BOOK REVIEW OF WINTER 2001

VOICES FROM S21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison
By DAVID CHANDLER
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. 238 pages, $17.95 (paperback)

Sarah Stephens

Of all the horrors perpetrated by Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, the prison code-named S21, or Toul Sleng as it is now more commonly known, was perhaps the most secretive and disturbing. The former Phnom Penh high school became a center for mass torture, starvation, and execution during the three-and-a-half years that the Mao-inspired guerrillas ruled Cambodia. Of the fourteen thousand men, women, and children who entered the prison, only nine survived.
David Chandler, who first visited the prison in 1981 when it had already become a Museum of Genocidal Crime, has spent the last six years analyzing over a thousand confession texts and hundreds of other documents from the prison's archive. In doing so, he has tried to find answers to some of the most important mysteries surrounding Toul Sleng, namely how the prison worked, the identity of the "enemies" being held, when torture was applied, whether there were foreign models for the prison, and so on.
Prisoners brought to Toul Sleng between 1975 and 1979 were invariably met with the same charges: treason, or collusion with the enemy. If no confession was immediately forthcoming, or sometimes even if it was, interrogators would beat the prisoners with electric wire, use water torture, kick and punch, and occasionally administer electric shocks, in a demented effort to procure the required confessions, the vast majority of which, many researchers agree, were probably fabricated by the victims simply to appease their torturers. One of the central conundrums of Toul Sleng is the insistence by its authorities on obtaining detailed confessions, sometimes running to hundreds of pages, despite the fact that all the prisoners were doomed to execution in the killing fields, whatever they pleaded. Through his analysis, Chandler has found strikingly similar testimony from prisoners who could not have possibly colluded with one another, evidence, he says, that the prison authorities were looking for predetermined stories, and forced the confessions to fit to what they needed to hear. The reasons for this are more difficult to fathom, but may center on the prison authorities' desire to provide their superiors with a set number of captured and exterminated "enemies."

"Reading the confessions takes us inside the thought processes of a schizophrenic regime that was at once terrified and terrifying, clairvoyant and delusional, omnipotent and perpetually under threat," notes Chandler. The sheer numbers of people put to death at S-21 are staggering. Survivor Vann Nath-who escaped death when the authorities utilized his painting talent to record images of their regime-recalls hearing agonized screams of the victims throughout the night, and seeing truckloads of new prisoners arriving every day toward the end of the regime. Interrogators were routinely indifferent to their victims' pleas of innocence, an attitude which underscores the Khmer Rouge's paranoid dictum, "It is better to arrest ten innocent people than to let one guilty one go free."
Anyone who visits the prison today, in its somber reincarnation as the Museum of Genocidal Crime, is faced with a blood-chilling sea of black-and-white photographs, portraits of the victims, who were rigorously documented by the prison photographer before, and sometimes after, their interrogation and torture. Facing such a sea of pain and horror can only prompt the most obvious question of the book: how could S-21 happen?
Here, Chandler brings the prison's rationale and techniques into focus by comparing them to other horrific twentieth-century phenomena such as the Moscow show trials, Argentina's "dirty war" in the 1970s, and the holocaust. At the end of the day, he says, although there was something uniquely Cambodian, and uniquely communist about the prison, there were also universal themes. In searching for a meaning to all the violence, Chandler ends up resorting to the "human nature" argument, which, although convincingly presented, still feels somehow lacking, when faced with the enormity of the regime's cruelty. What would we do, he asks, if we were prison guards, forced to work for an organization that might at any moment turn round and kill us? Many would do the same thing, he asserts.
While his is not a conclusion that everyone will agree with, Voices from S21 is still an exceptional book. With over five hundred books and articles noted in the bibliography, and numerous quotes from previously unpublished documents, it is a must for Cambodia scholars, human rights advocates, and anyone who is interested in what is ultimately one of the most disturbing and inexplicable events of the twentieth century.

Sarah Stephens is a journalist and consultant living and working in Phnom Penh.