Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (27 page)

painful enough in some cases to induce a full confession.
⁶⁰

By 1978, an image symbolizing America had been added to that of Ho Chi Minh. The interrogator’s notes to Svang Kum’s confession identify the second image as one of Lyndon Johnson:

At first when we came to the interrogation place, after I had asked about her history and asked why the Organization had arrested her, she wept and shouted, saying that her husband was a traitor and that she wasn’t a traitor. I applied discipline by making her pay homage to the image of the dogs Ho Chi Minh and Johnson, but she refused to salute [them], so I beat her for

refusing to tell her story and for not respecting the discipline of
santebal.
She gave up hope and began to speak about her secret networks.
⁶¹

Two other passages that discuss “paying homage” to the images occur in notes takes by senior interrogators Chan and Tuy-Pon at a livelihood meeting convened on 28 May 1978. They differ slightly and are worth quoting in full.

tuy-pon text

We test them by getting them to pay homage to two dogs. Dogs have a political meaning. The first dog is America. The second is Vietnam. When they salute them, they acknowledge that they support these two.

From the standpoint of ideology, we cast [the prisoners] aside, and no longer allow them to stay with us.

From the organizational standpoint, we force them to honor
santebal.

We have achieved good results from this already.

The document closes when Tuy-Pon quotes the speaker at the study session as saying: “You should not beat prisoners when they are angry. Beating doesn’t hurt them when they are angry.” The interrogators also were urged to keep their tempers, for as the interrogators’ notebook asserted, “Sometimes we go blind with rage, and this causes us to lose mastery. It causes [the prisoners] to be incomplete, ideologically, spinning around thinking [only] of [their own] life and death.” The rights and wrongs of inducing these death-dealing effects are left unmentioned.
⁶²

chan text

We force them to salute the images of two dogs. This is a kind of interrogation. The dogs have political significance.

First dog: American imperialism.

Second dog: Vietnamese consumers of [our] territory.

We have them pay homage so as to hold them fi , because when they are arrested, 90 percent of them [still] consider themselves revolutionaries. After they have paid homage to the dogs, they will realize that they are traitors.

From an ideological standpoint, we reject their ideology.

From an organizational standpoint: do they respect
santebal,
or not?

Procedures: Say what you can to make them change their minds and obey “older brother.” If they argue, don’t beat them yet, but wait for a minute before making them say that they served these two dogs: from what year? in what organization? Be careful: they may say that the CIA has no venom [real strength?].

“Paying homage” in this way introduced many prisoners abruptly to the power relations of S-21. It highlighted the contrast or contradiction in Khmer Rouge thinking between hidden, abject, foreign, and treasonous “facts” on the one hand and the overwhelming “truth” of the hidden but resplendent Organization on the other, and between the omnipotence of the interrogators and the powerlessness of “guilty people.” This particular torture also set out the discipline of the interrogation that was to follow and forced the prisoners to identify themselves, even before they started talking, as traitors.

Some “ninety percent” of the prisoners, it seemed, began their interrogations by pluckily referring to themselves as “revolutionaries.” How was this possible, the interrogators wondered, if they had been arrested? How could a genuine revolutionary be fettered, numbered, and locked up? “Paying homage” was one of a series of degradations designed to force prisoners to recognize their animal status. Their foreign masters
(me)
were depicted as animals, and only animals would pay homage to them. Once the patron–dogs’ identities and the prisoners’ loyalty to them had been displayed, the prisoner was divested of revolutionary and human status, and the interrogation could proceed, majestically or at a fast clip, to unearth “treacherous activities,” “plans,” and “strings of traitors.” The prisoners by that point had become debased, unhealthy, document-producing creatures tottering on all fours toward their deaths. To place torture at S-21 into a historical context, it seems clear that “paying homage,” electric shock, immersion, suffocation, beatings and other tortures at S-21 combined the traditional “vengeance of the sovereign” with a comparatively new, disturbingly “rational,” and quasi-judicial quest for documents, memories, and evidence, raw terror trans—

muted into history.

In this hushed and brutal ambience, counterrevolutionary actions, whether “true” or “false,” needed to be brought to light, and memories had to coincide with expectations. Inevitably, however, “doing politics” often failed to motivate the interrogators or to unearth the memories that were required. Was torture any more reliable? There is no way of telling; no discussions of the issue have survived. The practice was certainly widespread. I would argue that after demonizing and dehumanizing the “enemies,” routinizing violence and unleashing the interrogators’ hatred, torture was doled out in substantial portions at S-21 with no thought for the pain it caused or, as far as the “truth” was concerned, its value compared to that of “doing politics.”

The Interrogators’ Notebook

The relation of torture to “doing politics” that the officials at S-21 desired is spelled out in a handwritten, unsigned notebook prepared at

the prison between July and September 1976, with doodles dating from 1978 on the closing pages. The notebook may have been initiated by an S-21 cadre, perhaps one of those purged in 1976 or 1977, and lost or abandoned for a couple of years.
⁶³
In the pages that relate to doing torture and doing politics, the notes stress that

we must take the view that the question of keeping [prisoners] alive or ask-ing for their papers or killing them is decided on for us by the Party. That is, we do whatever we can, so long as we get answers.

