Against the Ages - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 24

DK's leadership, centered on a six-member CPK Standing Committee led by Pol Pot
and “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea, was paranoid and secretive. Cambodia's new
rulers saw their revolution as under constant threat from foreign agents of every stripe. To
root out internal enemies, the regime established a network of crude prisons and detention
centers, a matrix of repression that converged on a three-story concrete high school in the
southern suburbs of Phnom Penh. Over the next three and a half years, Tuol Sleng pris-
on, codenamed S-21, grew into an elaborate bureaucracy of death, where at least 12,272
“enemies of the revolution” were tortured, forced to confess often imaginary crimes, and
then butchered at a mass “killing field” on the city's outskirts. Just a handful of those who
entered S-21 as prisoners ever came out alive. 29
After his evacuation from Phnom Penh, Kassie Neou ended up at a work camp in Bat-
tambang in western Cambodia, where he was forced up at 4 a.m. and toiled until dark,
ploughing hard earth with skinny draught animals. One day his disguise slipped and he
uttered a few words in English to a workmate. He was arrested and sent to Kach Roteh,
a nearby prison, where he was shackled to the floor of a leaky hut along with dozens of
other prisoners. For six months Kassie was beaten and interrogated, accused of being an
agent of the “CAI”—as his illiterate torturers mistakenly termed the US Central Intelli-
gence Agency.
Of the 72 men then imprisoned at Kach Roteh, he was the only one who survived.
After his arrival, he slowly won over the young guards by telling them stories—Aesop's
fables and Asian folktales he had learned by heart from the old tapes he once played over
the radio. One morning, when the prisoners were assembled in the yard, one of Kassie's
teenage guards walked up and pulled him out of the line and shackled another man in his
place. Shortly afterward the prisoners were marched off and killed. “I was needed to tell
the stories,” Kassie said. “But somebody had to die in my place, which is not a good feel-
ing.”
The plight of Kassie Neou and millions of his countrymen remained nearly invisible
to the outside world. After April 1975 Cambodia's only link to the outside world was
a single weekly flight to Beijing. China and Vietnam, the two countries that had done
the most to bring Pol Pot to power, remained silent about conditions inside the country.
In the US, meanwhile, the lack of information was compounded by a lack of interest.
Topics like Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero , published in France in January 1977, were
mostly ignored. After the fall of Saigon in April 1975, Cambodia was no longer even a
sideshow—it was, like Vietnam itself, a lost and forgotten cause.
Between 1970 and 1975, the Washington Post and the New York Times had published
more than 700 stories on Cambodia each year. In 1976, after the Indochinese dominoes
had toppled, they ran just 126. 30 In September 1975, when Newsweek 's Latin America
bureau chief James Pringle filed an exclusive interview with DK's foreign minister Ieng