Searching for the truth Issues 21 - Documentation Center of Cambodia

Searching for the truth ⎯ History
willing of condemn “freedomism”(sereipheap) in
political meetings and obediently connected this form
of evil with the United States, many of them fondly
remembered the personal freedoms they had enjoyed
before the civil war. Prum Yon described his
“counterrevolutionary” stance as follows: “If I want to
eat something, I eat it; if I want to do something, I do
it; if I want to go somewhere, I go.” Another prisoner
recalled that “in the old society, there were no secrets,
and if you had some money you could be happy”; a
third confessed to the “crime” of “encouraging people
to love the happiness that they had enjoyed in the
past.”
Prisoners also missed the pleasures of living
among relatives and friends. Some of them expressed
nostalgia for gambling, dancing, theaters, movies,
alcohol, and extramarital sex⎯“sinful” pleasures that
were frowned on and curtailed in DK. These regrets
crop up so often in the confessions of young prisoners
as to suggest that they were saying what they
imagined their interrogators wanted to hear. While it is
unlikely that many of the young prisoners had ever
had the time, money, or leisure to become gambles,
alcoholics, or libertines, “crimes” of this kind were
perhaps the only they could readily imagine. Asked to
write about “counterrevolutionary” actions, prisoners
dredged up or invented sexual encounters, playful
conversations, card games, or drinking bouts. Several
female prisoners were coaxed into confessing serial
liaisons; male owned up to a series of one-night
stands.
Many prisoners expressed a generalized
nostalgia for prerevolutionary life. Complaints of this
kind often recur word for word in documents written
several months apart. It seems likely that copy deemed
suitable for confessions was spooned into the texts by
the interrogators or document workers regardless of
what a given prisoner had done or said. It is also
possible that the confessions of many low-ranking
prisoners were cobbled together by document workers
without much interrogation, once the general outline of
appropriate “crimes” and what constituted acceptable
complaints was clear. Indeed, the former interrogator
Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam)
Number 21, September 2001
Chhim Chhun admitted in his confession that he “only
wrote the [prisoners’] stories that were easy to write.
If a story had too many relationships [in it ] and was
hard to write I threw it out.”
Even with these constraints, the confessions
that describe the shortcomings of the revolution are
often extraordinarily frank. For example, in July 1977,
Chhin Cheap, formerly a soldier in Division 310,
recalled a conversation with one of his friends.
“Chhun of Division 310 made me see that the
revolution was pitch dark (ngongut). He said, “Doing
a revolution these days is difficult and confusing, from
the standpoint of clothing and nourishment; there’s
never enough of either.” He said, “When the war was
on, that was difficult enough, but when it stopped
things became even more difficult. There was no time
to rest. To make a comparison, it’s like they order us
around like cattle but don’t even let us eat grass.
What’s more you can’t live where you like, there’s no
freedom, you can’t even walk a short distance without
permission. The way we live now is unhappy. There’s
no fun.... If we look at the old society, on the other
hand, sure, our parents used to work, but not too hard,
and they never lacked food, they were happy, they
were independent, easy. If we wanted to do something
we could do it, provided we had money.”
A month earlier, Dith Kung, also a soldier, had
remembered:
“In February 1976, Sung told me, ‘If you do a
socialist revolution, food isn’t tasty, and you work
without stopping to the point where young people
collapse at their work places. You work all day and all
night, there’s no time to rest, you have no freedom at
all. Doing a revolution means eating rice gruel
morning and afternoon, and there’s not even enough
of that. To go some place or come from some place
you need a letter.
There’s a rule for going out and a rule for
coming in. When you do a socialist revolution there
are no wages, either, no ranks, no women, no alcohol,
no gambling, no cars to travel in. You just walk
everywhere.”
(Continued in the October 2001 issue)
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