Dan Harlow

Text by David Chandler. Additional text and images from zonaeuropa.com.

The mayhem that Democratic Kampuchea inflicted on its people led the French author Jean Lacouture to coin the word autogenocide — to differentiate events in Cambodia from previous pogroms, holocausts, purges and vendettas. Lacouture’s horror, if not the word he coined, was justified by the facts. In less than four years, more than one million Cambodians, or one in seven, probably died from malnutrition, overwork, and misdiagnosed or mistreated illness. At least one hundred thousand, and probably more, were executed for crimes against the state.

S.21 (Security Office 21) was one of the most notorious prisons during the reign of Pol Pot in Cambodia. Also known as Tuol Sleng (which translates to mean “a poisonous hill or a place on a mound to keep those who bear or supply guilt”) alone, the number of prisoners by year was as follows:

• 1975: 154 prisoners
• 1976: 2,250 prisoners
• 1977: 2,330 prisoners
• 1978: 5,765 prisoners

These figures, totaling 10,499 do not include an estimated 2,000 children. There are only seven known survivors. Of these survivors, a few of them created works of art now on display at the museum on the site of the old prison depicting the atrocities that took place at S.21. When one sees the implements of torture that were used it can be difficult for the mind to recreate the horrors they produced so the paintings help drive home the terror that these prisoners endured.

Here one must say that imagination fails miserably. The first photo shows a vat sitting in the courtyard. What is it? Above the vat is a wooden bar with hooks. What are they used for? The tour guide explains, but these are only words which cannot take your heart away. It took a painting by a survivor to explain the purposes. Human urine and feces were collected in the ammunition boxes and then emptied into the vat. When prisoners refused to confess their crimes, they were hung up with their hands behind their backs by ropes tied to the hooks, and then their heads were dipped into the vat.

Spatters of human blood still stain the ceiling of the prison.

In 1997, when questioned by the journalist Nate Thayer, Pol Pot denied any knowledge of “Tuol Sleng,” hinting that the museum and its archive were Vietnamese concoctions.

“I was at the top, I made only big decisions on big issues. I want to tell you — Tuol Sleng was a Vietnamese exhibition. A journalist wrote that. People talk about Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng … When I first heard about Tuol Sleng, it was on the Voice of America. I listened twice.”

“As you know,” he [Thayer] said, “most of the world thinks that you’re responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Cambodians who didn’t deserve to suffer.” Pol Pot replied:

“I’m going to reply. I’m going to tell you clearly. I would like to tell you that I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me, am I a savage person? My conscience is clear.”

Thayer pressed on, asking Pol Pot to acknowledge that he had “made very serious mistakes” during his time in power. Pol Pot replied deftly, in a schoolmasterish fashion:

“There are two sides to it, as I told you. There’s what we did wrong, and what we did right. The mistake is that we did some things against the people … but the other side, as I told you, is that without our struggle there would be no Cambodia right now.”

“I want you to know,” he said, “that everything that I did, I did for my country.”

Speaking to a Khmer reporter from Radio Free Asia on April 17 [1998], Ta Mok (a senior figure in the leadership of the Khmer Rouge also known as Brother Number 5) delivered this epitaph:

“Pol Pol has died,” he said, “like a ripe papaya. No one killed him, no one poisoned him. Now he’s finished, he has no power, he has no rights, he is now no more than cow shit. Cow shit is more important than him. We can use it for fertilizer.”

Until recently, there was an exhibit of a map of Cambodia built from skulls and bones found at the killing fields. Based upon a request from the Cambodian human rights commission, this exhibit has been dissembled and the skulls are kept in a shelf out of respect to these identified dead persons. Today, only this large photograph is shown at this museum. Why a skull-based map of Cambodia? Because the killings were not restricted solely to Phnom Penh, but occurred all over the country and just about every family lost someone somewhere sometime.

When we deal with the culture of S-21, it is tempting to rush to judgment, but it is also easy to judge the interrogators, guards, or executioners too severely. They could disobey orders only on pain of death. Without similar experiences, temptations, and pressures it is impossible for any of us to say how we might have behaved had we been interrogators ourselves, locked in a cell facing a helpless and devalued “enemy” alongside a pair of colleagues, either of whom might report us to the authorities for failing to inflict torture or for “counterrevolutionary” hesitation. Similarly, we cannot say what we would have done if a superior gave us an iron bar with which to smash the skull of a kneeling victim.

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