‘Better to destroy ten innocent people than let one enemy go free’
IN MARCH 1999, I hitched a ride with a mine-clearance organisation into a former Khmer Rouge zone.
We left Battambang early in the morning and began our journey down Route 10, one of the most fought-over stretches in Cambodia. After an hour of bouncing over spine-jarring roads, past hills that soared like cathedrals from the flat rice plains, we turned left at a junction and all signs of civilisation vanished. There were no houses, no people, no fields. The road was new.
Here the road threaded deep into the mountainous forest close to the Thai border and our ultimate destination: the former Khmer Rouge district of Samlaut. This was the last area to have ceased hostilities with the Cambodian government after more than thirty years of almost continuous upheaval. Samlaut had been the first place to rise up against the government in the late 1960s. And it was here, in June 1998, that the Khmer Rouge finally laid down their weapons, bringing the conflict full cycle and opening the area up to outsiders. Although the war was over, and the Khmer Rouge defunct, the same local leaders remained in control. But the ghosts of the past were still far from laid.
The jeep jerked to a halt at a military checkpoint marking the start of former Khmer Rouge territory. Shacks of recently returned refugees were huddled in the trees along the side of the road. Young soldiers in government uniforms carried AK-47s and stared impassively at us and, despite our smiles, remained sullen but let us through.
Samlaut had been an area of conflict since the 1960s when a peasant uprising was brutally crushed. Often considered the birthplace of the Khmer Rouge revolution, the area had now arrived at a tense peace. Uniformed Khmer Rouge soldiers mingled with civilians who had returned from refugee camps in Thailand and had begun to rebuild their homes and lives in an area that was heavily mined. It was a bleak part of the country. Dry jungle, denuded forest and neglected farmland bore witness to the years of war.
The mine-clearance team I was travelling with had arranged to meet the leaders in the area to discuss the removal of ordinance and hundreds of thousands of mines that lay waiting in the rich soil all around. While the meeting was taking place, I wandered over to a group of people lying in hammocks beside the district office and begun talking to a Khmer Rouge amputee. A short, wiry man appeared wearing a white T-shirt emblazoned with the initials ARC (American Refugee Committee). Shaking my hand he politely introduced himself in perfect English as Hang Pin. He told me that he had been a schoolteacher specialising in mathematics and that he had originally come from Phnom Penh and had recently worked in a refugee camp on the Thai border. He had worked with American aid organisations since 1997. He took a keen interest in my Leica and, using this opportunity to photograph the people in the group, I caught him in the frame. Large ears, bad teeth, cropped hair–he had aged a little, but the likeness to the photograph tucked in my back pocket was unmistakable. Hang Pin was Comrade Duch.
For twenty years no-one knew what had happened to Comrade Duch. He had left Phnom Penh with the rest of the Khmer Rouge when the Vietnamese invaded in 1979. On that same day, the 7th of January, a Vietnamese photographer crossed Monivong Bridge and entered the deserted city of Phnom Penh. Ho Van Tay had followed the Vietnamese 7th Division Armoured Corps that led the attack into Cambodia on Christmas Day 1978. An experienced journalist, Van Tay had covered the war against the Americans as a combat photographer and cameraman and had walked the entire length of the Ho Chi Minh trail, an extremely hazardous journey that took him three months to complete. He had been wounded in the leg during a US bombing raid and had filmed the liberation of Saigon in 1975.
Resistance was light. The Khmer Rouge defence collapsed under the weight of the Vietnamese onslaught. The night before, the division commander had asked Van Tay if he wanted to accompany him to Phnom Penh. They were still some hundred kilometres from the capital and Van Tay had expected the fighting to be heavy and protracted. He had known the Khmer Rouge before and, like many of his fellow countrymen, admired them for being formidable fighters.
‘Are you joking?’ he asked in disbelief.
The battle-hardened Vietnamese troops had never thought that the Khmer Rouge would give way so easily and many expected that the worst was yet to come, that Phnom Penh would be the place where the Khmer Rouge would make their stand.
‘No,’ the division commander replied. ‘This is for real, we’re going to take Phnom Penh.’
Clambering on top of an old American armoured personnel carrier he perched himself among sixteen other heavily armed soldiers. The column rumbled its way through the night, arriving on the outskirts of the city at dawn. Cambodian and Vietnamese scouts had gone on in ahead. They waited. They could hear the sound of small-arms fire and the occasional boom of cannon, the echoes rolling through the streets to where they sat. Then, when the news came in over the radios that the city had been liberated, the main Vietnamese regular forces went in. What they found stunned them.
