Less Than Human

Torture in Cambodia
 

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			A LICADHO Project Against Torture report   by Jason Barber                   June 2000
	Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO) Mailing Address: PO Box 499 ● Office Address: 103, Street 97, Phnom Penh, Cambodia Fax/Tel: 855-23-360-965 (main office) 855-23-211-391 (Project Against Torture) ● email: Licadho@camnet.com.kh

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

	Foreword by David Chandler..................................................................................................................			i
	Preface.............................................................................................................................................			ii
	PART 1: BACKGROUND..........................................................................................................................			1
		Chapter 1: Introduction......................................................................................................................
		Chapter 2: What is Torture?................................................................................................................
		Chapter 3: Historical Context...............................................................................................................
			The Roots of Torture........................................................................................................................	5
			The Pol Pot Regime...........................................................................................................................	6
			Post-Pol Pot.............................................................................................................................	0
		Chapter 4:Overview of Current Torture..................................................................................................		12
			Scope of Torture.............................................................................................................................	13
			Methods of Torture..........................................................................................................................	14
		Chapter 5: Legal Framework: Prohibitions on Torture...............................................................................		15
			International Law............................................................................................................................	15
			Cambodian Law..............................................................................................................................	16
	PART II: TORTURE IN STATE CUSTODY.................................................................................................			18
		Chapter 6: Police Torture: The Practice...............................................................................................		18
			Extent of Police Torture..................................................................................................................	18
			Methods of Police Torture...............................................................................................................	20
			Geographic Locations of Police Torture..............................................................................................	22
			The Victims..................................................................................................................................	25
			Deaths from Police Torture..............................................................................................................	27
		Chapter 7: Police Torture: The Causes................................................................................................		30
			During the Torture: Arrest & Detention...............................................................................................	31
			After the Torture: Lack of Response...................................................................................................	34
		Chapter 8: Torture by Military & Other Non-Police Agents........................................................................		43
		Chapter 9: Torture in Prisons..............................................................................................................		45
			Overview of Prison Torture...............................................................................................................	45
			Circumstances of Torture in Prisons...................................................................................................	48
			Shackles & Handcuffs.....................................................................................................................	50
			Children & Women in Prisons.............................................................................................................	51
			Prison Living Conditions...................................................................................................................	53
			Outside Assistance: The Impact.......................................................................................................	54
		Chapter 10: Political and Military Torture in Cambodia............................................................................		55
			Military Torture: War with the Khmer Rouge........................................................................................	56
			Military & Political Torture: Intra-Government Fighting...........................................................................	57
			Political Torture: 1998 National Elections.....................................................................................	58
			Political Torture: Misuse of the Law............................................................................................	60
	PART III: TORTURE IN CIVILIAN CUSTODY..............................................................................................			63
		Chapter 11: Trafficking & Prostitution..................................................................................................		63
			Sexual Trafficking Practices.......................................................................................................	63
			Involvement of State Forces......................................................................................................	67
		Chapter 12: Non-Sexual Human Trafficking............................................................................................		69
		Chapter 13: Domestic Violence......................................................................................................		70
	PART IV: HEALTH & SOCIAL ISSUES.......................................................................................................			73
		Chapter 14: Physical Symptoms of Torture.......................................................................................		73
		Chapter 15: Psychological Symptoms of Torture......................................................................................		75
		Chapter 16: Psychosocial & Economic Effects of Torture...........................................................................		79
			Overview.........................................................................................................................................	79
			Sexual Torture..........................................................................................................................	80
			Domestic Torture..........................................................................................................................	81
			Lack of Justice & Fear of Further Torture........................................................................................................................	82
		Chapter 17: Rehabilitation Services for Torture Survivors......................................................................		83
	PART V: PSYCHO-SOCIAL CONTEXT OF VIOLENCE..................................................................................			85
		Chapter 18: Historical Legacy.........................................................................................................................................		85
		Chapter 19: The Cycle of Stress & Violence.......................................................................................................................		88
	PART VI: LAW & IMPUNITY.................................................................................................................			90
		Chapter 20: Legal System in Crisis.......................................................................................................................................		90
		Chapter 21: Torture Victims & the Law...............................................................................................................................		98
		Chapter 22: Confessions & Police Torture.........................................................................................................................		101
		Chapter 23: Police Torture – the Government Response...........................................................................		104
	PART VII: CONCLUSIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS.......................................................................................			111
		Chapter 24: Conclusions.....................................................................................................................		111
		Chapter 25: Recommendations.............................................................................................................		113
			Torture in State Custody...................................................................................................................	113
			Torture in Civilian Custody..................................................................................................................	118
			Torture in State & Civilian Custody...............................................................................................	119
	APPENDIX 1: CASE STUDIES...................................................................................................			123
		1. “I would have done anything I could to avoid being beaten”.....................................................................		124
		2. "He said the next time he caught a robber, he would beat them more than he had beaten me."......................		126
		3. “When people speak loudly, I feel frightened”........................................................................................		129
		4. “If you kill me, that’s okay”...........................................................................................		131
		5. “They treated us like wild animals”...................................................................................................		133
		6. "They said I should confess or they would take me to Klang Leu. I understood what they meant: that I would
			be killed." .........................................................	137
		7. “I could not whip my wife fifty times, so I only whipped her four times.”..............................................		139
	APPENDIX 2: POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER...........................................................................................................			144
	APPENDIX 3: UN CONVENTION AGAINST TORTURE........................................................................................................			146

