The Khmer Rouge File

...Torture was applied until the accused confessed and, most important of all, revealed the identities of fellow conspirators...

...Torturing a prisoner to death suggested a "loss of mastery" and represented a "loss for the party...

...David Hawk, the commission's director, is a former anti-war activist and Amnesty International official who in 1980 served as a relief worker in Thailand, ministering to the thousands of Cambodians who had suffered first under Pol Pot and later—following the Vietnam-Khmer Rouge war—from a deadly famine...

...Hawk has subsequently devoted his energies to keeping the issue of Pol Pot's crimes before the public...

...In addition to being overzealous, I some security personnel were apparently violating party strictures on sexual matters...

...The Heng Samrin regime has an obvious interest in reinforcing the image of the Khmer Rouge as genocidal monsters in order to buttress its claim as the legitimate government of Cambodia...

...Like most bureaucrats the functionaries of the Kampuchean torture bureaucracy were meticulous record keepers...

...True or not, the fact is that the fate of Pol Pot alone is essentially irrelevant...

...Even where people are determined and diligent enough, crimes of the Soviet Union do not escape opprobrium: witness the continuing pressure for Jewish emigration and the international campaign against Soviet psychiatric abuse...

...Why so thorough a purge of a department that, in most societies, is essential to the smooth functioning of government...

...As can be imagined, conditions in Phnom Penh were primitive: for example, special arrangements had to be made for the electricity to be turned on in the section of the city where Tuol Sleng is located...

...He was asked what medicines he might need, and told to ponder the "welfare of his wife and children," also under detention...

...and certain social classes, most notably the urban population...

...But after three trips Hawk returned with thousands of documents, a large collection of photographs of the extermination centers and killing fields, and hundreds of recorded interviews with survivors of the Khmer Rouge period...

...The party has us beat women convicts with whips and absolutely not beat them with our hands...

...T he uncertainty and fear that the 1 Khmer Rouge sowed throughout Cambodian society did not leave the security forces untouched...

...All [the guards] ever thought of was beating...

...We started using torture in the morning with about 20 whippings with fine rattan...

...He did ask security officials to "clarify what all he was to report," which reveals something about the bewildered state of mind of the party's victims...

...We should not violate...

...There is no trace of cynicism or irony in the interrogation manual...

...The premature death of a prisoner was regarded as a major defeat...

...In any normal society, even in most dictatorships, such guidelines might be appropriate...

...Prisoners were seldom accused of overt acts of rebellion...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 19 And since all they thought of was beatings, the enemy was responding with nonsense, with indiscriminate accusations...

...Although the lecture ranged over a wide terrain (for example, interrogators are cautioned to sharpen pencils before taking down a confession), most attention was given over to the theory and practice of torture...

...if anything, the tone is inspirational...

...Torture "is not something we do for the fun of it," or done "out of individual anger or for self-satisfaction...

...As an alternative to torture, security officers were advised to suggest that the prisoner's life would be spared if he cooperated...

...Another approach was to "have them think of their wives and children," who, in all probability, were also prisoners and might well face a session with the torturer unless the inmate's attitude changed...

...That the world not forget the monstrous injustices committed under Khmer Rouge rule is of more than historical importance...

...Torture, therefore, is inevitable, but only as one of several different techniques of questioning...

...With torture and murder occupyinga central place in the governing of Democratic Kampuchea (as the country was known under Pol Pot), it was inevitable that a special bureaucracy of torturers, interrogators, and executioners would emerge...

...Recent rumors suggest that Pol Pot is seriously ill with cancer, and no longer serves as political leader of the Khmer Rouge...

...Mey Phan, laborer, "mental...

...Specifically, the Commission is asking that the Khmer Rouge be formally indicted before the World Court on the charge of genocide...

...Other prisoners were recorded as suffering wounds of the back, neck, and head,as well as tuberculosis, emphysema, and stomach trouble...

...The party, however, regarded it a notable triumph to have kept him alive long enough for still more fictitious information to be extracted before the revolution finally put him out of his, misery...

...The Khmer Rouge leadership enforced a puritanical sexual code with brutal rigor, to the point of executing young Cambodians for flirting, becoming engaged without party approval, or holding hands in public...

