S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Oct, 2005  by Laurence S. Moss

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S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. (2002). Dir. Rithy Panh, Prod. Cati Couteau. 105 minutes. First Run/Icarus Films, Inc. (32 Court Street, 21st floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201).

During the start of the fall 2004 semester, I opened my Comparative Economic Systems course with selections from this documentary film. It worked by provoking student interest in the genocide problem, without the need for bloody images or piles of mangled corpses. It is an attention grabber but in a much different way.

The Cambodian carnage of 1975-1978 is staggering and difficult to comprehend. The death estimates cluster around 2 million, at a time when the entire population of Cambodia was less than 8 million. That means that 25 percent of the Cambodian population was murdered by their own ruling government. This is genocide, clear and simple.

In 1970, the Vietnam War was extended to Cambodia as a result of a successful coup against Prince Sihanouk by forces friendly to the Khmer Rouge (KR). The American forces subsequently bombed the countryside (it is alleged that 600,000 Cambodians died as a result of these bombings). The military purpose was to keep Cambodians from crossing the border and joining hostile combat against the American forces on location in Vietnam.

These aerial bombings became the pretext for an anti-capitalist/anti-USA genocide of vast scope and dimension. After all, went the reasoning, bombing campaigns must surely require local spies on the ground to give away strategic positions, and it is the job of the defending national forces to root out these spies in our midst and silence them.

One well-known killing center was named "S-21." It is a former public school located directly in Phnom Penh itself that now serves as a museum for curious tourists and a memorial honoring the legions of victims that passed through its portals to be interrogated, tortured, and subsequently shipped to a field for summary execution. In 1975, the victorious Khmer Rouge marched into the capital of Cambodia and ordered the residents out of the city. The KR closed this school and all other schools. All textbooks were burned, the local currency was abolished, all religions were banned, and the KR proceeded to set up centrally planned labor camps. Rooting out capitalist institutions requires the joint remedies of terror and execution, which Stalin pioneered during the 1930s. Cambodia would be no exception.

In this documentary film, the story of S-21 is told largely through the eyes of several S-21 survivors. They include at least one former prisoner (Heng Nath) and several prison guards, who were asked to come to Phnom Penh for a poignant reunion and a tearful reliving of what happened nearly a quarter-century ago.

The film opens with closeups of a typical Cambodian wooden house and its inhabitants carrying on the normal daily routines of family living. A tiny newborn is being cared for, and life in rural southeast Asia looks exactly as the textbooks describe. We quickly learn that one of the family members has a terrible past--he served as a prison guard at S-21! This film is about confronting this man and several of his colleagues who survived the period and are here today (2002) to both recall that past and discuss it openly on camera.

One former guard confesses that he is "sick all day long" this and every day of his life. Furthermore, he "didn't want to do it" but, after all, he had no alternative. The slightest expression of remorse or moral concern would have meant his immediate death. His mother summarizes what happened to her son most succinctly: "They turned my son into a thug that killed people."

Curiously, her son never pulled a trigger, since his job description did not include the actual executions themselves. He was stationed at S-21, which limited its activities to beatings and torture as part of the interrogation procedure, not executions. His story is that of a tiny cog in a killing machine. He rounded up suspects in the countryside, trucked them long distances during the night to Phnom Penh, roped them to each other as they entered S-21, kept them sleeping on the floor, reasonably clean, and beat down any aberrant behavior by the doomed prisoners. Food rations were kept to an absolute minimum so that body breaks (urination and defecation) were necessary only every few days rather than several times per day.

This guard's defenses are the familiar: "I was given orders; they terrorized me with their guns" and, most surely, "[t]he evil is the leaders who gave the orders." (Ironically, the principal leader of the KR, Pol Pot, had the singular distinction of dying peacefully in bed in 1998.) The surviving prison guards who tell their stories to the camera are rather ordinary looking and quite unassuming guys. It is hard to believe that they were part of this. But they were part of a division of labor--a powerful Cambodian killing machine of enormous regularity and efficiency.