Clarifications

In this report:

-          All costs quoted in dollars ($) refer to United States’ dollars; $1 = 3,800 Cambodian riels at time of writing

-          Unless otherwise footnoted, all case examples of torture (presented in italics or in boxes) are based on victim testimonies or other information collected by Licadho

-          Names of victims of torture are excluded or changed, except for cases in which the victim died or cases in which the victim’s identity has been previously well-publicized
 

FOREWORD

by David Chandler

 

 

I have been asked to add a few words to this probing and often terrifying study, which examines the phenomenon of torture and places it in a Cambodian context. Nothing I can say will increase its value, and I urge anyone reading these words to read on, up to the end, where some appalling case studies are documented in an appendix.

 

Over the last few years, I have thought a good deal about torture in Cambodia. This is because my book, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison, published in 1999, deals with the systematic mistreatment of over 15,000 men, women and children who were held in this Khmer Rouge anteroom to death. They were accused of counter-revolutionary crimes and interrogated at length. Extremely brutal torture formed a key component of those interrogations.

 

I devoted a chapter in my book to torture. I placed the practice in a historical context both globally and in the framework of Cambodian history. I also examined torture in other times and places, and absorbed as much theoretical writing as I could find, including the works of Jean Amery, Michael Foucault, Edward Peters and Elaine Scarry, among others. I came away feeling depleted and depressed, but with a faint understanding of what the prisoners at S-21, and the victims described in the pages that follow, had gone through.

 

I write that torture in Cambodia did not start with the Khmer Rouge. The current study, Less Than Human, shows that the practice diminished, but did not end, after the Khmer Rouge fell from power. It documents torture in the 1980s and 1990s and widens the definition of torture for the 21^st Century to include protracted domestic violence and the appalling abuse of sex workers.

 

Nonetheless, as Less Than Human also makes clear, the problem is deeper and wider than a single country. There is no need to demonize Cambodia or its people for what is documented here. Indeed, a positive aspect of this study is that it was written openly and carefully inside Cambodia itself. In many countries of Southeast Asia – to say nothing of the rest of the world – a study of this kind would never be permitted. Admitting that a problem exists, and publicizing examples, is better than denying that practices exist, or taking refuge in “Asian values” which are synonymous with the values of those in power, rather than those of the powerless victims of abuse.

 

When we look up from reading Less Than Human we are left with some awful stories and with an enduring problem, which is the tendency toward violence that is embedded in all of us. Studies like this one show us that we are capable of torturing others on the one hand and capable of seeking to stop the practice on the other. If the study does anything to make us aware of these capabilities, and to reduce the incidence of torture in Cambodia, it will have had an enormous, and merited, success.

 

–         David Chandler is Professor Emeritus of History at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of A History of Cambodia (1996), Facing the Cambodian Past: Selected Essays, 1971-1994 (1996), and Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (1992).
 

