A Problem from Hell. Samantha Power
as a girls’ high school. They quickly discovered that of the 16, 000 Cambodians who had arrived there, only five had departed alive.151
The Tuol Sleng complex consists of four triple-story, whitewashed concrete buildings, lined on the top floor by a Motel 6– like balcony-corridor and overlooking identical grassy courtyards, once playgrounds for the young schoolgirls. A single-floor wooden building divides the compound in two. Some time in late 1975, Kang Keck Ieu (known as “Duch” ), a former schoolteacher, took over the management of the facility and helped turn a seat of innocence into a seat of inhumanity. Most of the instruments found in Tuol Sleng were primitive, “dual-use” garden implements. Building A, which contained individual prison cells, was divided into small rooms, each containing a metal bed frame, an ammunition box to collect the prisoners’ feces, and garden shears, lead pipes, and hoes. When the Vietnamese journalists first entered these rooms in 1979, they found these tools beside bloodied victims whose cadavers lay shackled to the bed posts. The prisoners’ throats had been slit, and their blood still dripped slowly from the beds onto the mustard-and-white-tiled floors.
When the Vietnamese wandered around the ravaged compound, they found other adornments, including bulkier torture implements and busts of Pol Pot. They also rummaged through surrounding houses and came across thousands of documents, notebooks, and photos. Years later this paper trail would be used to spur prosecution of the aging former KR leaders for genocide and crimes against humanity.
Like the Nazis, those who ran the extermination center were bureaucratically precise. A prisoner’s time at Tuol Sleng consisted of four basic activities. The prisoners were photographed, either upon arrival or upon death. They were tortured, often electrocuted as they hung by their feet, their heads submerged in jars of water. They were forced to sign confessions affirming their status as CIA or Vietnamese agents and to prepare lists of their “networks of traitors.” Then they were murdered. Low-ranking prisoners were usually disposed of quickly, whereas more senior inmates were typically kept alive for protracted torture sessions. The highest daily tally was May 27, 1978, when 582 people were executed. A day’s targets were often clustered according to their affiliation. For example, on July 22, 1977, the KR “smashed” those from the Ministry of Public Works.152 The photos and confessions of four Americans were also found. The men had disappeared in 1978 while sailing yachts off the coast of Cambodia. Hoping to convince their brutal torturers to relent, the men wrote detailed, bizarre accounts of their elaborate CIA plots to destabilize Cambodia.
If ever there was a document that captured the regimental tenor and terror of the KR regime, it was the set of instructions for inmates that had been posted at the Tuol Sleng interrogation center. It read in part:
1 You must answer in conformity with the questions I asked you. Don’t try to turn away my questions.
2 Don’t try to escape by making pretexts according to your hypocritical ideas.
3 Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dares to thwart the revolution.
4 You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect…
5 During the bastinado or the electrification you must not cry loudly.
6 Do sit down quietly. Wait for the orders. If there are no orders, do nothing. If I ask you to do something, you must immediately do so without protesting…
7 If you disobey [any] point of my regulations you will get either ten strokes of the whip or five shocks of electric discharge.153
An “interrogator’s manual” was another of the many damning documents left behind. A forty-two-page guide for Tuol Sleng torturers, it reminded them they should use both political pressure and torture on prisoners. “Prisoners,” the guide said, “cannot escape from torture. The only difference is whether there will be a lot of it or a little…We must hurt them so that they respond quickly. Don’t be so bloodthirsty that you cause their death quickly.You won’t get the needed information.”154
The Vietnameseinstalled regime was savvy enough to create a Tuol Sleng Museum almost as soon as it had solidified control of the capital city. The new leaders turned the snapshots of murdered prisoners into perhaps the most vivid visual indictment of evil in the second half of the twentieth century. The photos had been taken of boys and girls and men and women of all shapes, shades, and sizes. Some have been beaten; others seem clean-shaven and calm. Some look crazed, others resigned. As in the German concentration camps, all wear numbers. And all display a last gasp of individuality in their eyes. It is with these eyes that they interrogate the interrogator. That they plead. That they grovel. That they accuse. That they accost. That they mock. And for those who visit, that they remind. It is in their eyes, much more than in the stacks of skulls gathered in villages throughout Cambodia, that visitors are prodded to confront the extremity of the victims’ last days. With their eyes, most of the Cambodians signal that they remained very much alive and that they hoped to stay that way.
U.S. Policy: Choosing the Lesser Evil
The existence of the torture center testified to the depravity of the KR regime.155 Cambodia was not widely visited immediately following the KR overthrow, but enough evidence of KR brutality emerged for many Americans to know that they should celebrate their defeat. Senator McGovern, the new humanitarian hawk, learned of the Vietnamese victory and thought it offered the real irony. “After all those years of predictions of dominos falling and Communist conspiracies,” he remembers, “it was Vietnam that went in and stopped Pol Pot’s slaughter. Whatever their motivation, the Vietnamese were the ones who supplied the military force to stop the genocide. They should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize.” Foreign service officer Charles Twining, who by then had been transferred to the Australia–New Zealand desk at the State Department, was overjoyed at reports of the Vietnamese victory. He recalls, “I didn’t see how else change would have happened. Those of us who knew about the Khmer Rouge cheered, but we quickly realized that everyone else just heard it as ‘Vietnam, our enemy, has taken over Cambodia.’” Some prominent U.S. officials confessed publicly to being torn. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, told reporters in New York: “I almost always think it’s always wrong for a country to transgress the borders of another country, but in the case of Cambodia I’m not terribly upset…It is a country that has killed so many of its own people, I don’t know if any American can have a clear opinion of it…It’s such a terribly ambiguous moral situation.”156
But rational, interest-based calculations led the United States to different official conclusions, which quickly overtook these isolated bursts of relief among Cambodia watchers. The Vietnamese victory presented President Carter with a difficult moral and political choice. Which was the lesser evil, a regime that had slaughtered some 2 million Cambodians or a Communist regime backed by the Soviet Union that had flagrantly violated an international border and that now occupied a neighboring state? After weighing the politics of the choice, Carter sided with the dislodged Khmer Rouge regime. The United States had obvious reasons for opposing the expansion of Vietnamese (and, by proxy, Soviet) influence in the region. It also said it had an interest in deterring cross-border aggression anywhere in the world. But this principle was applied selectively. In 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between 100, 000 and 200, 000 civilians, the United States looked away.157 In the Cambodia case perhaps the most important factor behind Carter’s choice was U.S. fondness for China, which remained the prime military and economic backer of Pol Pot’s ousted government. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the problem through the Sino-Soviet prism. Since U.S. interests lay with China, they lay, indirectly, with the Khmer Rouge. Slamming the KR might jeopardize the United States’ new bond with China. Slamming the Vietnamese would cost the United States nothing.
With the policy decided and the tilt toward China firm, Secretary of State Vance called immediately for the Vietnamese to “remove their forces from Cambodia.” Far from applauding the KR ouster, the United States began loudly condemning Vietnam. In choosing between a genocidal state and a country hostile to the United States, the Carter administration chose what it thought to be the lesser evil, though there could hardly have been a greater one.
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