When the War Was Over (44 page)

Bophana was probably manacled to a bed in a small cell. She spent her first night not knowing why she had been brought to this hell, what accusations had been flung at her. From that day onward she referred to herself only as Sita Deth—Bophana had disappeared entirely. She had to endure
this last test of fire, five eternal months of torture, until mother earth finally swallowed her up.

There was no escape. Bophana was just the type of person the party wanted to kill in this first wave of executions. Even as the party began to turn on itself, it became more obsessed with destroying the
ancien regime,
particularly anyone who held a position of stature in the old society Since Bophana worked for a foreign charity and helped the Lon Nol government care for refugees, she was classified as a former functionary. Because of Deth, she was charged with corrupting one of the revolution's own cadre—the crime the regime feared most.

Everything about Bophana was “counterrevolutionary.” Duch, the chief of Tuol Sleng and the security police, thought her political crimes transparent. She had worked for a charity funded and managed by wives of American and European officials, a flimsy cover for an American CIA operation, he noted. Bophana rose in the ranks of that charity; she had to be the head of a major CIA network. Duch wrote instructions to her interrogators telling them how to lead the conversation toward this obvious truth. She was educated and wrote forbidden love letters to a man Duch was convinced could not be her husband; Bophana used her wicked attractiveness to seduce Deth and subvert the revolution through him. This could be proved easily by those letters in which she criticized the revolution, promised devotion to Deth rather than Angka, and even vowed revenge. Duch rarely had such strong evidence.

But there was something resilient in Bophana. She signed all of her confessions Sita Deth, emphasizing where her loyalty lay. Her torture dragged on for months. After her declaration she was required to write her biography or life story over and over until she “confessed” to crimes that could justify her execution. She had to write her confession herself and modify it if Duch found it wanting. Much of this system was inherited from the other communist countries, particularly from Vietnam. The security police in Vietnam regularly arrest suspects without charges, lock them up, and force them to write out their biographies, then their confessions of “crimes” against the state. They are interrogated endlessly and encouraged to implicate their friends and families. But in Vietnam, and in most periods in China and the Soviet Union, sadistic torture was not part of the interrogation process, nor was execution the automatic end of the imprisonment.

Bophana, now Sita Deth, had to condemn herself, her husband, and at least one dozen others. She had to confess that she had been a CIA agent operating a secret spy network through her husband, Deth, and that she and her network were responsible for disrupting the transportation of rice
seedlings during the early 1976 planting season. As fanciful as such a plot might be, all victims had to admit that they were responsible for the real problems of the regime. Duch could then bring this “confession” to the party's standing committee and prove that subversive elements in the country had purposefully disrupted the rice-seedling convoys. It was not the fault of the party or the party plans—it was the fault of counterrevolutionary elements and foreign enemies. It did not seem to matter that Bophana, for instance, had no idea how the transportation system of Democratic Kampuchea worked or even when rice seedlings need to be moved in time for the first planting. The records suggest that the more ridiculous the crime, the more convincing it sounded to the standing committee.

Duch wrote out these instructions to her interrogator: “If she agrees that her husband is CIA, this is very important.”

Bophana dutifully wrote her husband's biography but did not say Deth was a CIA agent. Duch wrote along the margin: “Why didn't she reply that her husband is CIA?” Farther down he answered his own question with another comment: “Do not correct [the omission of Deth's CIA connections] —these are her maneuvers to mislead.”

The weeks became months. Bophana's first honest biography written in October bore faint resemblance to a major confession she was tortured into writing in January. The only constant by now was the signature—Sita Deth. By now her mind and body were sufficiently bruised and mutilated for her to write a fantasy of betrayal satisfying Duch's requirements. She said she had been inducted into the CIA by the wife of the last American ambassador, Mrs. John Gunther Dean. Among her assignments were secret missions to give refugees food so they would prefer American imperialism to the revolution during the war; her assignment, given her in 1975, was to destroy rice seedlings and material for transportation once the revolution triumphed. Her “CIA network” was distinguished by its own distinctive emblem, a picture of a heart. At the American embassy she was inducted into the CIA at a ceremony with a vow to respect the discipline, law, and loyalty of the CIA and an oath to slit her own throat if she ever betrayed the CIA. This ceremony was followed by a small party at the embassy. This fantasy owes more to the practice of the Communist Party of Kampuchea than to the imagination of Sita Deth.