PREFACE

 

Torture, as one of the gravest crimes possible, is protected by a wall of silence and denial. Perpetrators do not admit it, and may take measures to avoid leaving evidence such as scars, or to dissuade victims from talking. Governments have reasons to downplay the scope of torture. Victims are left traumatised, ashamed and frightened; they are often reluctant to talk about their experience, or lay complaints against their torturers. Breaking this silence, and giving victims a voice, is a necessary first step towards reducing the use of torture. This report is an attempt to begin to break this silence in Cambodia.

 

In a country and a world in which so many people are torture survivors, it must be noted from the start that the author of this report is not one of them. Any attempt to comprehend torture, and the trauma it wreaks, by someone who has not experienced it will inevitably be inadequate. The experiences, emotions and thoughts of torture survivors can by no means be fully and properly described.

 

This report is an exploratory study on torture in Cambodia: how, where and why it occurs and is perpetuated. The research included a review of torture cases in Licadho investigation, medical and prison research files. Additional information was gathered through interviews with torture victims, and with others – government and law enforcement officials, and the staff of non-government organizations (NGOs) – with knowledge of torture.

 

This is not a statistical study. It is impossible to accurately estimate the amount of torture which occurs in Cambodia. While this report includes some statistics – particularly an analysis of information about torture contained in Licadho’s prison research database (see below) – these figures should not be considered comprehensive; they are indicative only.

 

The seeds of this report were planted in 1992 with the creation of Licadho as an independent Cambodian human rights organization, and the subsequent establishment of its provincial network (it currently has offices in 15 provinces and municipalities). Part of Licadho’s work is to receive complaints of alleged human rights violations, investigate to try to establish their veracity, and, where appropriate, refer cases to government, law enforcement or judicial bodies with a request for prosecutions and other action to be taken according to the law. Torture is one of the human rights violations that Licadho investigates.

 

In 1994, in response to chronic health problems in prisons, Licadho established a small medical team to provide treatment in several prisons. Torture victims were among those who were treated. The medical project continues today, with its staff regularly visiting 11 prisons around the country to treat inmates and guards. Meanwhile, Licadho’s work in prisons expanded in 1997 with the creation of a prison monitoring program. Researchers were employed in Phnom Penh and the provinces to regularly visit prisons, monitor conditions, identify and work with the authorities to try to resolve human rights problems, and interview pre-trial and convicted prisoners. Currently, the program covers 20 of Cambodia’s 25 prisons. The medical and prison monitoring work is conducted with Ministry of Interior approval. The extent of access to prisons, and the ability to interview inmates in private (without prison staff in earshot), can vary from prison to prison and time to time.

 

Inmate interviews by the prison researchers cover a variety of questions, including the inmates’ personal details, circumstances of their arrest and detention, whether they have legal representation (for pre-trial prisoners), and food, health and other conditions in prison. One of the questions asked is whether they were mistreated while in the custody of the arresting authorities or while in prison; if so, the inmates are asked to describe what happened to them. Information from these interviews, including inmates’ statements about torture or other mistreatment, is compiled in a central database.

This report – designed to bring together the available information about torture held by Licadho, as well as other organizations – was commissioned by Licadho as part of preparation for the creation of the Licadho Project Against Torture. That project was established in early 2000 to provide investigation, advocacy and rehabilitation services to torture victims.

Torture is a disturbing and depressing subject. One of the pitfalls of researching and writing about it, into which the author of this report undoubtedly falls, is to neglect to see or to show the many glimmers of light in what is otherwise a very bleak picture. There are many Cambodians across all sectors of society who not only refuse to close their eyes to torture, but who actively work against it: the dedicated and talented staff of numerous NGOs who try to care for the victims and investigate the perpetrators; the many so-called ordinary people in villages and towns throughout Cambodia who, often at risk to their own safety, are willing to help the victims and provide information to investigators; and those officials within the government, police, military and courts who are prepared, each in his or her own way, to assist the fight against torture. Finally, and most importantly, there are the torture survivors who in picking up the pieces of their shattered lives serve as inspiration to us all.

PART I: BACKGROUND

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

“Our children must learn never to treat human beings like animals,

or lower than animals.”

– Vann Nath, survivor of the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 torture center.

