Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison
In January 1979, Vietnamese troops captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh at the end of their two-year war against Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. As Vietnamese troops entered the city, they came upon the grounds of a former high school where they discovered several recently murdered men and a voluminous, hastily abandoned archive. They had stumbled across one of the most secret and horrifying institutions in Pol Pot's Cambodia, a prison code-named S-21, where in just less than four years some 14,000 men, women and children were incarcerated, tortured, and killed by the Khmer Rouge in a demented effort to cleanse the country of its political enemies. Only seven prisoners who entered S-21 emerged alive. During incarceration, prisoners were forced - often under brutal torture - to document elaborate, counter-revolutionary crimes they were told they had committed. The S-21 archives hold more than 4,000 of these confessions, as well as stacks of administrative records documenting daily life, interrogations and torture. David Chandler supplements analysis of these never before seen documents with interviews of survivors and former workers to bring to life the story of the people consumed in a course of auto-genocide.
How could S-21 happen? By comparing its rationale and techniques to those of such horrific twentieth-century phenomena as the Moscow Show Trials, Argentina's "Dirty War" in the 1970s, and the Holocaust, Chandler sorts out what was Cambodian, what was Communist, and what was universal about what happened at S-21.
