Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  The Hanoi leadership did not help its own cause. The Vietnamese Party’s Fourth Congress that month approved a resolution calling yet again for ‘the preservation and development of the special relationship [with] Laos and Kampuchea’ so that, as it put it, the three Indochinese states ‘will forever be associated with one another in the building and defence of their respective countries’. The overtones of limited sovereignty, whether intentional or not, could not have been better chosen to raise Cambodian hackles.

  The meat-mincer ground on. In the first half of 1976, four hundred people entered S-21. In the second half, more than a thousand. By the spring of 1977, a thousand people a month were being ‘smashed’. Stalinism has its own logic. In Democratic Kampuchea, it was given free rein.

  Nothing illustrated better the ghastliness of Pol’s regime than S-21 and its associated institutions in the provinces. Not because of what they were — all totalitarian regimes torture and kill their opponents — but because they represented in its purest form a doctrine of extermination.

  The word recalls the practices of Nazi Germany, a parallel artfully underlined by the Vietnamese propagandists who, after the regime fell, turned Tuol Sleng into what is today the equivalent of a holocaust museum. But the analogy is false. The role of S-21 was not to kill but to extract confessions. Death was the finality, but it was almost incidental. The officials in charge, Son Sen, Deuch and the Head of the Interrogation Unit, Mam Nay, all former schoolmasters, brought neat, orderly minds to the organisation of their work. But for the barbed-wire netting, covering the façade to prevent suicide attempts, it might have been an office block staffed by bureaucrats processing industrial statistics.

  In that sense, much about S-21 is depressingly familiar.

  It was not just a totalitarian phenomenon. Democratic governments have also gone down that road. The French army in Algeria set up torture centres where conscripts martyrised suspected fedayeen and then killed them ‘to maintain secrecy’, exactly the same justification as was used in Democratic Kampuchea. Five thousand Algerian prisoners were killed in this way in one interrogation centre alone. In the country as a whole, the number of such deaths probably exceeded the 15—20,000 who died in S-21. The factors that led young, Roman Catholic Frenchmen to violate every principle of justice and humanity they had learnt since childhood were not essentially different from those that governed the conduct of S-21 guards. Both were told, in the Khmer phrase, to ‘cut off your heart’ — an injunction which, to a greater or lesser extent, applies to soldiers everywhere. Both were under pressure from peers. The French conscripts faced court-martial if they refused to carry out orders; the S-21 guards faced torture and death.

  It may be argued that for Khmers it was easier: their religion cultivates indifference. However, S-21 had French carceral antecedents. The shackles used in its cells were inherited from French colonial times. The torture that the Khmers Rouges called ‘stuffing prisoners with water’ had been introduced to Indochina by the French army, which called it ‘la baignoire’ (‘the bathtub’) and used it on the Viet Minh in the early 1950s. If the French connection is easy to draw — Cambodia was, after all, a former French protectorate — other Western countries have little cause to crow. Experiments carried out in American universities suggest that a majority of human beings, American, British, German, or any other nationality, will agree, under suitable conditions, to inflict physical torture on others. At a conservative estimate, more than half of all UN member states have, or have had in the recent past, prisons resembling S-21. Democratic Kampuchea was not a fatal exception in an otherwise kindly world.

  Yet S-21 was different in ways that set it apart from all other institutions of its kind.

  In Stalinist Russia, in Nazi Germany, in countries like Argentina, Indonesia and Iraq, the death camps were monstrous aberrations, growing from the dark side of societies which in other respects appeared more or less normal and where those outside the concentration camp universe enjoyed certain basic freedoms.

  Tuol Sleng was not an aberration.

  Instead it was the pinnacle, the distillation, the reflection in concentrated form of the slave state which Pol had created. Thiounn Mumm’s uncle, the ex-Issarak leader Bunchan Mol, had written years before the Khmers Rouges came to power:

  In a civilized society, people understand what justice is. In our Khmer society, we do not . . . We still like to follow the savage ways of ancient times. If a man is condemned, we kill all his relatives lest one day they take revenge . . . If we knock down an opponent, we beat him until he dies. Victory, to us, means that our adversary is dead. If he lives, it is not victory. That is our Khmer mentality.