Torture is one of the most grievous acts of brutality practiced by mankind. While the word conjures up visions of the Dark Ages or the Inquisition, torture is by no means relegated to the ancient past. It is still commonly practiced in dozens of countries. Cambodia is one of them. In police stations and prisons, on military bases, in brothels of sexual slavery, and in private homes, torture is an everyday occurrence. People are regularly and routinely beaten black and blue with punches and kicks. They are hit with batons, iron bars, gun butts, pieces of wood or other objects, subjected to electric shocks, whipped with wire, bamboo, rope or belts. Some are nearly suffocated with pieces of plastic, or have their feet crushed under wooden or iron bars. For many victims, torture includes rape or other sexual abuse. Aside from physical torture, methods of psychological torture include prolonged unlawful detention, verbal intimidation and death threats, mock executions and physical assaults or threats against relatives of victims.

Torture has existed in Cambodia for centuries, including during the famed Angkorian civilisation, but Cambodians need no reminding that torture is not consigned to ancient history. The most notorious practitioners of torture in modern Cambodia – the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot – haunt the memories of many Cambodians today. Virtually the entire population was tortured or subjected to other extreme traumas in one way or another by the Khmer Rouge. Decades later, some of Pol Pot’s torture methods are still in use. Indeed, throughout the ages of Cambodian history, the basic aims, and many of the techniques, of torture have remained the same. Today’s torturers, like those of the past, inflict physical and mental pain primarily for the purposes of extracting confessions or other information, punishing perceived wrongdoers (criminal or otherwise), or simply extorting money from detainees or their families.

Torture is inflicted on men, women and children in Cambodia, and many victims receive this treatment at the hands of those who are supposed to protect society: police officers, soldiers, government bodyguards and others in positions of authority. The single biggest reason why torture is permitted to flourish in Cambodia into the 21^st Century is the lack of accountability before the law of criminals who hold power or influence.

§         Police officers smash an iron bar over the head of a 15-year-old boy, to get him to confess to stealing;

§         a woman is whipped with wire, beaten with a stick and nearly suffocated with a plastic bag, at a police station;

§         prison guards beat a group of inmates with the handle of a hoe until they are bloody and bruised, and then confine them in a cell without adequate food, clothing, bedding or water for bathing for more than two weeks;

§         a teenage girl, forced into prostitution, is taken to a house owned by a military policeman or his family and beaten, given electric shocks and injected with drugs to make her ‘agree’ to sleep with customers;

§         a man is taken to a police station and blindfolded, manacled and beaten by police who stomp on his face and try to force him to eat a cigarette.

The above are just a handful of torture cases in Cambodia in the past three years, and they are by no means the worst. The victims have two things in common – they were tortured, and their torturers were not brought to justice.

Torture is prohibited by international law, through the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which Cambodia is a party. Cambodia’s Constitution (1993) and criminal law (1992) also expressly forbid torture. Such prohibitions mean little or nothing to a victim or a torturer. The government, police and judiciary, by failing to meet their legal obligations to investigate and prosecute torture cases, are accomplices to torture. In recent years, the number of torture-related prosecutions of police or prison officers, for example, can be counted on one hand. As for convictions and prison sentences, there appears to have been only one: a military policeman who spent four months in jail for beating a teenage boy who died in custody.  When torture cases are brought to their attention, government officials, judges, prosecutors, police and military chiefs usually turn a blind eye, thereby explicitly permitting and implicitly encouraging the use of torture.

As such, Cambodian torture victims are victimised repeatedly – first by the torturers, and then by a government and judicial system which at best ignores the victims and at worst condones the barbaric and illegal treatment of them. They are often further victimized by the economic consequences of torture, as their physical or psychological injuries make it difficult for them to earn a living.

Torture is just one part of the pervasive violence in current-day Cambodia, whose impacts stretch far beyond individual victims. Countries that permit torture invariably permit other grave crimes and human rights abuses. Police and other officials who commit torture invariably commit other crimes. The practice of torture is directly counter to the rule of law, and perpetuates Cambodia’s climate of impunity for those who hold power and climate of fear for those who do not. Both contribute to the cycle of violence and repression that has marred Cambodia for decades, hindering the country’s social, economic and legal development.

