Judge rejects banality of evil and former S-21 death bookkeeper is heard

Phnom Penh (Cambodia). 10/05/2002: Suos Thy, former Khmer Rouge who used to be in charge of prisoner records at S-21, during the shooting of documentary movie, “S-21, the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine” of Rithy Panh
©John Vink/ Magnum

Ka-set
http://cambodia.ka-set.info

By Stéphanie Gée
28-07-2009

The hearing on Monday July 27th started with an infuriating morning of rarely sagacious interrogations and a witness who claimed too readily he did not remember to the point of irritating judge Lavergne. The latter took a stance in his questions, starkly rejecting the banality of evil. In contrast, Suos Thy, who used to be in charge of prisoner records at S-21, then called to testify, offered a clear and precise statement on his activities and the workings of S-21, “on the very mechanical fashion of a death registrar,” in the words of Thierry Cruvellier, observer at Duch’s trial.

A guard also assigned to the “rice field” late 1978
Kok Srov alternated between patrols inside and outside the S-21 compound, where he was assigned from late 1975 to late 1978. From his post, he saw the prisoners pass, “their body covered with wounds.” One was not spared the recurring questions of the judges on the prisoners’ detention conditions, food rations, etc. No, he did not see interrogation rooms where he was on duty and neither did he attend any interrogations, he claimed, adding that “the interrogators were the ones to escort the prisoners,” while the guards only opened the door and made the detainees come out. No, he never saw the accused interrogate a prisoner.

The former guard did not know “where the detainees were taken after the interrogation, but they disappeared from the cell.” He said he never witnessed any execution within the S-21 compound. Before Phnom Penh was captured by the Vietnamese troops, he was assigned “together with other people to work in the rice field” because there were no longer jobs at the centre. He thus came in support of the story of Him Huy, who testified before him and also claimed he had been assigned to the rice field late 1978.

Does Kok Srov remember David Chandler?
When it was her turn, judge Cartwright confronted him to the statements he made, several years ago, to David Chandler, author of “Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison”, who will be called to testify early August before the Chamber. Did Kok Srov remember David Chandler? “I met someone, but I cannot remember his name.” While he arrived at S-21 when he was 25, guards who arrived as early as mid-1977 were much younger, he had then confided to Mr. Chandler. Yet, the witness no longer remembered saying that. He now claimed that only a few were about fifteen years old. “Do you remember telling [David Chandler] that important prisoners at S-21 enjoyed special treatment?” “I cannot remember that part of the interview.” “You spent a lot of time at S-21 and were able to witness many events. Is that correct?” “It was such a long time ago. I have already forgotten most of those events.”

An unclear memory of his time at S-21…
“You told David Chandler there were a lot of screams, especially at night, when there was no other noise in Phnom Penh, and that the noises were so loud they could be heard a kilometre away. Do you agree with this statement you made?” “I am not aware of saying that. I did not know about it.” “You also told him that almost all the executions happened in the utmost secrecy and at night. Is that faithful to the way you remember it now?” “I have completely forgotten about this point.” “You also told him that although executions were not discussed openly, the stench of decomposing bodies mixed to the stench of faeces was dreadful. Do you remember saying that?” “I do not have a clear memory of that part of the interview.” And so on. Was the witness afraid of incriminating himself as the defence duly recalled it to the former S-21 staff members called to testify?

Quarrel Duch-Chandler
Then, the judge cited words of the accused, taken from a statement he allegedly made on February 18th 1976 during a “life meeting” and reported by David Chandler in his book, which the witness said he “was not aware of.” She then turned to Duch, to whom she read the excerpt again: “You must get rid of the view according to which beating prisoners is a cruel thing. Gentleness is inappropriate in such cases. You must beat the prisoners for national reasons, class reasons and international reasons.” The accused corrected: “That is remotely not what I said in reality.” He explained having said that “any person arrested by the Angkar was an enemy, and if one cannot consider them as enemies, one cannot make these people confess. It was a message conveyed to all interrogators.” Duch refused any reference to “cruelty” and stressed having answered to Mr. Chandler, “in a 13-page document in French” which he already submitted to the co-Investigating Judges. “And I will answer your questions again when Mr. Chandler comes and testifies in this courtroom.”

“I forget things a lot…”
Judge Lavergne’s first question to Kok Srov set the tone: “Can you first tell me if you suffer from memory problems?” “Given that these events go back a long time, I do not have a clear memory of them.” “You do not remember precisely what happened at S-21. Do you have memory problems in general or do these problems relate only to your memories of S-21?”, the judge insisted. “I know that I forget things a lot because I think a lot. What worries me most at the moment is how to support my family.” The judge then confronted him to the statements he made to the investigators of the co-Investigating Judges. The witness’ memory today failed him. “Are your memory problems recent? Because you were heard just over a year ago [on April 3rd 2008]…” “I forget a lot of things… What worries me most today is how to feed my family.” “Are you scared today, Mr. Kok Srov?” “No, I am not scared.” Jean-Marc Lavergne then recalled him that as a witness, he “took an oath” and he had the “obligation to participate to the search for truth.” The witness said he was aware of it but that did not change anything to his lack of cooperation.