She was made to write that she did not love Deth, she had only professed her love in order to move in with a cadre and move down to Phnom Penh, where she could best disrupt seedling traffic. She was tortured into saying she was not married to Deth, that that was also a lie. Duch comments that this
shows Bophana is a common whore, and he writes down a vulgar word for her that means roughly “piggish animal” in Khmer. It is impossible to say how Bophana was tortured. Everyone—man, woman, and child—was subjected to whippings, electric shocks, and repeated dunkings in water tanks. But there were said to be special tortures for women—their breasts were slashed; their vaginal areas were burned with hot pokers; poisonous reptiles were allowed to roam their bodies; if they were mothers, they were forced to watch their children slowly tortured. They were regularly called bitch or pig.

Since Duch concentrated on Bophana's alleged loose morals, she was probably subjected to sadistic mutilation of genitalia. Like other authoritarian societies bent on becoming wealthy overnight, the Khmer Rouge were schizophrenic about sex and procreation. On the one hand they thought sex should be restricted because it took up too much time and detracted from the chores at hand, overnight industrialization and glorification of the motherland. Yet they also decided there should be many more Cambodians to carry out this program and ordered that the population double. The solution was no sex, no romance, but regular visitation rights for husband and wife.

In fact, the Khmer Rouge did become so sexually repressive that sadism affected much of cooperative life. The date for marriage was moved up to twenty-two years of age for men, twenty years for women—a rule originally adopted for the army alone. Any sex before marriage was punishable by death in many cooperatives and zones. Young people were segregated by sex and expected to work, learn utter devotion to Angka, and forget about the opposite sex. Predictably, the birthrate dropped dramatically. Many women stopped menstruating entirely, partly because of malnutrition, partly because of the trauma.

In a larger sense, the Khmer Rouge were threatened by all expressions of love—between husband and wife, parents and children, friends and colleagues. Everyone had to renounce personal intimacies, as Hannah Arendt predicted. By writing to each other, Deth and Bophana had refused to live a solitary, isolated, and emotionally barren life. That was perhaps Bophana's greatest crime in Duch's eyes.

Bophana's stay in Tuol Sleng was unusually long. She ended her January biography with the comment: “After confessing all of these betrayals, what does life matter?” She signed herself, as always, Sita Deth. She had two more months to endure.

She was required to complete her confession by including her closest friends, colleagues, and surviving family members in her CIA “network.” This was a particularly gruesome part of the torture; victims were required to indict those closest to them and often died knowing their tortured “confessions”
led to the arrests and deaths of their loved ones. Friendship was dangerous in the revolution. In these early years, three indictments by Tuol Sleng victims were sufficient to bring about the arrest of a suspect. Once arrested, very, very few escaped Tuol Sleng.

The small, once beautiful Bophana spent the better part of her twenty-fifth year in a tiny brick cell waiting for the release of death. She must have been tortured as much by the sounds and cries of other victims as by her own wounds. During her five-month stay at least 261 people were executed and countless others tortured in the small former schoolhouse. Through it all she was forced to write or dictate the greatest volume of confessions, biographies, and statements of all the victims who filed into Tuol Sleng. Not even top-ranking Khmer Rouge ministers who were brought in during the later period would be forced to write as much as Bophana. She must have realized she was different, her torture singularly long.