...Indeed, that the world has not responded in outrage to the Cambodian tragedy is itself altogether disturbing...

...The party has us beat women convicts with whips and absolutely not beat them with our hands, We should not violate...

...the Khmer Rouge hated Russians almost as much as Americans, and today seize every opportunity to murder Soviet personnel posted in Phnom Penh...

...It would be a hideous distortion of justice if those who, in Cambodia, committed similar, and much more recent, atrocities were allowed to live normal lives, and perhaps, at some future date, again rule the country they once destroyed...

...We do whatever is necessary to make them uncertain about thequestion of life and death so that they may still hope that they will survive...

...26, 1976...

...In theory torture was to be no more than a supplement to propaganda and indoctrination, but in practice it was far easier for interrogators simply to beat the victims until they confessed to whatever lurid fantasy the party dreamt up...

...subversive networks organized by the CIA, KGB, or a combination of several foreign intelligence services...

...rr oday, it is a relatively simple affair 1 to mobilize "world progressive opinion" against South African apartheid, military dictatorship in Chile, or the democratically elected leader of a scorned nation like El Salvador...

...For example, on July 6, 1977, 127 persons were killed, all of them party members suspected of disloyalty to Pol Pot...

...At that time we beat him to death...

...the men said most likely to succeed him are equally as guilty of crimes against humanity...

...Generally, though, the preferred method of interrogation was beating...

...On the other hand, interrogators were cautioned against various strategies of the enemy, particularly claims that a prisoner had only "confessed because of the pain...

...Pen Sarin, cook...

...In pressing this effort, Hawk emphasizes that the killings in Cambodia were not indiscriminate, but that certain groups were singled out for extermination: Buddhist monks and the clergy of other religions...

...An inmate who died is described in a notation at the bottom of the report: "Croaked: the one named Khheang Sek, posted as a document carrier at the General Staff, as a result of torture by being placed in a plastic bag...

...Another interrogator, But Heng, aged 26, was arrested for beating prisoners to death...

...W hen at the beginning of 1979 the Khmer Rouge fled in panic before the invading Vietnamese army, they left behind in Phnom Penh thousands of documents compiled during their three-and-a-half years in power...

...ne of the most illuminating documents unearthed in the Tuol Sleng archives is an interrogator's manual—in reality, forty or so pages of lecture notes prepared by a senior security official for delivery to his subordinates at the prison...

...Nor, of course, should prisoners be killed...

...Those directly responsible for Khmer 'Rouge atrocities, from Pol Pot, to the rest of the political leadership, to the military commanders, to those who ran the torture and extermination centers, today remain a force to be reckoned with inside Cambodia...

...Immediately upon taking him back where he belonged, I called over Chhay and Teng to help me beat him...

...Prisoners were photographed upon entering the institution, and then re-photographed after torture and sometimes after execution...

...Never during his tours of the interrogation areas did he hear genuine questioning, only "thuds and crashes" and "screaming about 'are you "C" or not.' " ("C" was a shortened version of CIA...

...Subsequently my activities were: Brother Chan had me question the KGB types he had gotten me myself...

...Tuol Sleng's inmates generally hovered between life and death...

...Interrogators at Tuol Sleng were in theory not to inflict torture without the approval of senior security officials, and were obliged to complete daily reports on "measures taken" during questioning...

...Although many victims were killed almost at random in villages or fields, others were killed under more formal circumstances, particularly if suspected of membership in Arch Puddington is on the staff of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in New York...

...The reasons are many: the geopolitical priority of bringing Vietnamese occupation to an end...

...The most significant documents deal directly with the very policies that earned the Khmer Rouge their greatest notoriety: the torture and execution of thousands upon thousands of their fellow Cambodians...

...Nevertheless, the Kremlin surely understands that the Khmer Rouge drew inspiration principally from Stalin, and are sensitive to the parallels that might be drawn between Pol Pot's policies and such Stalinist episodes as the Ukrainian terror-famine and the persecution of national minorities following World War II...

...Tuol Sleng held the most important of Pol Pot's enemies: Lon Nol's military officers, pre-revolutionary civil servants, and suspect Khmer Rouge cadres...

...my activity was that I set fire to her ass until it became a burned-out mess, then beat her to the point that she was so turned around I couldn't get any answer out of her...