For three years, eight months and twenty days Phnom Penh, under the Khmer Rouge, had remained a ghost town. Having evacuated the entire population at gunpoint as part of their vision to radically restructure Cambodian society, the city, save for a few thousand Khmer Rouge, became nothing more than an empty shell.
The central Monivong Boulevard became a vast deserted canyon where nothing stirred in the tropical heat. Its buildings had been painted white, but the back streets were scattered with the debris of looted buildings. Untamed gardens had begun to reclaim the empty houses. Chairs, pots, sewing machines, mattresses and old family photographs lay scattered about in the vacant buildings and deserted streets. Just after the Khmer Rouge had been driven from power, one of the first western journalists to visit Cambodia had walked the entire length of Monivong Boulevard in the early morning, the same distance as from Hyde Park to Clapham Common. He didn’t see a single soul. The Khmer Rouge had blown up the national bank before their departure and now thousands of useless bank-notes fluttered through the vacant streets. The same journalist came across a chequebook on the bank’s counter made out to ‘cash’ and dated 17 April 1975, exactly as its owner had left it almost four years before.
Street and shop signs had been painted out and cars were swept into huge piles along with dishwashers, fridges and other electronic appliances considered reactionary by the Khmer Rouge. There they sat among the weeds, rusting quietly in the scorching heat, no longer of use in the new society. Elsewhere telephones that had been ripped out of buildings from all over the city had been dumped in a large pile, doused with gasoline and set alight, leaving a blackened mass of melted plastic.
This was the scene that greeted Ho Van Tay when his country’s Soviet-built T-55 tanks clattered into the silent city.
The sun was already high in the sky as the column thundered along the empty boulevards, their bewildered troops at the ready. ‘It was completely quiet,’ Van Tay recalled. ‘They didn’t find anything. The Khmer Rouge had fled, they had just run away.’ Little did he realise that pairs of eyes were following their movements from the deserted buildings on either side of them. The grass was growing wild and coconuts lay where they had fallen in the middle of the streets. Armed with a 16mm camera and a Pentax, he shot scenes of the tanks arriving and the flag being raised. He then returned to Ho Chi Minh City with his scoop.
Van Tay delivered his material to his editor in Ho Chi Minh City and returned to Phnom Penh that same night. The traffic was heavy. Passing thousands of troops and columns of tanks, he arrived early the following morning. He filmed Khmer Rouge prisoners who had been captured and rounded up by the Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies, the vast majority of them children. ‘There were at least 2,000 that I saw and we had to feed them–they were very malnourished.’ They had been captured on the way to Phnom Penh and brought to a holding place in the city centre. Most of them were under fourteen years old and a large proportion were young girls. Many were so small that they couldn’t even carry their own AK-47s. Their fatigues were far too big for them. It was as though the Khmer Rouge army had somehow shrunk in the face of the Vietnamese invasion. Some older cadres were in their twenties, but most had fled, leaving an army of confused and frightened children to defend the country.
That same day, at about noon, accompanied by his editor, Van Tay drove through the city in an old US army jeep, looking for things to film. In one area he came across a series of shop houses containing bizarre stockpiles of items. The first contained a neatly stacked mountain of shoes that reached the ceiling–but only the left shoe. Next to it there was another shop that contained thousands of right shoes. A whole row of shops contained sewing machines that had been placed on top of one another. Next to it was another containing stacks of cooking pots, another with chairs and another filled with tables. Then, as Van Tay drove along the road from the Olympic stadium back towards the Independence monument, he passed through an invisible cloud of the most formidable stench. ‘I had smelt this smell before,’ he said. ‘It was very heavy in the air–not animal, but human. I can still smell it now.’
Van Tay and his colleagues followed the stench through what had been a well-to-do neighbourhood, passing large villas as they continued through the streets. ‘The closer we got, the worse it became,’ he said. Eventually they came to a corrugated-iron wall crowned with coils of razor wire. A sign above the entrance read, ‘Ecole Première de Tuol Sleng’. He prised the gate open and climbed through. They found themselves in the back yard of what had been a large schoolhouse. Rats scattered as they approached. Ahead was a metal-framed structure with a corrugated-iron roof and behind it four imposing grey buildings. Pots and chairs and sewing machines lay scattered about. Clothing hung from washing lines and several hammocks were suspended between the trees. It was clear that those who had once occupied the compound had left in a terrible panic.