“Ordinary” job at S-21
Was his work at a detention centre under the Khmer Rouge an “ordinary job” for him? “From what I saw, it was rather an ordinary job.” “Can you explain to me what was ordinary about this job?” “I say ordinary because, in all the places where I worked, it was always the same thing. And at the prison, it was simply another kind of work…” “Today, if you were asked to do another ordinary job of that kind, would you do it again?” “No, no, I would not do it again.” “The screams you heard, was that ordinary, was that normal? […] The smells you noted, what or whom were they the smell of?” “The wounded detainees were human beings physically, but the smell, I didn’t know any more if it was an animal’s stench or something else. […] It stank like a decomposing body, I think.” It was as if the French judge, outraged that the crime could take on an ordinary dimension, became the voice of the victims.

Judge Lavergne rejects the banality of the crime
He then prompted the witness to remember prisoners who suffered and asked him for help, questioning him: “Was that an ordinary job? Is this neither a good or bad memory, but an ordinary memory for you?” “I remember this job only partly…” No, Kok Srov did not see any prisoners kill themselves and he did not see anyone die at S-21 either. “Was the accused an ordinary chief to you?” “After seeing him and living there, I believe he directed work in an ordinary way and did not force us to do anything. […] It was ordinary because we were always made to do the same thing and we followed the orders in a routine way.”

To the investigators of the co-Investigating Judges, Kok Srov had stated, the judge recalled, that Duch gave “the general order, for instance, that to execute.” “Today, you are still telling us that he was warm but strict, someone ordinary?” “Yes, what I said now is true.” The witness argued that he had “not understood at the time that the regime had exterminated a large part of the population” and as far as he was concerned, he did “his best to survive.” “If I try to summarise, Mr. Kok Srov, if you have bad memories, is it because you have suffered personally or do you have them because others had them at S-21? Or is this suffering too ordinary?” “The sufferings endured at S-21 were enormous because we had to work very hard and each of us had to endure it. We had no other choice. We could not escape and we had to work and work again.” On the judge’s insistence, the witness admitted nonetheless that the prisoners had suffered more than the staff.

Unchanged distribution of speaking times to the parties
After the break, the president announced that the Chamber had decided, in response to the requests filed on Wednesday July 22nd, to maintain the distribution of speaking times allotted to each party, to meet the demands of a speedy trial. It recognised the right to civil party lawyers to interrogate the accused on their interrogation time for a witness and granted the right to the defence to refer to the Chamber on a case-by-case basis to request more time to ask questions.

The memory freshens up a little…
After the co-Prosecutors, Silke Studzinsky interrogated the witness, in the name of the four civil party groups. He proved slightly more talkative with her. He finally remembered “seeing the accused once enter a room where there was an interrogation” but did not know what he did or said there. He also remembered the case of a prisoner who had hung himself when, an hour earlier, he said he did not know of any suicide at S-21. He explained he left S-21 “fifteen days before the liberation” of Phnom Penh to go and work at the rice field, but claimed he had not come back to S-21 to recover important documents kept in a wardrobe, as he had confided in the past to David Chandler.

Duch does not recognise the witness but fails to convince
On the defence side, only Kar Savuth was there, as his international colleague was held back at the international tribunal for Lebanon. He asked the witness whether, at the time when he worked very briefly at the main prison, the police headquarters, South from Phsar Thmey (Central Market), he knew Nath, Duch’s predecessor. Kok Srov answered negatively. And while he was on duty at S-21, he only saw “Vietnamese civilians.” Kok Srov was part of the rare people who had joined the S-21 staff as early as 1975 and survived the purges… An exception that no one sought to clarify.

Kok Srov, former Khmer Rouge guard at S-21, during Duch’s trial
©Stéphanie Gée

Floor to the accused. This time, the president warned him he must “not talk to the witness but to the judges” and “not exercise any pressure on the witness.” Duch then lined up his arguments that led him to believe that “Kok Srov was not a guard at S-21:” he did not remember the witness; there were elements of his testimony he contested, as saying he occasionally went to detention cells or gave the order to prisoners to copy documents when S-21 owned “a copying machine, a stencil and a roll;” Kok Srov said he was not aware of the existence of Nath, the former director of S-21. It was unfortunate that the witness’ biography was not shown in court to confirm his status. Duch said it clearly, as long as he is not brought a document establishing he was a S-21 staff member, he will consider the testimony “doubtful.” For his part, Kok Srov firmly maintained he was a guard at S-21 from late 1975 to late 1978. Judge Lavergne then pulled apart Duch’s arguments by making the accused recognise that out of the 2,000 people employed at S-21, he only knew less than a hundred…

The one in charge of prisoner records
After lunch break, another witness took the stand. Suos Thy is a 58-year-old farmer who joined the revolutionary movement on the day after Lon Nol’s coup, in response to Norodom’s Sihanouk call to take the arms. As a soldier, he was assigned to the keeping of combatant lists in his battalion as early as 1974, following a serious injury sustained on the front line. He was led to pursue this work a the prison set up at the headquarters of the police, of division 703, South from Central Market, from 1975, on the request of Hor (deputy of S-21 director), then at S-21, after the premises moved to what is now the Tuol Sleng museum. He was in charge of managing “the lists of incoming and outgoing prisoners” of the security centre and writing the biography of each detainee before their photograph (only at S-21) was taken and joined to the document. The only exception was the children arrested at the same time as their parents, for whom no biography was written and no photograph taken. Suos Thy believed he had seen a little less than a hundred children imprisoned at S-21. The Western detainees did not transit through him but Hor, the witness added, sitting straight on his chair and keeping his eyes closed when talking.

The three branches of S-21
Suos Thy was the first to evoke subdivisions at S-21, describing three branches: “S-21 A,” which corresponded to the interrogation unit and the economic, typist and photography sections; “S-21 B,” which designated the guards unit and the special unit, as well as the cooks unit; and “S-21 C,” that is the logistical unit, later called S-24, he described scrupulously.

On alert, “24 hours out of 24”
For the needs of this sinister documentation work, which he was the only one in charge of, Suos Thy had to be “on alert 24 hours out of 24” because the prisoner convoys could arrive at any time of day or night. “In general, the prisoners arrived in 4, 10, 20 or 30 numbers at most. But late 1978, much larger groups were sent, sometimes over 100 people. But that did not happen often. Usually, it was people from the North-Western zone.” But when they arrived in small numbers, the witness confirmed, the prisoners were escorted from the main entry of S-21 and walked up to the prison. But if there were many of them, the special force transported them by truck to inside the compound.

A constant updating of the lists
The witness explained the procedure was well-detailed. When new prisoners arrived, he would go and meet them to register their names and establish brief biographies which he would then give to the guards, who would escort them either to an individual or collective cell. Who decided the cell distribution? The witness did not answer the question and the president did not follow up. Suos Thy would then specify next to each name the corresponding cell number “so that when the higher echelon would ask me who was detained where, I could provide the answer.” The interrogations unit would go to him to obtain the cell numbers of the detainees.

Each day, Suos Thy would give the updated prisoners list “at 7am” to Hor, who would sign it, and he would then send it to the chief of the interrogations unit. Once the interrogation of a detainee was over, the latter would be moved from a collective cell to an individual cell, and a report was presented to Hor, who would signal him the changes to be made regarding the change of cell. The witness would also make these changes as he would receive reports of prisoner deaths communicated to him.

Blood drawn until death ensues
Suos Thy did not witness any blood drawing on prisoners, but he was aware of them. “Hor asked me to record list of prisoners whose blood was taken and to extract these names from the list of prisoners to be smashed. The medical unit would transmit a request to Hor who forwarded it to Duch. […] The prisoners whose blood was taken would die…” Suos Thy remained unflinching while giving these details. According to him, there were about twenty people concerned by this practice.

Duch’s prerogatives
Lists noted by Duch were transmitted to him through Hor to determine who had to be taken to be eliminated and who had to stay at the prison. On this basis, Suos Thy established lists by indicating the building and cell number where the detainees were to take away to “facilitate the guards’ work,” documents he would give to Hor. The witness repeated that if he happened to make the slightest mistake in those lists, he risked being sanctioned, as Hor had warned him. He thus checked “twice” these strange inventories which he supervised until 1979. The detainees “to eliminate” would climb onto trucks stationed outside the gate, which remained slightly open so that only one detainee could go through at once and his identity was checked. In his explanations, the witness regularly cited Hor, the one whom he received his instructions from.

As for important prisoners, they transited through Duch on their arrival. The witness had no access to them. Similarly, these special detainees were executed without him being informed. Only Duch had the authority to write notes on the relevant lists, by indicating next to their names the mention “to smash.” The witness had to keep up-to-date the records of prisoners executed. According to him, no one was released from S-21. He only remembered one successful escape, which was followed by many arrests of staff members. Besides, the macabre bookkeeping of former cadres and S-21 staff members escaped Suos Thy. “I did not have the right to know. It was Hor who, upon Duch’s order, proceeded to the arrests.” He could not establish their biographies and received their names afterwards to include them in his lists. To conceal them from the sight of others, “the head of those S-21 staff members was literally covered by a piece of fabric, when they were taken to or brought back from interrogation rooms.” The witness considered they were over a hundred, maybe two hundred, to know such a fate.

Suos Thy left S-21 “after hearing gunshots”, that is on January 7th 1979.