While torture for political reasons has been publicized in recent years (in the aftermath of the July 1997 violent disintegration of the coalition government, for instance), the majority of torture committed in Cambodia is for non-political reasons. The most institutionalised use of torture occurs in police stations. To be arrested in Cambodia is a dangerous affair; violence, or the threat of it, is routinely used to secure confessions from criminal suspects. Approximately one in four prison inmates in Cambodia was allegedly threatened, mistreated or tortured while in police custody, according to Licadho research. Torture is a common criminal investigation technique in Cambodia, tolerated by all levels of the police and judiciary.

As well as in police stations, torture also occurs in prisons, mainly as punishment for attempted escape or other discipline breaches, and in military camps and other detention sites.

As for civilian places of torture, the pain and suffering inflicted in brothels or private homes on victims of sexual trafficking and domestic violence can be as horrific, if not more so, as the torture committed in State custody. In both sexual trafficking and domestic violence, the physical, sexual and psychological torture unleashed on women and children is often extreme; the victims are kept in a virtually continual state of misery and terror.

Torture is about treating people as though they are less than human. Torturers invariably dehumanise their victims, labelling them as enemies, criminals or possessions, and therefore implicitly justifying barbaric treatment of them, as though they were animals or objects of lesser or no value. The people who have lost their humanity are, of course, the torturers, not the tortured. Cambodia historian David Chandler, writing about torture under the Pol Pot regime, quoted Zygmunt Bauman’s comment about the Holocaust and its perpetrators: “The most frightening news… was not the likelihood that ‘this’ could be done to us, but the idea that we could do it.” Half a century after the Holocaust, and 20 years after the end of Pol Pot’s rule, the question of how and why someone can become a torturer remains seemingly incomprehensible. How does a human being beat and break another human being’s body and mind, watch him bleed and watch him scream? What goes through the mind of a torturer, what is he thinking, what is he understanding? The depths of depravity to which humans can descend defy explanation, and that alone makes it more frightening.

For the victims, the torture continues long after the torturers cease their work. Torture takes an incalculable toll on victims, extending far beyond black eyes, broken bones, bruises and scars. A myriad of psychological problems – such as fear, anxiety, depression, nightmares – can plague the lives and souls of survivors for years, if not forever. The psychological distress of victims, and their loss of dignity and their loss of faith in fellow humans, also defies adequate description or comprehension. But it is widely accepted that the psychological consequences of torture are immense, and often far more debilitating than the physical injuries. In Cambodia, for example, no one doubts the ongoing psychological suffering caused by the Khmer Rouge and years of war. Yet scant regard is paid to the psychological pain inflicted on today’s torture victims, most of whom are left to suffer alone and in silence. 

Concerted action to combat torture is long overdue. There is an urgent need for greater education of police, other officials and the general populace, as well as prosecutions of offenders and assistance to victims, and most importantly the establishment of practical safeguards for people at most risk of being tortured. Such action is vital to begin to heal the scars of the past, reduce the infliction of new wounds, and break the cycle of violence and trauma in Cambodia.

CHAPTER 2. WHAT IS TORTURE?

“1. to cause extreme physical pain to, esp. to extract information, etc.; to torture prisoners. 2. to give mental anguish to. 3. to twist into a grotesque form. 4. physical or mental anguish. 5. the practice of torturing a person. 6. a cause of mental agony.”

            – ‘Torture’, as defined by the Collins Concise Dictionary, third edition, 1992. 

“For the purposes of this Convention, the term ‘torture’ means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.”

– The UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

“For the purpose of this Declaration, torture is defined as the deliberate, systematic or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons acting alone or on the orders of any authority, to force another person to yield information, to make a confession, or for any other reason.”

– The World Medical Association’s Declaration of Tokyo, 1975.

The Cambodian word for torture is tearunikam, which is derived from the Sanskrit daruna, meaning “fierce” or “savage” and the Pali kamm, meaning “action”. The expression twer bab, which means to abuse, mistreat or inflict suffering, is also commonly used.

Torture is not defined in Cambodian domestic law because, as in many countries, torture is not legislated as a ‘crime’ per se. Perpetrators should be charged under the applicable criminal provisions for each element of the torture – i.e. battery, illegal confinement, rape, manslaughter, and so on.

