When the War Was Over (51 page)

The sorrow of the revolution seeped into their lives nonetheless. Vanna received a letter from her mother saying that she was seriously ill and begging Vanna to come home. Vanna asked her chairman but the answer was no, there were no leaves of absence from the factory. Vanna obeyed. She heard that her mother died a few months later. After that there were no more letters from her family. Vanna was now alone in the revolution.

It was 1977, and sometime around September one of the girls fell ill and was taken to the hospital. There she saw soldiers wounded in what she was told was a battle against the Vietnamese.

About the same time stories spread on the factory floor that there was trouble in the girls' native Eastern Zone. Some cadre, or the east itself, were accused of becoming “very vicious.” Some Eastern Zone cadre were said to have become traitors. The girls heard that the Southwestern Zone had sent in new cadre to replace the vicious or traitorous Eastern Zone cadre. A mass meeting was called in the factory to discuss the Vietnamese threat, but no mention was made of the trouble in the east. This concerned the girls at least as much as the Vietnamese threat: Who were the cadre, were they friends or family, did they come from their home villages, what did it mean for them?

The girls knew better than to raise those questions at the meeting. There was only one official topic—this new, ill-defined threat from Vietnam. But the girls' worries were well placed. The revolution was running out of victims, running out of scapegoats to blame for the inherent problems of the state.

There would be no protection for even these favored youth, or for thousands of party members, cadre, and soldiers. Families of Vanna's friends would be massacred in the next round of executions and purges. After destroying the old society and isolating the people of the country, the Center leaders turned against their own people.

The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.

Most Respected and Beloved Party, Most Respected and Beloved Elder Brother leaders of the Party, I ask the most respected and beloved party and brothers to have mercy on me. I have never even once had the least feeling of betrayal against the party . . . Given the ideals I hold what can I do but tell the Party, sincerely, that I very much fear this kind of death . . .

 

 

If a regime can be understood by the institutions it creates, Democratic Kampuchea should be remembered through Tuol Sleng. This central interrogation, torture, and death chamber was set up inside a complex once housing a primary school and lycée in Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge threw out the students, sending them to labor camps when it did not kill them forthwith. They closed down the other schools of the country, but the buildings at the Tuol Sleng-Tuol Svay Prey school complex were handed over to the secret police. Destroying childhood and education; murdering the gifted and the innocent in the name of revolution; that is part of what Tuol Sleng represents.

There are multiple ironies the least of which is that Duch, the head of Tuol Sleng, was a former schoolteacher named Kong Kech Eav.

The four former school buildings on the campus were divided into discrete areas for imprisonment and torture of the victims, housing for the guards and executioners, and storage space for the voluminous records. The police kept dossiers on most of the 20,000 victims brought in for interrogation, compiling hundreds of thousands of pages of confessions, photographs of the victims, and instructions on the torture of prisoners. The mass of dossiers provides a rare, if uneven, history of a communist party.

Classrooms were subdivided into crude cells by short brick walls that reached halfway to the ceiling. Lecture halls were outfitted for torture with iron manacles, whips, hooks, and beds with spring mattresses where prisoners were shackled. The former campus grounds held the huge water tanks used for dunking and nearly drowning the victims. Old student notebooks were used to keep records. The school bulletin boards were used to post rules for the victims, admonishing them not to cry out loud under torture, to answer questions directly and without elaboration, and to follow other awful rules while awaiting their deaths.

Duch oversaw a precise department of death. His guards dutifully photographed the prisoners upon arrival and photographed them at or near death, whether their throats were slit, their bodies otherwise mutilated, or so thin from torture and near starvation that they were beyond recognition. The photographs were part of the files to prove the enemies of the state had been killed. Duch even set aside specific days for killing various types of prisoners: one day the wives of “enemies”; another day the children; a different day, factory workers.

Such attention to detail had become a signature of Duch during his rise through party ranks. He had been a schoolteacher in Kompong Cham province, in what became the Eastern Zone, but when he joined the revolution he worked in the southwest and eventually made his mark in that zone's security branch. He is credited with perfecting the excessively secret purge system of the Khmer Rouge while serving in the southwest during the early war years as the zone's security chief.

He was transferred to the Special Zone around Phnom Penh in 1972 to establish the security branch there, one of the most sensitive and weakest zones during the war. When the party central committee inherited the army and bureaucracy of the Special Zone in 1975, Duch naturally, and by dint of his record, took over the secret security police for the entire nation. It was a party organization, however, not part of the government. Duch had only to answer to Pol Pot as head of the party and to some members of the elite standing committee. Son Sen, the equivalent of the minister of defense and
head of the armed forces, was Duch's most immediate supervisor—or rival. In a country ruled by terror, the man who “uncovered” and killed enemies of the revolution became more important as the party leaders grew more fearful of enemies from within and without.

Duch became one of the half dozen most important leaders in the country as Tuol Sleng became the nerve center of the system of terror. Shortly after Tuol Sleng began operating in 1976, the consensus among the party leaders began breaking down and Duch was charged by Pol Pot to uncover enemies in the party as well as in the population. Duch not only arrested suspects named by Pol Pot, he helped concoct the evidence against them. By controlling confessions of victims, hence the “evidence” of crimes, he was gradually able to manipulate the party leaders and point to unsuspected “enemies.”