...Torture should not be overdone, should not be applied in a "subjective" way, and interrogators were "not to engage in beatings in an unorganized manner...

...But the record reveals it was torture that proved ultimately successful in extracting his confession: threatened with further beatings, the prisoner agreed to cooperate...

...Prisoners were assumed guilty, and it was further assumed that no prisoner ever acted alone, but carried out traitorous acts as a part of an enemy network...

...the enemy then croaked, ending her answers...

...Inmates' health should be constantly evaluated, and prisoners should be "kept alive for a long time, to get answers for the party...

...Torture was to Cambodia what interrogation and trial are to the civilized world...

...American exhaustion and shame over our conduct in Southeast Asia...

...The new government has therefore released an impressive volume of papers, which has been translated and is being made available to scholars and journalists in the United States...

...Among the entries for April 24, 1977, are Chea Chhay Hen, market chairman, unclean wound...

...The security staff was exhorted to greater effort, greater watchfulness, greater resourcefulness in encounters with the "enemy...

...There were no judicial procedures, not even the show trials to which errant party members have been subjected in other Communist societies...

...The reference here is to a favorite Khmer Rouge practice of placing a plastic bag over a prisoner's head until he became unconscious...

...When ready to confess, prisoners were to be allowed to proceed without prompting...

...The various versions of confession extracted from each prisoner were carefully recorded and filed away...

...The most plausible explanation is that the chief of the department, a Khmer Rouge official, had fallen out of favor, was arrested and executed, and then, in a pattern repeated throughout Cambodian society, a housecleaning of subordinates perceived as tainted by association with the old chief was undertaken, right down to the humblest workers...

...Interrogators were not immune from these strictures, as the manual notes: Some comrades, asked to interrogate on political matters, instead interrogated on the matter of morality with women and in accordance with their happy-go-lucky ideology...

...As the interrogators were reminded, no matter how much the party might "sniff and ferret for days and months, right up to [the prisoners'] deaths, nevertheless the secrets of the CIA organization are in them in greater or smaller measure...

...The following day, it was the children's turn: eighty-five sons and daughters of previously executed prisoners were killed.rri he organization principally responsible for the translation and publication of the Tuol Sleng documents is the New York-based Cambodian Documentation Commission...

...The Khmer Rouge government-in-exile is still recognized as Cambodia's representative to the United Nations, and within the country the Khmer Rouge control the largest, and most effective fighting force among the three movements working to liberate their homeland from Vietnamese domination...

...The author of the interrogation manual recounts the great lengths to which the party went to save the life of a prisoner who attempted suicide by swallowing nails...

...a psychological unwillingness to come to grips with the enormity of Cambodia's fate...

...The daily charts completed by security personnel on the "status of the enemy" provide a hint of the universal agony within the inmate population...

...The Commission's efforts are eminently deserving of support...

...At the central Khmer Rouge prison and execution facility, Tuol Sleng, dossiers were maintained on each prisoner from the time of arrest until execution...

...A crucial message of the interrogation manual is to avoid emphasizing "torture over propaganda...

...Sometimes prison officials would note in the margins the type of torture employed in a given case...

...The Soviets harbor few sympathies for Pol Pot and his accomplices...

...Prevented him from sleep and put him with the mosquitoes...

...At that time, after questioning for one morning, one of these guys made an incident jumping out of a third story...

...This man was evidently a sadist who beat prisoners for all the "subjective" reasons of which the party disapproved...

...Except at meals...

...The Khmer Rouge also maintained a policy of exterminating the wives and children of executed enemies of the revolution...

...This man probably knew nothing of genuine interest to the Khmer Rouge, and his "confession" was nothing more than a desperate ploy to avoid torture...

...the fact that Cambodian exile organizations lack political influence...

...The execution schedules provide a grisly chronological history of the Pol Pot period: first to go was Lon Nol's officer corps, followed by civil servants and other functionaries from the prerevolutionary era, followed by their wives and children...

...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987...

...The Commission has thus initiated a campaign designed to ensure that the Khmer Rouge, or at least its leadership, never play a role in a future government of a free and independent Cambodia...

...Interrogation methods emphasized brute force over psychological torture: brain-washing was apparently too tedious a procedure for the Khmer Rouge...

...This group included many ordinary workers, among them: Deo So Meng, ex-private in water supply department...

...In this way, the security net was cast in ever-widening —and increasingly paranoid—circles...

...Worst of all, prisoners sometimes died from excessive torture before making confessions and naming names...

...ethnic minorities, like the Chams...

...But as the author acknowledges, when an interrogator limits himself to political persuasion, the prisoner confesses "at an extremely low level...

...Once he had croaked no report was yet made...

...There were executions each day at Tuol Sleng, and it was customary to organize the victims by occupation or some other category...

...And here, it appears, the security forces faced something of a dilemma...

...And, of course, his victims sometimes died before a confession could be obtained, a clear loss for the organization: I questioned this bitch who came back from France...

...I waited until the proper day to make the report in order to throw the upper echelons off the track so they wouldn't take any notice I had slipped up and croaked him immediately...

...And„ of course, there were the daily execution schedules...

...Even prison interrogators were subject to revolutionary justice: they could be charged as traitors, for overzealousness in using torture, or for not applying torture rigorously or often enough...

...Moreover, only seven of Tuol Sleng's inmates survived, these being prisoners whose special skills were of use to the jailers...

...All told, some 20,000 were executed at Tuol Sleng in less than four years...

...The inmate had already made a fairly thorough confession, and would no doubt soon succumb before the blows of an executioner's club...

...These papers eventually fell into the hands of the new, Hanoi-installed rulers headed by Heng Samrin, a former Khmer Rouge official...

...Thus the schedule for July 4, 1977, lists 126 women, mostly widows of workers who had already met their fate...

...In the afternoon there were about 20-30 whippings with electrical wire instead...

...Nothing in the documents- gives the mildest hint that party officials recognized the insanity of the whole process...

...One guard, accused of "Agitating Against Beating the Enemy," somewhat surprisingly offered a straightforward defense: he said that prisoners were confessing simply to avoid further beatings...

...The "accomplices" were then arrested and tortured until further names were divulged...

...The Khmer Rouge also kept complete records of executions...

...A typical "measures taken" report notes: On the night of Sept...

...Moreover, the liquidation of these groups was sanctioned by the Khmer Rouge by the astonishing device of "prohibiting" the existence of those classes which could not conform to the new revolutionary order of things...

...Finally, it was the Khmer Rouge cadres who fell out of favor...

...Eang Kim, section leader at lumber mill, chest pains, unconscious...

...Interference by security personnel would, it was said, "make the essence of the response vague and meaningless...

...The interrogators were instructed to remain detached during a torture session...

...instead, mistakes, accidents, or an inability to meet irrational production quotas 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 were labeled deliberate attempts at sabotage...

...Almost always, execution was preceded by torture...

...There were daily reports on the prisoners' health, including notations of who had died from torture...

...Hawk eventually found his way to Phnom Penh, where he began to collect archives housed in Tuol Sleng, which has been transformed into a museum of the Khmer Rouge genocide...

...Prisoners should "write in their own hand, in their own way of speaking, in their own sentences, with their own thoughts...

...Other techniques were used in the case of this particular prisoner...

...Quite the contrary...

...Then he hurled his head against something and broke it open...

...On July 22, 1977, eighty employees of the Department of Public Works were executed...

...There is also the fact that the Khmer Rouge were Communists, and therefore received little more than pro forma denunciation from the Soviet Union and the international left...

...Som Sen, water supply center nurse...

...The executions were carried out at the various prisons-cum-extermination centers established—usually in former schools or pagodas—in the various regions of the country...

...After threatening him a couple of times I told him to pull off his shirt and put the arm shackles on him...

...Thus: On 21 September, 1976, we received instructions from the organization to use torture...

...But in Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea, they simply intensified a grotesque charade, where innocent men were forced to confess'in their own sentences"—to absurd crimes, the specifics of which had been determined by their jailers...

...Nonetheless, two doctors were summoned to prolong his life so that more questions could be asked and more torture applied...

...Croaked: the one named Khheang Sek, posted as a document carrier at the General Staff, as a result of torture by being placed in a plastic bag...

...Five hundred eighty-two prisoners were executed on May 27, 1978, the highest figure for any single day...