The applicable legal definition of torture as a concept, rather than the individual actions that may comprise an instance of torture, comes from the UN Convention against Torture, which Cambodia ratified in 1992. A broader definition, designed for medical doctors, is that of the World Medical Association.

The key difference between the two definitions is whether the participation or complicity of a State official is necessary for physical or mental pain to be categorized as torture. The UN convention requires the consent or acquiescence of a public official “or other person acting in an official capacity”, while the World Medical Association refers only to “one or more persons acting alone or on the orders of any authority”.

This report applies a broad definition of torture. While it focuses primarily on torture by people in positions of State power, it does not exclude torture committed by those who wield other forms of authority or influence. In particular, this report asserts that sexual trafficking and domestic violence, even if the perpetrators are civilians, can in some cases be characterized as torture. This is in the belief that the key element in torture is the infliction of serious physical and/or mental pain by someone – whether it be a policeman, soldier, civil servant, brothel owner, husband or other civilian – who holds (or believes they do) a position of authority over the victim.

A broad definition of torture is particularly relevant in Cambodia, where the lines are often blurred between crimes committed by officials and those committed by civilians. In the sex trade, for example, human traffickers and pimps often operate under the protection of members of the State security forces. Children and women are abducted or sold, and detained, raped and beaten into working as prostitutes. Whether or not State security personnel actively participate in these crimes, the patronage they provide to the perpetrators permits such violence to occur. Furthermore, the authorities’ general failure to enforce the law in certain areas – particularly human trafficking and domestic violence – allows offenders to feel free to commit crimes without fear of punishment. As such, the State bears some responsibility, if not for the crimes of the perpetrators, then for the lack of justice they face (and the lack of deterrence to others who would commit the same crimes).

There are many different types and degrees of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading acts, from punching, kicking and whipping, to electric shocks, mutilation with weapons, psychological threats and material deprivations. The Convention against Torture does not categorise or define specific acts of torture, nor of “Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment”. Inevitably, torture is a subjective concept open to differing interpretation; there is no universally-accepted line across which lesser acts of violence or degradation suddenly become ‘torture’.

Given the lack of an accepted overriding definition of torture, and in the context of countries where State complicity in violence takes many forms, it has been argued that “degrading, cruel and inhuman treatment” becomes impossible to separate from torture. As one commentator has asked, “Is it not torture to have children witness the murder of their parents? Is it not torture of women to have their sons and husbands taken away never to be seen again? Is it not torture to engage village members including women and children to forced labour and to threaten men with rape and sexual abuse of their women?”

Such questions are applicable to Cambodians, particularly in regard to the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime, but also in more recent years. Today, for the survivors of past torture and for current-day victims, there are many more questions: Is it torture to have lost relatives during the Khmer Rouge regime and have to live for decades without ever knowing what happened to them? Is it torture to have your son murdered by a policeman, soldier or someone else and feel compelled, or threatened, to accept a few hundred dollars in compensation, rather than take the case to court? Is it torture to be beaten day in and day out by your husband, and be unable to depend on the authorities for help because they don’t consider it a crime? Is it torture to seek the help of the police to rescue your abducted wife or daughter, who is being tortured in a brothel, only to be told that they will not do anything? The victims may well think so.

CHAPTER 3. HISTORICAL CONTEXT

“Once again, I was human.”

– Teeda Butt Mam, a survivor, on the downfall of the Pol Pot regime in 1979.

A. THE ROOTS OF TORTURE

The elaborate stone reliefs carved on the walls of Cambodia’s most celebrated religious monument, the 12^th Century Angkor Wat, include graphic scenes of people being skinned alive, strung up on trees, chained or beaten. They provide a glimpse into the history of torture in Cambodia, indicating that, as in Europe and elsewhere, its roots stretch back centuries.

The torture depicted on Angkor Wat’s walls represent the hells to which wrongdoers were supposedly banished. On the huge monument’s southern gallery, there are, according to one account, a total of 32 hells. As Vittorio Roveda’s book Khmer Mythology describes, each hell is depicted with scenes of brutal punishments and inscriptions indicating how they are meted out depending on the type of sin committed. For those who are guilty of injustice, there is the “hell of weeping”, where sinners are chained, beaten and slashed by great swords. Those who have harmed, or taken the property of, others are thrown into basins of molten metal. Seducers and adulterers are torn to pieces by birds of prey or thrown into lakes. State servants who abuse their positions to steal from others are thrown, head first, into cauldrons. For other sinners, the punishments include being sent into forests of cactuses, bound upside down in ropes, or strung up on trees with nails hammered into their heads. 

Interestingly – in a country where today, centuries later, suspected thieves and robbers are beaten by street mobs or tortured to confess by police officers – a total of 12 of the 32 hells are reserved for thieves. The punishments here include having their tongues pulled out with tongs, being thrown into freezing cold water, or, for “great criminals”, being devoured by dogs or birds of prey. As Vittorio Roveda puts it, “All these descriptions provide a colorful picture of life at the time of Suryavarman II”, the King who built Angkor Wat.

The actual use of torture in ancient Cambodia, if perhaps not of all the methods so vividly displayed on Angkor Wat, is corroborated by the most comprehensive eyewitness account. Chinese emissary Chou Ta-Kuan spent nearly a year in Cambodia in 1296-97, more than a century after Angkor Wat was built, and documented his observations. According to his account, execution, torture and amputation were features of Cambodian justice. Serious criminals would be buried alive, while lesser ones would have their feet, hands or noses cut off. A man who adulterously slept with a married woman would have his feet squeezed between two splints of wood (a version of which is still practiced in Cambodia today) until he surrendered all his property as compensation to the woman’s husband. A thief caught red-handed would be imprisoned and tortured, while a suspected thief would be given the chance to confess or be put to a test of his innocence or guilt. If he denied the charge, his hand would be plunged into a vat of boiling oil. “If he is truly guilty, the hand is cooked to shreds; if not, skin and bones are unharmed,” wrote Chou Ta-Kuan.

Such a use of torture for ‘judicial’ reasons, to determine or punish criminal guilt, continued in Cambodia for centuries. Historian David Chandler has noted that 17^th Century Cambodian legal codes list 21 time-consuming, extremely painful punishments for people accused of betraying the King; the Khmer narrative poem Tum Taev, set in the 17^th Century, closes with the execution of an entire family for lese-majeste, buried up to the neck and decapitated by a buffalo-drawn iron harrow. During the subsequent French colonial period (1863-1954), torture was not lawfully sanctioned, although Chandler suggests that torture (such as “very rough” interrogations of prisoners) continued to be practiced to some extent through the colonial era.

B. THE POL POT REGIME

In modern Cambodia, the most systematic use of torture as a government policy occurred during the 1975-79 Democratic Kampuchea regime led by Pol Pot. Seizing power in April 1975, Democratic Kampuchea, the communists also known as the Khmer Rouge, unleashed a ferocious revolution which swept through Cambodia “like a forest fire or a typhoon”. In a warped bid to return the country to “Year Zero”, the regime’s leaders sought to wipe out “over 2,000 years of Cambodian history” and rebuild an entirely new society. In search of a rural workers’ utopia, they forcibly evacuated the country’s cities, dispatching millions of people to the countryside to work like slaves in regimented labor camps. Money and private property were abolished, along with religion, schools and all but the most basic of medical services. There were no political, social, economic or cultural freedoms.

Ordinary Cambodians did not know who was ruling their country, but were told only that Angkar (the Organization) was in charge. The invisible Angkar was everywhere, watching and knowing everything, they were told. Angkar decided everything: how people would work, live, eat, and, for many, how they would die. Infractions of Angkar’s rules were dealt with severely, and security forces hunted down real and imaginary counter-revolutionaries. By January 1979, and the fall of Pol Pot’s regime to the invading army of neighbouring Vietnam, as many as one in four or five Cambodians was dead from execution, disease or starvation. It was one of the worst genocides of the 20^th Century, a living nightmare rivalled by the hells depicted on the walls of Angkor Wat some 800 years earlier.

By virtually any definition of torture, most Cambodians who lived through Pol Pot’s rule can be said to have suffered torture. The regime’s policies – such as mass evacuation of cities, separation of families, forced labour, forced marriage and the abolishment of social services – undoubtedly inflicted severe physical and mental pain and suffering on the populace. Many younger people (born after the Pol Pot regime) are likely to be secondary victims of the torture inflicted on their older relatives. Arguably, the majority of Cambodians alive today have suffered from torture in one form or another.