The balconies of the buildings were covered in a netting of barbed wire; the former play area had recently been ploughed. Inside the rooms they found typewriters, telephones, photographs and office equipment, all of it hastily abandoned. Drawers had been left open and thousands of documents were scattered about. Bullets littered the floor next to a Chinese radio set. In another room they discovered hundreds of stacked fetters and padlocks that hung on nails with numbers next to them. Beside them lay a spilled bag of lime. Lying on tables were instruments of torture–whips, saws, axes, hoes and batons. Van Tay found busts of Pol Pot and a series of portraits that had been painted from photographs. One of the paintings depicted a particularly demonic-looking Pol Pot barking into a microphone. He crept up the stairs to the second floor of one of the buildings. ‘There were flies everywhere,’ he said.
More papers were scattered about amid tufts of hair and large, inch-deep pools of semi-dried blood. Peering through the window, he saw the source of the stench: corpses in varying stages of decomposition, chained to iron bedsteads. There were perhaps twenty or thirty bodies in different rooms–men, women, children–‘but it was impossible to tell their ages as they were so decomposed and swollen’. Van Tay had to clamber over some of them. Vermin ran everywhere. The victims had been hit on the head with a shovel, their skulls exploding on impact. ‘Some of the heads had been completely destroyed,’ he said. Careful not to disturb anything he tiptoed around the rooms. ‘There was a popping sound from the maggots under my feet.’
Gingerly, he made his way through the four buildings, taking pictures as he went. ‘My hands were shaking, I was so afraid.’ The last of the day’s light was beginning to fade as they made their way out. Passing through the gate, Van Tay and his crew discovered four children, including a month-old baby, all of them extremely sick and malnourished. They hurried off in their jeep to seek medical attention and to inform the authorities of what they had found. The Khmer Rouge’s darkest secret was about to be exposed to the outside world.
When I first arrived at Tuol Sleng in 1989 the buildings were empty save for a few guides who smiled and waved me in at the entrance. I walked straight to the first building that photographer Ho Van Tay had approached ten years before and, like him, peered inside. There in the room was a bed frame, some faded clothing, an old US army ammunition box and a table and chair. Below the bed was what looked like a large pool of dried blood. The authorities had hung one of Ho Van Tay’s photographs on the wall. Taken in 1979, it showed the same room with the same bed. The only difference was the distinct outline of a corpse, its hand outstretched.
Tuol Svay Prey, the district in Phnom Penh where the prison is located, roughly translates as ‘The Hill of the Poison Fruit Tree’. Tuol means hillock. Sleng, depending on the context, means either ‘bearing guilt’ or ‘the enemy of disease’; Sleng is also the name of a tree with extremely poisonous fruit. To the Khmer Rouge the prisoners at Tuol Sleng were known as Neak thos or ‘guilty persons’. To a handful of people assigned work nearby in the same section of the city, it was known simply as konlaenh choul min dael chenh: the place where people go in but never come out.
The occupying Vietnamese had transformed the prison into a museum, which opened a year after the liberation of the city. Situated in what had been a residential area, it comprised four three-storey buildings in a single compound. Beyond, there had been an execution ground and several mass graves. The whole area was sealed by an electrified fence and a corrugated-iron wall. The ground floor of building ‘A’ was where interrogations had taken place and where high-ranking prisoners were confined. The ground floors of buildings ‘B’ and ‘C’ had been converted into holdings for other important prisoners. They had been divided into cells with crude brick and cement partitions. Large holes had been smashed in the original walls by the Khmer Rouge to form a crude corridor linking the rooms to one another. Some of the cells contained shackles, a plate and an old US ammunition box used as a latrine, as if awaiting the next prisoner.
Outside sat two large empty pots under what looked like an exercise frame. The pots had once been filled with water into which prisoners had been forced. Then their wrists were lashed to the frame, they were hauled up and suspended in the air, dislocating their arms–a method known as ‘the rope’ in medieval Europe.
Inside building ‘B’ there was a glass cabinet that held a large pile of clothing stripped from prisoners. Geckos which had made their homes among the rags scattered for cover as I walked past. Beside the pile were various instruments of torture: a hoe, a whip, several shovels, as well as manacles and chains. There was a box that had once housed scorpions and other poisonous insects used in torture sessions. On the other floors the rooms had held prisoners in mass detention. They were stripped and made to lie down on the floor and held together by a large iron fetter. Outside, the prison regulations had been translated by the Vietnamese from a blackboard for the benefit of visitors. I stood in front of the signboard and read them. It was the only place in the museum where the Khmer Rouge spoke directly to you.
1. You must answer accordingly to my questions. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that; you strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your little wrong doings or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order keep quiet; when I tell you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many lashes of the electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations, you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of the electric discharge.
Inside, the photographs of the prisoners were put on display by the Vietnamese curators. Thousands of faces adorned the walls. There they were, as they had arrived at the prison–men, women, children, Muslims, Christians, ethnic minorities and a handful of foreigners. In some, the prisoners had attempted to smile as if the Khmer Rouge might take pity and somehow spare them. Others looked traumatised and some had received blows, their faces bloodied and swollen. Each person was tagged by a number. One shirtless boy had his number pinned on to the skin of his chest.
Looking at the photographs on the walls was a dizzying experience. As the prisoners looked at you they created a false intimacy and yet the repetition of so many faces stripped the prisoners of their individuality. My eyes darted around trying to find something that would allow me to comprehend what was in front of me. There were so many of them. Not until you walk through the empty corridors of Tuol Sleng does Stalin’s idiom that one death is a tragedy–a million a statistic, take on a terrifying potency. This was the only lasting trace that these people had ever walked on this earth before being ‘smashed to bits’, as the guards routinely reported to Duch. I could feel their eyes follow me. I realised I was seeing the world according to the faceless Angka or the ‘Organisation’ as the Khmer Rouge leadership called itself. When the victims looked back they were looking at their tormentors. Confronted with the enormity of what had happened, how was one to react?
I began to take photographs of the photographs. The last room displayed photographs of the mass graves found in various parts of the country, showing exhumed remains and mushroom-like skulls laid out in neat rows by the hundreds, whitened by the tropical sun. One survivor had been commissioned to depict Khmer Rouge atrocities in crude paintings which hung in the last few classrooms of the fourth block. They showed women being whipped and people being lowered into barrels of water. There was a large map of the country fashioned out of varnished human skulls from the mass graves found in the compound. And there, among other photographs, was one of the director of the prison, Comrade Duch.
I waited self-consciously in each room for the ghosts of the victims to talk to me. Walking down the empty corridors I thought I would leave with some deep question answered, or a newfound value, as though there was some great moral purpose in me being there. I tiptoed around, awkwardly taking photographs. The next room was the same and so was the one after it. Outside, storm clouds began to gather. I returned to the balcony to make my way to the next building and the heavens opened. The downpour was so heavy that I found myself trapped in the building. I could feel the panic rise within me.
One photograph stood out. I had seen it reproduced in books before. It was of a young mother cradling her baby. She sat there in front of the lens expressionless, resigned to her fate. Her baby lay sleeping in her arms. Her hair was a bob in the uniform Khmer Rouge style and her shirt was the standard black worn by everyone. A placard hung around her neck. On it was the date: 14 May 1978, and the number 462. Her name, I later found out, was Chan Kim Srun, her revolutionary name Saang. She was the wife of a senior Khmer Rouge cadre from the ministry of foreign affairs. Her eyes were swollen from crying.
I wondered what it was Kim Srun had seen that day–if she had any sense of what lay in store for her and her child. Was there something in her eyes that could tell us that she knew she was about to die?
‘Better to destroy ten innocent people than let one enemy go free’ ran a Khmer Rouge slogan. Because of the lack of information displayed at the museum we often assume that the prisoners of Tuol Sleng were innocent victims; the terror in the faces elicits a response of pity from the viewer. The popular image of the Khmer Rouge in the West was of young, fanatical murderers in black pyjamas, wielding guns. What is not immediately apparent to most visitors to the prison is that Tuol Sleng was created for rooting out enemies from within the party. The majority of prisoners were from the Khmer Rouge’s own ranks. This adds an unwelcome moral complication: among the photographs that I now faced there were interrogators as well as guards from the prison itself, Khmer Rouge who suddenly found their roles reversed during the many purges. The upside-down world of Tuol Sleng blurred the distinction between the guilty and the innocent.
Despite attempting to eradicate the past and found a new Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge were shaped by it. They sometimes referred to the past as a kind of memory sickness to which they were the cure. It was as though, as one writer has noted, people were killed simply for remembering a different world from the one the Khmer Rouge were trying to create. In their obsession with rooting out enemies and ‘cleansing’ the nation, death became the only purification.
It seemed no accident that Tuol Sleng had been a school. All over the country teaching and learning centres, pagodas and schoolhouses became places for ‘re-education’, often a Khmer Rouge euphemism for execution. Many senior cadres had been teachers. The principal purpose of the prison became the principal irony: by setting out to eradicate all trace of these ‘enemies’, the Khmer Rouge had unwittingly preserved their memory permanently, through documents and photographs.
And one of these photographs had led me to Duch.