Chandler on S-21

Tuol Sleng and S-21 - by David Chandler
Author of Voice from S-21, Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (1999)

I began reading documents from the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes in the early 1990s, and since that time I have read thousands of them, and I have also given many talks and seminars about the museum and the DK prison, known under Pol Pot as "S-21", that used to occupy its grounds. In my book, Voices from S-21 , I summarized my research, drawing on these documents and on interviews with survivors of the prison, and with people who had once worked there. The book has been translated, chapter by chapter, in the pages of Searching for the Truth (a monthly magazine of the Documentation Center of Cambodia). On several occasions, Cambodians have suggested to me that S-21 was invented out of whole cloth by the Vietnamese, so as to blacken the reputation of the Cambodian people and to indict them en masse for genocidal crimes. None of the Cambodians who spoke to me could be considered a "Khmer Rouge". I always replied to them that I believe that their suggestions were mistaken. The effort to invent S-21, I think, would have been far too costly for the Vietnamese, and far too complicated. The Vietnamese did not have the resources, for example, to compose the documents discovered in the S-21 archives (and thousands of others related to S 21, discovered elsewhere in Phnom Penh after the Vietnamese withdrew), to invent the names and backgrounds of workers at the prison, to fake the photographic evidence, and to invent biographies for the survivors and former workers at the facility. Moreover, had they mounted such an operation, it seems likely that someone who participated in it would have talked about it, especially after the Vietnamese withdrew their forces in l989.

To be sure, the impetus to turn Tuol Seng into a museum came from the Vietnamese., under the guidance of a Vietnamese army colonel named Mai Lam, who is now retired and living in Ho Chi Minh City. Mai Lam has been interviewed on several occasions. He says he is proud of his work in the site S-21 into a museum of genocidal crimes. He is also happy to have turned the killing fields at Choeung Ek, where over 10,000 prisoners at S-21 were executed, into a terrifying tourist destination. The Vietnamese established the museum at Tuol Sleng in 1979-1980 for several reasons. In the first place, I believe, it was important for them to base the legitimacy of their presence in Cambodia, and the legitimacy of the PRK government, on the fact that they had freed Cambodia from the "genocidal clique" of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, who were tried and condemned to death in absentia in August l979. It was also important for the Vietnamese, and for their allies in the Soviet Bloc, to distance the Vietnamese Communist party, and its Cambodian counterpart, from the communist regime of Democratic Kampuchea. It was important for the Vietnamese and the PRK to label Democratic Kampuchea a "fascist" regime, like Nazi Germany, rather than a Communist one, recognized as such by many Communist counties. Finally, it was important for the Vietnamese to argue that what had happened in Cambodia under DK, and particularly at S-21, was genocide, resembling the Holocaust in World War II, rather than the assassinations of political enemies that at different times had marked the history of the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Vietnam.

The Vietnamese organized S-21 into a museum, using the massive documentation that had survied at the site. Similarly, they turned Choeung Ek into a tourist destination after exhuming thousands of bodies there. In neither case did the Vietnamese invent an institution. Instead, the documents from the S-21 archive, the photographs of prisoners, and the interviews that have been conducted with survivors and former workers at the prison all convince me that S-21 was a Cambodian institution, serving the purposes of the leaders of a terrified and terrifying Cambodian regime.

Tags: cambodia