When the War Was Over (56 page)

The cadre are reminded why they are torturing these prisoners—to force confessions and “document” the networks and subterfuges that are threatening the revolution. “Special police branch work is class struggle work,” the cadre is told, “to defend the party, defend the proletariat, defend Democratic Kampuchea, defend the line of independence and mastery. No matter how dark the secrets of the enemies, we will dig them out and be able to smash their maneuvers, their organizational networks, their plans ever more effectively.”

The procedure is spelled out. Retrieve information. Press prisoners on specific points. Then pressure them with political propaganda. Press them further “while cursing them out.” Then torture them. Then “review and analyze their answers” in order to ask more questions and document crimes. Prevent them from dying during the interrogation and from hearing the interrogation of others. Above all maintain secrecy about the entire operation of Tuol Sleng. The torture should be secret. No one should know confessions were beaten out of prisoners. Cases should be discussed only with immediate superiors. “If there are no more secrets then there is no more meaning to the special branch” was the watchword.

The confessions were at the center of the interrogation. The cadre were told to let the prisoners write them in their own hand, and sign them and date them clearly. “You must arrange for them to write their life story of betrayal so that when read it reads well and is concrete and clear with reasons given . . . explaining their espionage and infiltration,” an instructor told the cadre. “Best of all is to have them write in their own hand, in their own way of speaking, in their own sentences; with their own thoughts. We should avoid dictating to them. Thus only when they have finished talking or writing should we raise their weak points.”

These first confessions, written in the prisoners' own words, constitute an extraordinary, and awful, historical archive.

There was one final rule. “Both the calligraphy for the confession and the paper must be clean.”

The instructions to the cadre leave no doubt that all prisoners were presumed guilty and condemned to death regardless of what they said. Be on guard, the cadre are told, against the prisoners' “maneuvers or strategems to confuse us—to plead with us and to pretend to be innocent and to claim they have not betrayed us . . . to say we are mistreating them and they really are not traitors . . . or saying they have confessed only because of the pain.” Another instructor added the prisoners cannot be allowed to commit suicide—still another devious trick.

The instructors give trade secrets to the new interrogators, telling them which lies induce the correct confessions. They are told to promise prisoners the correct confession will save their lives or save the lives of their family members. They are told to explain that this is a special branch of the party and the party “doesn't just go around arresting people and killing them.” They are only searching for the truth.

“In sum,” the instructor says, “we do whatever is necessary to make them uncertain about the question of life and death so that they will still hope that they may survive.”

Even in the stilted, cold language of the cadre's notebook a hint emerges that those working at Tuol Sleng may be concerned about the monster they are creating. With rules that presume all prisoners guilty and presume that their associates and family members are guilty by association, the Tuol Sleng machine could eventually implicate the entire party. Innocence does not exist. The cadre must have complete faith in the party. Yet only the very top people of the party—presumably the thirty-odd members of the central committee—are aware of the full extent of secret police activities at Tuol Sleng and in the provinces. Instructors warn the cadre that confusion may arise. “The party changes rapidly and frequently. The party changes the
prisoners that we have to interrogate according to no fixed schedule. . . . The party changes [the procedure for making up] documents, the methodology of interrogation, of political propaganda, of torture, of incarcerating and moving prisoners—very frequently and rapidly.”

Tuol Sleng was just the tip of the iceberg, the headquarters of the security police, and the home of the Center's incarceration center. Its prison was responsible for a fragment of the murders—victims who lived in the Phnom Penh area and those from other regions who were considered important enough to warrant torture and interrogation by Duch.

There were countless other “Tuol Slengs” bloodying the country. There were prisons, execution sites, and pits. Work and murder, work and murder were the two certainties of Democratic Kampuchea. To the citizens of the regime the ruthlessness of their village and district leaders at first seemed simple but predictable madness. The people knew how to protect themselves from the most obvious penalties. They knew to hide their backgrounds if they came from an educated family. They knew to obey orders without complaint. But they did not know now how to hide from the incomprehensible fury that was unleashed when the Center ordered new purges, new executions. This was never done in the open, with explanations about the whys or wherefores of the Center's paranoia. This was part of the design. Not even the party cadre were told. Fear was the primary instrument to keep the population under control.

Nonetheless there was a pattern to the slaughter. The communist party's security bureaucracy headquartered at Tuol Sleng was one of the strongest systems in Democratic Kampuchea. At the village level there were crude killing grounds, often just a field nearby that announced itself by the stench from the bodies buried there. The party cadre who ran the village cooperatives were required to report executions to the next highest authority, to the subdistrict leaders. Most of the people murdered in their village killing grounds were hauled off for “disciplinary” reasons; people who dared challenge the organization's total power or people who could not keep up, who made mistakes and fell into the category of useless workers, the ones who received the warning: “If you keep this man there is no profit, if he goes there is no loss.”