The use of torture is a supplementary measure. Our past experience with our comrades the interrogators has been that they fell for the most part on the side of torture. They emphasized torture instead of propaganda. This is the wrong way of doing things; we must show them the proper way to do them.

The notes go on to suggest that while torture is inevitable, its use should be delayed in many cases until after a valid confession has been obtained:

The enemies can’t escape from torture; the only difference is whether they receive a little or a lot. While we consider torture to be a necessary measure, we must do politics [with them] so they will confess to us, [but] it’s only when we have forced them via politics to confess that torture can be used. Only when we put maximum political pressure on them, forcing them by using politics to confess, will torture become effective. . . . Furthermore, doing politics makes the prisoners answer clearly, whether or not the use of torture follows.

The passage suggests that torture should be used and indeed became “effective”
after
confessions were obtained, seemingly acknowledging that workers were going to torture prisoners anyway and that perhaps some tortures carried out as medical experiments might best be performed after documentation was complete. The passage also implies that torturing prisoners might be a bonus for S-21 workers after a confession had been obtained. But what is meant by “effective” remains unclear. Except when prisoners died, after all, interrogators were not punished for infl pain. The notebook goes on to provide hints about tactics that interrogators might employ to propagandize, beguile, and disarm the prisoners without torturing them, and adds:

One objective of doing torture is to seek answers from them, and not to make us happy. . . . It’s not done out of individual anger, out of heat. Beating is done to make them fearful, but certainly not to kill them. Whenever we torture them we must examine their health beforehand, and examine the [condition of the] whip as well. Don’t be greedy and try to hurry up and kill them.

The passage suggests that torturing prisoners made some interrogators “happy,” while others freely acted out of “heat” or were in haste to kill the Party’s “enemies.” Moreover, provided that the whips were in acceptable condition, beating relatively healthy prisoners almost but not quite to the point of death was considered fair. None of this violence is surprising, given the wholesale dehumanization of prisoners and the culture of the prison, but it is chilling to see it so dispassionately written down. Almost as if its author were aware of overstepping a limit, the document then backs off and adds sanctimoniously:

You must be aware that doing politics is very important and necessary, whereas doing torture is subsidiary to politics. Politics always takes the lead. Even when doing torture, you must also constantly engage in propaganda.

Even when “doing politics” occupied such a privileged position, torture was certain, and “doing politics” might occasionally be overlooked. It is hard to decide whether cautionary injunctions like these were sincere and systematically enforced or whether they were intended to provide bureaucratic cover for Duch and his colleagues should unwelcome excesses at the prison be discovered by the “upper brothers”
⁶⁴
or an important prisoner be beaten to death prematurely out of “heat” or “greed.” The notebook continues:

Break them with propaganda or break them with torture, but don’t let them die. Don’t let them get so feeble that you’re unable to question them. . . . Defend against the enemy. Keep [the prisoners] from dying. Don’t let them overhear each other.

Two years later Chan wrote, in a similar vein:

Take their reports, observe their expressions. Apply political pressure and then beat them until [the truth] emerges. Thinking only of torture is like walking on one leg—there must be political pressure [so that we can] walk on two legs.
⁶⁵

The passage suggests that “one-legged” interrogations (those involving lots of torture and little or no politics) were still being carried out. At about the same time, Pon was noting that “problems” at S-21 included “beatings that deprive enemies of strength” and “the problem of torture: still too heavy.” He went on to criticize an interrogator specifi cally. “He said he beat [a prisoner] a little; in fact, he beat [him] a lot.”
⁶⁶

A contradiction in Khmer Rouge thinking that affected the practice of torture at S-21 arose between the notion of “independence-mastery”

extolled by the regime and the requirement that followers of the Organization succumb unthinkingly to its requirements. “Independence-mastery” supposedly meant shaking loose from deferential ties to prerevolutionary patrons. The process led to empowerment at the price of personal independence, because of the demands of revolutionary discipline. People were liberated from dependence into the companionable solidarity of the Party. Empowered men and women became instruments of the popular will, which is to say the servants of the Party. This subtle point was lost on many young recruits, who may have seen permission to torture the Party’s “enemies” or “guilty people” not merely as an assignment but as a right. In these cases the violence implicit in their empowerment overrode the constraints imposed by obedience to the often austere directives of the Party. In the heat of the revolution, however, such “left” deviations, where “enemies” were involved, were often ignored.

Crimes of Obedience

The watchword at S-21, to alter Talleyrand’s famous dictum, might have been
“surtout, trop de zèle”
(above all, [display] too much zeal). As the 1976 notebook put it,

It is necessary to avoid any question of hesitancy or half-heartedness, of not daring to torture, which makes it impossible to get answers from our enemies. . . . It is necessary to hold steadfast to a stance of not being half-hearted or hesitant. We must be absolute.