Free Voices From S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison by David P. Chandler

survivors of the DK era, now in their mid-thirties, enjoyed the freedom of moving around the country as teenagers, much as the young Red Guards in Maoist China had done. 56
Many of the S-21 workers had “joined the revolution” (choul padevat) when they were very young. Nhem En was only ten. Six years later, when he came to S-21, others his age were working there. Photographs of these self-satisfied, smiling teenagers, many wearing oversized Mao-style caps, adorn the walls of the Museum of Genocidal Crimes. For many of them, the “Organization” had replaced their mothers and fathers. Responding to its desires, fi through the commands of their “older brothers,” they were often capable of extreme cruelty. 57
Adolescents have earned a reputation in many countries for their malleability, idealism, their hunger for approval, and their aptitude for violence. Talking to Philip Gourevitch in 1996, the psychiatrist Richard Mollica discussed the Hutu warriors in Rwanda, whose age and background resembled those of the workforce at S-21. “In my opinion,” he said, “the psychology of young people is not that complicated, and
most of the people who commit most of the atrocities in these situa-tions are young males. Young males are really the most dangerous people on the planet, because they easily respond to authority and they want approval. They are given the rewards for getting into the hierarchical system, and they’re given to believe they’re building heaven on earth. . . . Young people are very idealistic and the powers prey on them.” 58
Problems arose at the prison with young people precisely because they were “poor and blank.” Their exposure to revolutionary discipline, to say nothing of Marxist-Leninist ideas, had been hortatory, brief, and haphazard. What they had learned in study sessions was no guarantee of good work habits. Their raw energy, so attractive in its revolutionary potential, was difficult for older people to harness. In the short time they were at DK’s disposal, many of these boys and girls were impossible to educate. As a Party spokesman noted ruefully at a cabinet meeting in May 1975:
Speaking of young, untrained people, they are honest, dedicated, and vigorous. These are their strong points. As for shortcomings, our young brothers and sisters play around too much; their culture is weak and they are illiterate and innumerate to the extent that the places where they work encounter difficulties. 59
After the regime collapsed, Ieng Sary explained the disastrous history of DK to the American journalist Henry Kamm. “We did not choose our public servants well,” he said disingenuously. “We lost some control.” He neglected to say that DK “chose” its “public servants” from among the least qualifi people in the country after all the incumbents had been dismissed and thousands of them had been summarily put to death. 60
Very few of the workers at S-21 had been “revolutionaries” for long. Only twenty-nine of those completing personnel forms in 1976 had “entered the revolution” before 1973, when Vietnamese forces withdrew from Cambodia and a massive U.S. bombing campaign forestalled Khmer Rouge attacks on Phnom Penh. Fifty-eight of the workers joined in that year, forty-three in 1974, and forty-two in the first few months of 1975. The remaining five had “joined the revolution” after the capture of Phnom Penh. The only training that any of them received for working at S-21 was a two-week session of studying “politics” (nayobay) at a “technical school” run at Ta Khmau in Sector 25 by “Brother [Kim] Tuy,” who later became an interrogator and administrator at S-21.
For many, the school may have been their first encounter with a total institution. If study sessions from the DK era serve as any guide, those that Kim Tuy conducted would have involved listening to hortatory lectures, memorizing slogans, and preparing brief, self-critical autobiographies. Students would