Voices from S-21 : terror and history in Pol Pot's secret prison /

Although several excellent studies on recent Cambodian history exist, this work is in no way either redundant or superfluous. On the contrary, it should be required reading, not only for specialists on Cambodia, Southeast Asia, or East Asia, but for everyone. It focuses on the former high school known under the Pol Pot regime as S-21, where some 14,000 Cambodians were imprisoned, tortured, and forced to compose artificial confessions of their counterrevolutionary lives, to validate the central regime and its use of authority and power by portraying it as surrounded by conspirators plotting its destruction. Fewer than a dozen of those 14,000 men and women escaped the murder that followed once their confessions were complete. Based on the massive archive of confessions and official documents found at S-21 by the Vietnamese army in 1979, Chandler asks what happened under Pol Pot, as well as how and why. In the concluding chapters, Chandler compares the genocidal practices of the Pol Pot regime with the systematic destruction of other groups, most prominently the Jews, and asks what these events have in common. In the end, Chandler asserts, "To find the source of the evil that was enacted at S-21 on a daily basis, we need look no further than ourselves." All levels. C. L. Yates; Earlham College

For some reason (Chandler suggests to generate "evidence" for a triumphal history of their revolution), the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records of their prison, S-21 in Phnom Penh. Confessions were tortured out of about 14,000 victims, who were then executed, with but few exceptions. The capture of those records, following Vietnam's January 1979 invasion, allows a reconstruction both of the horrific functions of S-21 and of the cold fanaticism of Khmer Rouge rule. This is an important historical task, because the Khmer Rouge cultivated secrecy, and little has come to light about the internal workings of the "Organization," as the leadership headed by "Brother Number One" (Pol Pot) was known. Chandler can sense the Organization's suspiciousness of its own party cadres through the charges of counterrevolution leveled against the intake of S-21. Once inside, the ghastly process of dehumanization ensued, made tangible through Chandler's extensive quotation from the "confessions." A studious work about a sinister places. --Gilbert Taylor

Chandler presents a grisly but lucid historical accounting of S-21, the secret prison where at least 14,000 people were interrogated, tortured, forced to confess to counterrevolutionary crimes and executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. This "anteroom to death," as Chandler labels it, was discovered by two Vietnamese photographers in the wake of the invasion that forced out the Khmer Rouge in January 1979. Drawn to the site by the smell of decomposing flesh, the men discovered the bodies of 50 recently murdered prisoners, an array of implements of torture and a vast abandoned archive of institutionally sanctioned torture and murder. (The area was immediately turned into a museum.) Chandler methodically reconstructs the history of S-21, working with both the archives discovered there and his own interviews with survivors of the camp; he offers some context for his evidence by drawing on his considerable knowledge of the region's past (the Australian scholar is the author of a history of Cambodia), for instance, identifying Chinese models for the camp. His assessment is of a government gone mad with paranoia, which must torture and murder its own citizens to protect itself against conspiracies that arise against it--"hidden enemies burrowing from within" who were viewed as more dangerous than outside threats. In attempting to understand how such evil arose, Chandler comes to the dismaying but arguable conclusion that places like S-21 and Nazi concentration camps originate in our own everyday capacities to order and obey, form bonds against outsiders, seek perfection and approval and vent anger and frustration upon the helpless. 13 b&w photos not seen by PW. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved