Read Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison for Free Online Page A

S-21, a study document prepared at the prison viewed the incident with alarm:
Secrecy was broken. The secrecy we had maintained for the last 3–4 months has been pierced. When there’s no secrecy, there can be no santebal, the term has lost its meaning. . . . If they were to escape they would talk about their confessions. The secrecy of santebal would be broken at exactly the point where it must not be broken. 9
Secrecy was maintained at S-21 by keeping outsiders away from the compound, clearing the neighborhood, limiting the distribution of the documents produced, burning papers instead of throwing them away, blindfolding prisoners when they were moved from place to place, and forbidding contact between the interrogation and document groups in the prison on the one hand and less privileged employees on the other. Guards were forbidden to talk to prisoners, and prisoners were forbidden to talk to one another. High-ranking prisoners were held and interrogated in buildings separate from the main complex. Finally, nearly all interrogations took place in buildings to the east of the compound, supposedly out of earshot of prisoners and personnel. An S-21 document from September 1976, setting up day and night guard rosters, noted that guards were not allowed to follow interrogators into interrogation rooms or to “open windows to look at enemies” being questioned.
Most brutally, secrecy about S-21 was maintained by killing nearly all the prisoners. 10
S-21’s existence was known only to those who worked or were con-fi there, to a handful of high-ranking Party fi and to cadres charged with santebal duties in the zones and sectors. When briefi their subordinates, Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Son Sen, and Ta Mok—by 1978, Brothers One through Four—occasionally named important “enemies” who we know had already been interrogated at S-21 and had confessed to counterrevolutionary crimes. None of these statements, however, ever referred to S-21 or santebal by name.
No documentary evidence survives to tell us when, why, by whom, and under what guidelines santebal was formally established. Predecessor units existed in the Khmer Rouge army during the Cambodian civil war (1970–1975); S-21’s immediate forebear, it seems, had operated in Sector 25 north of the capital from 1973 to 1975. The two men most intimately concerned with such operations at that time were Son Sen (1930–1997, alias Brother 89 and Khieu), a ranking military commander, and his subordinate, a former schoolteacher named Kang Keck Ieu (c.1942–, alias Duch), charged with security matters. Under DK, Son Sen was the deputy prime minister, responsible for defense and national security. Santebal was one of his responsibilities. Duch, who reported to him, was the commandant of S-21 itself.
Workers at S-21
S-21 had three main units: interrogation, documentation, and defense. A photography subunit operated within the documentation unit. Subunits operating within the defense unit, the largest at S-21, included one that guarded the prisoners, another that brought prisoners in and took them to be executed, a third that provided rudimentary medical services, and a fourth that was responsible for economic support.
A helpful guide to the higher-ranking personnel at S-21 is an internal telephone directory containing forty-six names. It must have been prepared before November 1978, when one of the interrogators listed in it, Chea Mai, was arrested. 11 The directory lists twenty-four names in a “hot” (kdau) section of the interrogation unit, fourteen in “documents,” five in a “separate” (administrative) category, and six others, probably also interrogators, in an unlabeled group.
The titles that preceded names in the telephone directory paralleled the three-tiered ranking system that operated within the CPK, whereby Party
members progressed from belonging to the Communist Youth League (yuv’kok) through candidate membership (triem) to “full-rights” membership (penh