Not all the executions were reported; the magnitude of the slaughter will probably never be known. Some subdistricts, most districts, and each sector and region had their own prisons. Most were buildings of some sort—former houses, schools, or pagodas with a field for torture and a pit nearby for
corpses. There were also prison camps where inmates were used as field laborers, the closest thing to reeducation camps in the country. It is safe to assume that these prisons generally followed the lead of Tuol Sleng, that these rural houses of death tortured and murdered those people considered enemies of the moment by the regime, and that they, too, were expected to keep records like Tuol Sleng.

But madness unleashed produces a cycle of guilt and sadism that is beyond control. The appetite for revenge and simple murder ballooned with each arbitrary, cold-blooded execution. Little tempered the murderers. On the contrary, the cadre came to understand that anyone could turn against them—particularly the party hierarchy—so they tried to eliminate their own enemies. They hid the number of murders from their superiors, perhaps from themselves. The awful reality was buried in the killing fields made famous in the movie of the same name.

A sense of numbers of people murdered can be gleaned from the expert testimony of one witness who lived in the Southwestern Zone. He was from Sector 13, one of the thirty-three sectors of the country. Sector 13, like the entire Southwestern Zone, was spared a purge by the Center; the zone's forces, instead, were used by the Center to purge other regions. Hence, the number of executions in Sector 13 was not caused by any of the zonal purges that raised the number of deaths in the less favored regions. Yet this witness said that some 38,400 Cambodians were officially executed in his sector between 1975 and 1978. This figure could be as arbitrary as the harvest figures cadre concocted for the Central records, but in the opposite direction. Usually cadre under-reported deaths: The regime had ordered that the population was to increase. This was but another piece of the madness; the Center was ordering purges and liquidations and working its people to death, yet expecting the population to double within two decades.

Finally, Tuol Sleng's list of victims is less a record of the numbers than the types of victims killed throughout Cambodia each year. It is a rare archive with confessions revealing the history of party members and ordinary people before and during the revolution. The confessions tell the stories of party debates, of intrigues and power struggles. In a completely closed, police state Tuol Sleng became the sole institution that could detail what motivated the revolution, the gruesome spirit of that revolution.

The rumors started in the middle of 1977. In Phnom Penh's factories, workers were told by their guards that the Cambodian army had been mobilized and sent to the border to fend off anticipated attacks by Vietnam. Across town, women processing rubber in the riverside factories heard that their home villages in eastern Cambodia were under attack by Vietnamese troops who had tortured and killed peasants. One cadre in the city said he saw wounded Khmer soldiers arriving at the old Chinese Hospital from the eastern front.

The rumors traveled far beyond the capital, in every direction. Nearly overnight the people of Cambodia were given a new focus of fear—an invasion by the Vietnamese army. In the Southwestern Zone, the peasants were told that the Vietnamese were attacking in the east because their own people were starving and Vietnam was trying to steal Cambodia's rice. In the troubled Northwestern Zone, the people heard by word of mouth that the dreaded “Youn” were preparing to invade. No matter how isolated or destitute the district, the news somehow reached the people that the old enemy was poised to strike.

While the world at large was surprised to hear the same rumors of war, many Cambodians registered neither surprise nor doubt. They accepted the stories as confirmation of a threat they had heard over and over again that they had been living under for generations. When the news penetrated the grand walls of the royal palace, Prince Sihanouk accepted it as a grim inevitability. Even though he had been held there in isolation from the rest of the country, under house arrest, the prince had kept up with news and rumors through his own guards and foreign broadcasts he was allowed to monitor with his radio.

He paced the floors of the palace unnerved by the prospect of an invasion and what it might mean for Cambodia. On the one hand, the Vietnamese should be capable of overthrowing the murderous Khmer Rouge regime and freeing the people from the nightmare of the past three years. On the other hand, the Vietnamese might never leave. They might try to make the country communist in their own fashion as they had tried to Confucianize it in the previous
century. Sihanouk had always held that communism had not dampened old Vietnamese ambitions toward Cambodia; rather, it provided new pretexts for Vietnam's well-known belief that Cambodia belonged under its wing. This was why Sihanouk, while in power, had sought to placate North Vietnam and at the same time win the protection of China.

He said he remembered the words of his grandfather King Norodom: “An ancestral prophecy predicts that our unfortunate people will one day be forced to choose between being eaten by tigers or swallowed by crocodiles.”

The Khmer Rouge tigers already had “eaten” hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, including some of Sihanouk's own children. Would the Vietnamese crocodiles try to swallow up Cambodia as they had Kampuchea Krom? Sihanouk, the man responsible for much of the tragedy facing Cambodia, had no answer. He waited in limbo, with the rest of his countrymen, to discover the dimensions of Cambodia's dilemma and whether the killing and devastation would ever end.