  S-21’s role derived from this approach to political conflict. It stemmed from what a Cambodian historian has called a ‘conquer-or-be-conquered’ tradition in Khmer politics that can be traced back through the Sihanouk years all the way to Angkor, and which continues to the present day. ‘In the ancient kingdom,’ another former urban deportee wrote,

  people had been buried alive, their fingers, hands, noses chopped off. The dead were left in the street, or tossed into fields to be devoured by wild beasts. What had changed?

  Confessions of treason were needed for men like Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphân to read out at closed Party meetings, proving that Angkar had ‘as many eyes as a pineapple’ and that nothing could escape its vigilance. The climate of fear this generated helped to unmask new ‘traitors’, who were then tortured to make them identify other members of their ‘strings’, the k’sae or patronage networks which were the basis of political activity in Cambodia.* If they were important leaders, their close relatives were located and killed. ‘Had I been arrested,’ Deuch said later, ‘my father, my mother, my sisters, my brothers-in-law, my nephews, would have been arrested too. That’s the way it was.’

  In this looking-glass world, the smallest gesture became suspect. Laurence Picq, at B-1, remembered how on one occasion a high official named Roeun gave her a loaf of freshly baked bread:

  I got up without thanking her, because one wasn’t supposed to thank people any more, and instead uttered the ritual formula: ‘My greatest happiness is to serve Angkar wherever and whenever I am needed’ . . . The bread smelt terribly good . . . But when I got back, I had doubts and I started to puzzle over Roeun’s behaviour. What did she want? The whole thing stank. It was a trap . . . I put the bread in a cupboard and went on with my work, promising myself not to touch it until I knew more . . . The next day one of Roeun’s servants brought me another loaf . . . I put it with the first . . . In the climate of pyschological warfare and the politics of hunger amid which we all lived, those loaves of bread carried the germs of a fantastic plot.

  She never learnt exactly what had been behind it. But in January 1977, the former Northern Zone Secretary, Koy Thuon, after languishing under house arrest for nine months, was transferred to S-21. His old subordinates followed: Roeun’s husband, Doeun — who, like Thuon, was a member of the Central Committee; Roeun herself; their long-time associate, Sreng, now Zone Deputy Secretary, and Soth, the Siem Reap leader. All confessed to being agents of the CIA.

  Meanwhile arrests of alleged pro-Vietnamese elements continued, among them Sien An, the former Cambodian Ambassador to Hanoi — who was accused of working for the French counter-espionage service, the SDECE — and Keo Moni, the former Issarak leader who in the 1950s had been Khmer Viet Minh Foreign Minister.

  The day after Koy Thuon was brought in, the Minister of Public Works, Toch Phoeun, was detained. His arrest marked the start of a new sweep, this time against the so-called ‘intellectuals’, former members of the Phnom Penh underground and the left-wing student movement, including Doeun’s deputy, Phouk Chhay, and the Information Minister, Hu Nim. They, too, were accused of working for the CIA. In fact, Pol had decided that they were too prone to compromise and therefore, at a time of tension with Vietnam, not reliable. Shortly afterwards a KGB ‘string’ was uncovered, allegedly led by Phouk Chhay’s friend Hak
Sieng Layni, who, like Keo Meas, was charged with having created a rival Khmer Communist Party, this time supposedly answering to Moscow.

  These early purges set the tone for everything that followed.

  All who were taken to S-21, whatever the reasons for their arrests, were forced into an identical mould. They had to confess to being either CIA, KGB, Vietnamese agents or ‘other’, a category which came to include French, East German and Thai intelligence, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang in Taiwan. Foreigners were treated like everyone else. An unfortunate young British yachtsman named John Dewhirst, who had been arrested by the Khmer Rouge coast guard, confessed:

  My course at the CIA college in Loughborough, England . . . ran concurrently with my teacher training course . . . from Sept 1972 to June 1976. It was held on Wednesday afternoons, Saturday afternoons and Monday mornings . . . The principal was Peter Johnson, a retired CIA colonel. The college was housed in a building disguised as the Loughborough Town Council Highways Department Surveyor’s Office . . . [It] was the smallest of the six CIA colleges in England . . . The others are at Aberdeen, Cardiff, Portsmouth, Bristol and Doncaster . . . Every Monday morning we would receive a lecture-seminar from Johnson on the role of the CIA as an anti-communist force . . . The lectures were really like indoctrination sessions . . . [We were] assigned spying jobs for the CIA and we had to report to CIA contacts . . .