She might have questioned why her fate, her karma, was such pain and suffering. But in the Khmer Rouge revolution, it was nearly inevitable. She was caught in the first movement against the
ancien regime
, the leadership and respected figures of the defeated Lon Nol government and the old society. She may have been arrested because of a random series of accidents, but it is doubtful that any woman who fought so hard to be with her husband, who was so traditional that she patterned herself after Sita, could have survived under the Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Rouge at Tuol Sleng regularly left corpses chained to beds or cells until an agreed-upon burial day. Then a detachment from Tuol Sleng would dump the bodies in a pit dug outside the city. Duch often chose burial days for symbolic reasons. Like March 18, 1977, the seventh anniversary of the Lon Nol coup d'état against Prince Sihanouk. Dozens of people were officially declared dead on that day so that Duch could fill up a pit in gruesome remembrance of the anniversary. It is difficult to believe Bophana was still alive on the day Duch wrote that Bophana, known as Sita Deth, was officially exterminated.

Many Cambodians might have been able to bear the loss of their personal lives but they found the revolution's attack on the family insufferable. As in many societies relatively untouched by modernity, Cambodians are extremely attached to their families. That was the primary loyalty, certainly
the most threatening to Angka. Nearly all directives of the Khmer Rouge led somehow toward the dissolution of the family. The severity of the revolution broke up families simply by killing off family members. Disease, malnutrition, or the ax of a Khmer Rouge executioner felled families even before the revolution instituted specific programs to separate and destroy the family tradition of Cambodia.

One of the first steps was to abolish the use of the family name. Throughout the revolution people used one name only, usually a shortened form of the given rather than family name. Party members often devised their own single names, usually monosyllabic. Hence the Khmer Rouge cadre Hout Ly Sitha became Deth. But the former Phnom Penh banker Mey Komphot merely shortened his given name to become Phot.

Another basic step was the elimination of the family as any meaningful unit of the society. Besides devising the three constitutional categories of citizens—worker, peasant, and soldier—the Khmer Rouge created other artificial categories that amounted to an unorthodox new class system that subordinated the family by ignoring it. These categories redefined identities and attitudes, shifting from family to revolutionary loyalties, or so the Khmer Rouge hoped.

The first division was between the “old people” and the “new people.” The old people were those who had lived in the Khmer Rouge zones during the war and had contributed to the revolution. They were also called “base people,” which refers both to their life in “base areas” during the war and their origins in the basic classes—the worker and peasant classes in whose name the Khmer Rouge made the revolution. The new people were those who had lived on the other side during the war and were literally new to the revolution and to the Khmer Rouge ideas of revolution. This distinction was often made with dates. The old people were called “18 March people,” the date of the Lon Nol coup against Sihanouk which inaugurated the war. The new people were “17 April people,” the date of the Khmer Rouge victory.

This was originally a popular distinction but it became standard party language. And the old people carried it one step farther. They felt burdened and threatened by the influx of new people into their zones at war's end. The party gave them more responsibility than they wanted without the necessary wherewithal to cope, or any reward for fulfilling their new duties. They considered themselves generous for simply giving these new people a space to lay their heads and enough food to keep them alive. “When the people came from Phnom Penh they had nothing and we gave them everything,” said the leader of one cooperative in the Southwestern Zone. “They couldn't do any
of the tasks. We had to teach them how to cultivate and harvest. They weren't worth anything the first year.”

During 1975 there were no specific new directives. The party was relying on the old people to save the situation and somehow produce a surplus harvest at the end of the year. The old people took advantage of this administration by fiat to create a new cooperative hierarchy which would put them at the top and protect their privileges (and property) and put the new people at the bottom.

They borrowed the categories for admission to the party and grafted them onto the cooperatives. Like the party, they held on to the prerogative of deciding who could join their cooperative. And they took the party categories to determine where these new members fit. At the bottom was “ward” of the cooperative. The majority of the new people were accorded this status, which meant they had yet to be accepted into the cooperative and had to prove themselves with hard labor and meager rations.