Duch and his police force took on the powers of judge, jury, and executioners. Tuol Sleng ultimately became a monster out of control.

The party hierarchy began suspecting some of the cadre and higher-level officials when they received reports of unsatisfactory progress in the countryside in the first part of 1976. Ieng Thirith's report from the northwest was one of the more worrisome. The Center interpreted these problems as signs of dissent within their ranks. While some of the cadre in the field undoubtedly objected to certain orders, there seemed little reason for the Center to feel threatened by its own people.

The available evidence suggests the opposite. The zone leaders cooperated fully in the initial evacuation of the capital, in the orders to turn the city people into peasants overnight, to destroy all individual rights, to confiscate property in the name of the regime, to purge the minorities, and to use terror to enforce these changes. There was agreement on the basic direction and ideas behind the revolution, agreement to take a “great leap” into the future over the backs of the people.

But there were questions about authority and as time passed, these were coupled with increasing doubts about the chosen revolutionary path. There were small battles in the streets of Phnom Penh between soldiers of the different zones. The leaders transformed their impatience for economic miracles into paranoia, into a search for those enemies who were robbing them of success. In 1976 they gathered in a series of meetings to reassess. The meetings led to the decision to promulgate a four-year economic plan; to purge newly suspicious members of the party according to a “network” system
of investigation; to accelerate the socialist revolution; and to destroy the historic compromise achieved over the delicate question of the party's origins and its relationship with Vietnam.

In communist parlance, the party leaders shifted their attention from eliminating or transforming the bourgeoisie to eliminating the bourgeois tendencies in the party itself. But in fact the party hierarchy was acting on its old, ingrained fears that their friends and allies were plotting deceptions. From the first days of the revolution the Khmer communists had suffered less from their enemies than from their friends—the Vietnamese who wanted to dominate the party, their own leaders who became informers for Sihanouk, the Chinese who supported Sihanouk to their detriment, and the Vietnamese, again, in their first postwar territorial disputes.

The Khmer communists' defense against further betrayals was twofold: They made cynical alliances with their enemies knowing they would break them, and they adopted a strategy to “smash” or murder prospective enemies before they had a chance to betray the party. Their temporary wartime alliances made largely through “united fronts” had been successful beyond anyone's imagination, involving Cambodians from Prince Sihanouk to the Buddhist clergy, the peasants, and the intellectuals.

But in the end paranoia, not enemies, was most responsible for bringing down the regime. As soon as it was expedient, the party broke these alliances, or fronts, violently. When it banned religion it did not just close down pagodas for all but a few days a year; the monks were killed and their pagodas taken over to store grain. When the communists were finished with Sihanouk, they did not give him a ceremonial role in the regime—they locked him up in the palace and made him their prisoner. And after they had used the Khmers who returned from exile in Hanoi to train their fledgling soldiers, they killed them.

In 1976, some former East Zone troops of an army division in Phnom Penh boldly demanded the right to marry freely. This led to an investigation and the inevitable victims and they in turn implicated their division commander, who was arrested and who then implicated several other East Zone cadres. So Phim unhappily went along with these arrests and executions to maintain Pol Pot's trust. This would last for little more than a year.

When the Center was faced with irrefutable proof of the first failings of the revolution, it blamed Koy Thuon and the old Northern Zone, inaugurating the first zone purge, or sweep. The Center ordered troops from the Eastern and new Central Zones to purge the old Northern Zone cadre in 1976. The soldiers arrested or murdered dozens of the old Northern Zone
cadre and replaced them with “loyal” cadre at the Center's directions. It was an ingenious method, because it implicated the leaders of the Eastern and Central Zones as well as the leaders in Phnom Penh. It also encouraged suspicion within the party. Perhaps this explains why the head of the Eastern Zone soon after arranged a dynastic marriage between his child and an offspring of the leader of the Northwestern Zone, to protect their zones should one be called upon to purge the other. (The ploy did not work.)

That same year, 1976, the party declared the inauguration of the socialist revolution and ordered the elimination of class alliances—of classes themselves. What that meant proved open to wide interpretation. Rich peasants who had fought with the Khmer Rouge during the war were executed as class enemies. So, too, were old people, party members, and soldiers whose relatives were sufficiently suspect to place them as members of the wrong class. Ieng Sary later described this class warfare or “political transformation” as a near disaster, and said cadre and old people had run amok in some zones punishing and killing the wrong people.

As a result, the party closed its ranks and dismissed thousands of members. The army also “cleansed” its ranks and even executed some of its soldiers from the wrong class background.

In the midst of this chaos, the Eastern Zone army was ordered to the border to push back encroaching Vietnamese troops. After several skirmishes, the Center rebuked So Phim, the Eastern Zone leader, for fighting the Vietnamese too zealously and warned him not to upset the tenuous balance on the border.

The end of the year brought the tallies from the December harvest and the party's disappointment with the Northwestern Zone's performance. Once the Center decided the Northwestern Zone cadre were to blame, not the Center's over-ambitious policies, the second zone purge was ordered. First, however, the secret police moved against Koy Thuon and completed that purge. Koy Thuon had been arrested earlier, but released. In January 1977, the Center jailed him in Tuol Sleng where Duch oversaw his torture and execution. Koy Thuon was accused and convicted of acting as a CIA agent since the sixties. It was noted that he also had a distinctly bourgeois background.