date
from October 1975. For the next six months or so, Duch divided his time
between a santebal prison at Ta Khmau, south of the capital, and
interrogation centers scattered throughout Phnom Penh. The Ta Khmau
facility, code-named S-21 Kh, was located on the grounds of what had been
Cambodia's only psychiatric hospital.

As the man in charge of S-21, Duch worked hard to control every aspect of
its operations. His experiences and instincts from teaching were helpful.
He was used to keeping records, ferreting out answers to problems, earning
respect, and disciplining groups of people. He drove himself and his
subordinates very hard. "He was strong. He was clear. He would do what
he said," the former guard Him Huy has recalled. Duch often frightened
workers at the prison. When asked what kind of a man Duch was, another
guard replied, "Ha! What kind of man? He was beyond reason [huos haet]."
In this man's view, Duch's worst crime was not to have presided over the
deaths of fourteen thousand prisoners, but to have allowed two of his own
brothers-in-law to be brought to S-21 and put to death. "Duch never killed
anyone himself," the former guard recalled, but he occasionally drove out
to the killing field at Choeung Ek to observe the executions.

Duch's neatly written queries and annotations, often in red ink, appear on
hundreds of confessions. They frequently correct and denigrate what
prisoners confessed, suggest beatings and torture, and urge interrogators
to unearth the buried "truth" that the prisoners are hiding. Duch also
summarized dozens of confessions, pointing out the links he perceived with
earlier ones and suggesting fresh lines of inquiry. The most elaborate of
his memoranda, written in 1978, was titled "The Last Plan"; it attempted to
weave two years' worth of confessions into a comprehensive, diachronic
conspiracy that implicated the United States, the USSR, Taiwan, and
Vietnam. Like the late James Jesus Angleton of the CIA, Duch was
mesmerized by the idea of moles infiltrating his organization. As a
mathematician, he enjoyed rationally pleasing models. "The last plan" was
his chef-d'oeuvre.

Duch lived close to S-21 with his wife and their two young children and he
remained at the prison until the evening of 7 January 1979 when he walked
out of Phnom Penh and soon disappeared from sight. In 1996, no longer
affiliated with the Khmer Rouge, Duch met some American evangelical
missionaries in northwestern Cambodia and converted to Christianity. He
was working as a medical orderly in April 1999 when a journalist discovered
his past identity. Duch was later interviewed by Nate Thayer and spoke
freely about his past before he was arrested by Cambodian Police and
imprisoned in Phnom Penh. . . . [End]