  Dewhirst’s confession, like those of the dozen or so other Westerners — Americans, Australians and New Zealanders — who died at Tuol Sleng, is revealing for the light it sheds on the methods of the S-21 interrogators. Prisoners first told their life-stories factually. Afterwards they were made to embroider their initial accounts with supposed links with foreign intelligence agencies until their interrogators felt they had incriminated themselves sufficiently Then they were killed.

  Cambodian prisoners were subjected to the same pitiless routine, with equally far-fetched results. Koy Thuon and many others ended up claiming that they worked not only for the CIA but also for the KGB or the Vietnamese. Pol saw no contradiction in that. He regarded himself at the head of a regime surrounded by malign forces which, by their very nature, had to be working in concert. As Nuon Chea put it, there was joint action by the USA, the KGB and Vietnam . . . The Vietnamese . . . accept anybody who fights the CPK, even CIA agents.’ It was a very Khmer way of looking at things: Sihanouk, when he was in power, made similar statements.

  By April 1977, Pol felt able to proclaim that ‘the enemy’s leadership machine has been basically wiped out’. But the Standing Committee maintained its call ‘to continue to purge and sweep away adversaries’, and it was not until the autumn that Pol finally declared the purges at an end. By then, he said, five Central Committee members, four division commanders and countless lesser fry had been eliminated. This was ‘a great victory’ which had left the Party ‘purified and strengthened’. He neglected to mention that no convincing evidence had been found that any of those purged had been traitors and that, in some cases, like that of Siet Chhâ, who had accompanied him to meet Mao two years earlier, it would never be clear why they had been arrested at all. The macabre jingle, ‘Angkar kills but does not explain’, was as true at the summit of the Party as it was among the ordinary people.

  The period from mid-1976 to the late autumn of 1977 saw Pol’s experiment in Utopian socialism reach its zenith, creating the conditions for its collapse.

  All that year, the firestorm of terror with its epicentre at S-21 billowed out across the country, reducing to ashes thousands of Party cadres and hundreds of thousands of ‘new’ and ‘old’ peasants. In a broadcast on Radio Phnom Penh, Pol surmised that ‘between 1 and 2 per cent of the population’ was irredeemably hostile and ‘must be dealt with as we would any enemy’ — not a reassuring thought for people who had seen how the Khmers Rouges had treated their enemies two years earlier, at the end of the civil war. By August 1977, according to the CPK’s own figures, four to five thousand Party members had been liquidated as ‘bad elements’ and ‘enemy agents’.

  The movement began in the Northern Zone and Siem Reap, where every ‘string’ reaching out from Koy Thuon and his associates was meticulously dismantled and replaced by forces loyal to Ke Pauk, who had Pol’s confidence. When there were signs of resistance, Mok’s troops were sent in from the South-West to help the new leadership establish itself. That set a pattern of intervention which would repeat itself whenever Pol sought to move against an incumbent Party network that he regarded as disloyal.

  Soon afterwards Ieng Sary’s wife, Thirith, the Minister of Social Affairs, led a delegation to the North-West. She came back shocked by what she had seen. Conditions in the area were indeed bad: with almost a million extra mouths to feed as a result of the influx of new people’, they could hardly be otherwise. But Thirith’s conclusion was calculated to stoke the regime’s paranoia. ‘Conditions there were very queer,’ she said later. ‘The people had no homes and they were all very ill.’ The cadres pretended to follow Party policy, but in fact they undermined it by forcing people to work in appalling conditions. The only possible explanation was that ‘agents had got into our ranks’. A report in such terms was — and was intended to be — music to Pol’s ears. It confirmed his worst suspicions. ‘Hidden enemies seek to deprive the people of food,’ he told the Central Committee in December 1976. ‘They [distort] our instructions and mistreat the people . . . forcing them to work whether they are sick or healthy.’ For some months he took no action while Mok sent trusted village cadres and their families from the South-West to settle in the area, ostensibly as ordinary peasants but in reality to pave the way for a purge. Finally, in June troops from the Western Zone and the South-West followed. They began by systematically smashing the existing cadre networks at district and village level, executing the incumbents and replacing them with South-Western officials. Then, over the following six months, higher-level leaders were targeted. By the end of the year, the leaders of five of the Zone’s seven regions, standing committee members from the other two and at least thirty more ranking officials were despatched to S-21 to make their confessions and be killed.