As well as the general populace which suffered from Democratic Kampuchea’s blunt attempts at social reengineering, there are those who were directly tortured by the regime’s security personnel. A national network of detention, interrogation, torture and execution centres (more than 180 in total, according to one historian) comprised the heart of Pol Pot’s security apparatus. The purpose of this gulag system was not to mete out swift death to detainees, but to obtain ‘confessions’ to alleged crimes against Angkar. Frequently, this involved physical and mental torture. Survivor Vann Nath describes his interrogation by the forces of Angkar after his arrest in Battambang province in 1977:

The interrogator told me to me confess, or else he’d hurt me. I didn’t have any answer. He tied the electric wire firmly around my handcuffs and connected the other end to my trousers with a safety pin. He sat down again.

“You’ve been reported to have been going around instigating people to oppose Angkar,” he said. “Who is your network?”

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Brother,” I said. I didn’t know what they thought I had done. At the cooperative I never had time to go around and see my friends, not a single one. It must have been a pretext to kill me. The man holding the gun laid it on the table and walked towards me. He connected the wire to the electric power and connected the other end to my bottom of my shorts.

            “Now do you remember? Who collaborated with you to betray Angkar?” he asked.

            I couldn’t think of the words to answer them when he gave me an electric shock. My whole body went into a spasm and I passed out. When I came to I could hear a distant voice asking “How many people in your network? Who are you communicating with?”

“No…brothers,” I could only get those two words out before I fell unconscious again.

Tens if not hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were detained in the Khmer Rouge’s prisons. Many died from starvation, disease, torture or eventual execution. The number of survivors is unknown, but one scholar has estimated the survival rate of detainees in smaller detention centres at 20-30%, compared to almost zero at the Phnom Penh interrogation centre, called S-21.

S-21, now better known as Tuol Sleng, occupied the site of a former high school. It was, as David Chandler has written, “a total institution whose mission was to locate, question and destroy” enemies of the Party Center (the regime’s central leadership). Its prisoners included former regime officials, accused of betraying the revolution, and their relatives. As the regime’s leadership increasingly descended into violent paranoia, the hunt for ‘traitors’, many of them imaginary, grew wider and wider, and many of its own revolutionary cadre and soldiers were arrested, tortured and executed.

At Tuol Sleng, prisoners were forced to give detailed ‘biographies’ of their lives and ‘confessions’ of alleged crimes against Angkar. Frequently, they were made to admit that they were spies of Vietnam, the CIA or the KGB (or all three). These biographical confessions were usually extracted through days of torture; often the preliminary confessions were vetted and then returned to the victims with suggested revisions. The bureaucracy was meticulous: every prisoner was photographed; their ‘confessions’, and correspondence between the interrogators and their masters, were recorded in thousands of pages of official documents. At one stage, a senior government official urged the prison chief to conserve paper, noting of the detainees: “Some of them are afraid and just talk and talk.”

After confessions were drafted and redrafted to the satisfaction of their jailers, the prisoners were executed, often along with the families, usually by being clubbed to the back of the head with hoe or axe handles. On July 1, 1977, 114 women were executed, 90 of them listed on records as “wives” of prisoners. The next day, 31 sons and 43 daughters of prisoners were killed. On October 15 alone, a record 418 prisoners were executed.

Of more than 14,000 prisoners sent to S-21, seven are known to have survived. One of them was Vann Nath, transferred to S-21 after his initial arrest in Battambang. After less than a month in the prison, kept shackled and virtually starved, “my ribs were poking out and my body was like an old man of 70. My hair was overgrown like bamboo roots, and had become a nest for lice. I had scabies all over my body. My mind and spirit had flown away. I only knew one thing clearly: hunger.”

Vann Nath, in his 1998 book on his S-21 experiences, continues: “Each day they would take some prisoners out of my room to be interrogated. They would handcuff and blindfold the prisoners before they left the room. Sometimes some of the prisoners came back with wounds or blood on their bodies, while others disappeared.”

The following torture techniques are documented in S-21 archives: