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

271 Pages·2000·2.67 MB·English

by  David Chandler

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Voices from S-21
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A
B O O K
The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint
honors special books
in commemoration of a man whose work
at the University of California Press from 1954to 1979
was marked by dedication to young authors
and to high standards in the field of Asian Studies.
Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together
endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables the Press
to publish under this imprint selected books
in a way that reflects the taste and judgment
of a great and beloved author.
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David Chandler
Voices from S-21
Terror and History in
Pol Pot’s Secret Prison
University of California Press
Berkeley
Los Angeles
London
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1999 by the Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chandler, David P.–.
Voices from S-21 : terror and history in Pol Pot’s
secret prison / David Chandler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. )
and index.
ISBN 0-520-22005-6 (alk. paper).
1. Torture—Cambodia. 2. Political prisoners—
Cambodia. 3. Political persecution—
Cambodia. 4. Genocide—Cambodia.
5. Cambodia—Politics and
government—1975–79. I. Title.
II. Title: Voices from S-Twenty-one.
HV8599.C16C48 1999
303.6909596—dc21 99-13924
CIP
Manufactured in the United States of America
08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the
minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).∞
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Contents
Preface vii
1. Discovering S-21 1
2. S-21: A Total Institution 14
3. Choosing the Enemies 41
4. Framing the Questions 77
5. Forcing the Answers 110
6. Explaining S-21 143
Appendix. Siet Chhe’s Denial of Incest 157
Notes 161
Bibliography 207
Index 233
Photographs follow page 76
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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 misdiag-
nosed 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 auto-
genocideto 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
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