  Other Zones were not spared either. During the summer, the Eastern Zone Party Congress asserted that, there too, ‘lackeys of the Vietnamese’ were ‘trying to starve the people and make them suffer, so that they lose confidence in the Party’. In the first half of the year, it said smugly, ‘hundreds of these traitors have been swept away’. In the Western Zone, where at that stage only minor purges had occurred, Nuon Chea told senior cadres that the first priority was ‘revolutionary vigilance’; economic development came second.

  Pol wanted to have his cake and eat it.

  He wanted a clean, pure, absolute Party, from which all doubtful elements had been expunged, and, at the same time, to unite the whole population for the coming struggle with Vietnam. He wanted everyone to be well-fed, to work reasonable hours and to have three, four, or even five days off each month, so that they would be ‘sharp and keen’, yet at the same time he insisted that the three-tons-per-hectare target be met, no matter what the cost.

  To the cadres who had to administer his policies, the choice was clear. Terrorised themselves, they responded by terrorising the population under their control. In a state which held that human will-power was capable of any feat, failure was equated with sabotage. If the choice were between improving the people’s livelihood — as Pol urged — and, in consequence, failing to meet Party targets; or achieving those targets — as Pol also urged — at the expense of living standards, most officials preferred the latter. Since the introduction of communal eating and the ban on foraging, most people lived badly anyway. When there were so few carrots, all that was left was the stick.

  From late 1976 onwards, and especially from mid-1977, Cambodia slipped back into the barbarism of its antique past.

  Attempts to ‘re-educate’ alleged offenders, never widespread under Khmer Rouge rule, were abandoned altogether, both at national
level, in Phnom Penh, and in the countryside. The Standing Committee’s decision a year earlier to vest the ‘authority to smash’ in the Zone leadership and above was quietly forgotten. In theory, district secretaries approved executions, but in practice death was meted out at commune or village level. The ‘Forest in the West’, as the execution ground was often called, became the punishment of first resort.

  What happened at S-21, which was subject to central control, was abominable enough. When the senior interrogator, Pon, reproached his underlings for excessive violence, he had to explain that what he meant was ‘beating prisoners to death, cutting open their arms, their backs and their penises.’ Inmates were drained of their blood for use in the city’s hospitals. ‘They used a pump,’ one guard remembered. ‘They went on until there was no blood left in them and they could scarcely breathe. You could just hear this wheezing sound, and see the whites of their eyes rolling as if they’d had a fit. When they were through, the corpses were thrown into a pit.’

  The medieval savagery of the jails in the countryside, where there were no constraints of any kind on the interrogators’ actions, made even such horrors seem tame. Haing Ngor was taken to one such prison in the North-Western Zone after being caught foraging for food:

  We stopped at a collection of buildings I had never seen before, at a clearing back in the woods . . . Some wrinkled black objects hung from the eaves of the roof but I was too far away to see what they were . . . In the afternoon, the guards brought [in] a new prisoner, a pregnant woman. As they walked past I heard her saying that her husband wasn’t a [former Lon Nol] soldier . . . Later [an] interrogator walked down the row of trees, holding a sharp knife . . . He spoke to the pregnant woman and she answered. [Then] he cut the clothes off her body, slit her stomach and took the baby out. I turned away but there was no escaping the sound of her agony, the screams that slowly subsided into whimpers and after far too long lapsed into the merciful silence of death. The killer walked calmly past me holding the foetus by its neck . . . He tied a string around [it], and hung it from the eaves with the others, which were dried and black and shrunken.