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institution. Its mission was to protect the Party Center. It accomplished this task in part by killing all the prisoners and in part by altering their autobi-
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ographies to align them with the requirements and suspicions of the Party. Control over biographies, inmates, and the personnel working at S-21 was absolute and followed a complex “discipline” (viney) that enabled the keepers to dominate the kept and to preside over their refashioning. 3 S-21 combined incarceration, investigative, judicial, and counteres-pionage functions. Some documents refer to it as a “ministry” (kro-suong), others as an “office” (munthi). Counterparts of santebal in other Communist countries would be the Soviet NKVD, the East Ger-man Stasi, and the Central Case Examination Group in China. Parallels also exist between S-21 and such bodies as the American FBI and the British MI5. In fact, most twentieth-century nations have a national security apparatus. Unlike many of its counterparts, however, S-21 deployed no agents in the countryside or overseas and had no central policymaking office. After mid-1976, its functions were carried out almost entirely at Tuol Sleng. For these reasons I use the names “S-21,”
santebal, and Tuol Sleng interchangeably.
Although S-21’s mission and the duties of people working there were not spelled out in law, for DK had no legal code and no judicial system, they resembled those of the Soviet secret police, empowered by the Soviet law of February 1936 “to uncover and combat all tendencies and developments inimical to the state and to take for this end all measures deemed necessary and expedient.” 4
Strictly speaking, S-21 was an interrogation and torture facility rather than a prison. Although people were confi and punished there, no one was ever released. The facility served primarily as an anteroom to death.
The two men who ran santebal reported directly to the collective leadership of DK, known as the Upper Organization (angkar loeu), the Organization (angkar), or the “upper brothers” (bong khang loeu) to outsiders and as the Party Center (mochhim pak) or leading apparatus (kbal masin) to members of the CPK. The Party Center was the nerve center of the country. Its membership altered over time, but its highest-ranking members, who were also those most directly concerned with the operations of S-21—Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ta Mok, Son Sen, and Khieu Samphan— remained members throughout the regime and, indeed, into the 1990s. 5
Secrecy at S-21
S-21’s task of defending the Party Center was given the highest priority by DK’s leaders. Speaking to sympathetic Danish visitors in July 1978,
the Deputy Secretary of the CPK, Nuon Chea (“Brother Number Two”), explained: “The leadership apparatus must be defended at any price. If we lose members but retain the leadership, we can continue to win victories. . . . There can be no comparison between losing two or three leading cadres and 200–300 members. Rather the latter than the former. Otherwise the Party has no head and cannot lead the struggle.” 6 The Party’s theoretical journal, Tung Padevat (Revolutionary Flags) had taken a similar position earlier in the year when an editorial had asserted, “If there is damage to the Center, the damage is big. . . . The leading apparati (kbal masin) must be defended absolutely. If we can defend them, we can defend everything else.” 7
The existence of S-21, the location of the Party Center, and the identity of those inside it were closely guarded secrets. Talking to the Danes, Nuon Chea insisted that “it is secret work that is fundamental. We no longer use the terms ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’; we use the terms ‘secret’ and ‘open.’ Secret work is fundamental to all we do.... Only through secrecy can we be masters of the situation and win victory over the enemy who cannot fi out who is who.” 8 Secrecy was always fundamental at S-21. In mid-1976, when a prisoner managed to escape from