Several leaders of the genocidal Khmer Rouge are in Cambodian state custody, and slated to stand trial this year for the atrocities of the Democratic Kampuchea regime. Although the tribunal, charges, and procedures have yet to be finalized, it is likely that the case against the Khmer Rouge will rely heavily on evidence drawn from the archives of the Santebal Khmer Rouge Domestic Security Force and of the infamous Tuol Sleng Prison. George Chigas, Associate Director of the Cambodia Genocide Program at Yale University, offers a grisly glimpse into documents likely to figure prominently in the case against the Khmer Rouge.
 

George Chigas is the Associate Director of the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University. He has recently completed an English translation of the Cambodian verse novel, The Story of Tum Teav, and is co-author with Susan Cook of "Putting the Khmer Rouge on Trial," which appeared in the Bangkok Post on October 31, 1999.

The Cambodian government has recently announced that a trial of the Khmer Rouge leadership may take place as early as the spring of 2000. It remains to be seen, however, to what extent the international community will participate in the proceedings. A stalemate over the composition of the tribunal may have been broken in October when a United States proposal received the support of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.

According to the U.S. plan, the trial would take place within the Cambodian judicial system and would involve a panel of five judges: three Cambodian judges and two from the international community. Any verdict would require the agreement of four of the five judges. As such, the plan would accommodate the Cambodian government's demand for sovereignty while enabling the international community to promote international standards of justice. The Cambodian government has yet to formally commit to the proposal, however, and the next phase of the process will hinge on the forthcoming recommendations of the government's legal team charged with drafting a new tribunal plan.

If the trial is eventually convened, the case against the Khmer Rouge leadership will certainly involve three forms of evidence: live testimony; forensic evidence, including the mapping of burial sites; and Khmer Rouge documents. At the top of the list of important Khmer Rouge documents are two known caches. The first is the archive of Tuol Sleng prison, the main Khmer Rouge torture and interrogation center. The second is the archive of the Khmer Rouge secret national security force, the Santebal, which oversaw repression and surveillance throughout Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Both of these archives are central to any assessment of the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge leadership, particularly Kang Kech Iev, alias Duch, the chief of Tuol Sleng, as well as Mok, the notorious military commander, both of whom are in custody and awaiting trial in Phnom Penh. Other living Khmer Rouge leaders include: Nuon Chea, former President of Democratic Kampuchea's (DK) People's Representative Assembly; Ieng Sary, former DK Deputy Prime Minister for Foreign Affairs; Ke Pauk, former Secretary of the Northern Zone of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK); and Khieu Samphan, former President of the DK State Presidium.

The purpose of this paper is to make some general observations about the Tuol Sleng and Santebal archives, first in terms of the history of the collections themselves, and second in terms of their importance to historiographical and legal accountings of the DK period. These two aspects of the documents are in fact interrelated. That is, understanding the history of the documents themselves, particularly their chain of custody, i.e., who possessed the documents where and when, is important to establishing their credibility as sources of historical information and legal evidence.

The DK Security Force

An examination of the Tuol Sleng and Santebal archives requires a brief description of the Santebal security force itself, which produced the collections. The Santebal, a Khmer term meaning "keeper of the peace" was part of the Khmer Rouge organizational structure well before April 17, 1975, when it took power from the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government. During this time, the Khmer Rouge, headed by Pol Pot, organized the country into regional zones. These included: the Eastern, the Northeast, the Northern, the Northwest and the Southwest zones.

As early as 1971, the Khmer Rouge established the Special Zone outside of Phnom Penh under the direction of Vorn Vet and Son Sen. Son Sen, later the DK Deputy Prime Minister for Defense, was also in charge of the Santebal, and in that capacity he appointed Duch to run its security apparatus. When the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, Duch moved his headquarters to Phnom Penh and reported directly to Son Sen. At that time, a small chapel in the capital was used to incarcerate the regime's prisoners, who totaled fewer than two hundred. In May 1976, Duch moved his headquarters to its final location, a former high school known as Tuol Sleng, which could hold up to 1,500 prisoners. It was at Tuol Sleng that the major purges of Khmer Rouge cadres took place and thousands of prisoners were tortured and killed.

From the archives it appears that Son Sen's major responsibilities as head of the Santebal were twofold. Firstly, he supervised Duch and oversaw the operations of the security apparatus, including the arrest, interrogation and execution of suspects. Documents sent to Son Sen from Duch constitute a large part of the Santebal archive. As the overseer of the regime's system of repression, Son Sen would have also reported to Pol Pot and responded to orders to arrest individuals throughout the country. There is, for example, a document from Pol Pot that tells Son Sen "to follow up" on suspects of the revolution.

Secondly, Son Sen was involved with the surveillance of Party members throughout the country. In this capacity, he would have worked with Nuon Chea, who was in charge of recording the biographies of Khmer Rouge cadre. More than half of the Santebal archive consists of these biographies, presumably sent from Nuon Chea to Son Sen for processing.

On January 7, 1979, when the Vietnamese forces drove out the Khmer Rouge, Duch was one of the last to leave Phnom Penh. Before making his escape, he oversaw the execution of remaining prisoners and attempted to destroy the documents at Tuol Sleng. Nonetheless, he left over 100,000 pages behind that document the activities of his security apparatus since 1974. In addition, another 100,000 pages of Santebal documents were left behind at a house, presumably occupied by Son Sen.

The "Archives"

Before discussing the contents of the Tuol Sleng and Santebal archives and their importance to historiographical and legal studies, it is important to clarify the difference between the two collections. As it happens, the categorization of the documents produced by the Khmer Rouge security force into these two groups is somewhat arbitrary. Technically, the corpus of Santebal documents would include the documents found at Tuol Sleng, as well as those found at other locations, primarily Son Sen's residence in Phnom Penh. Their designation as separate archives is more a result of the physical location of the documents during and after the DK period than it is an organizational distinction made by the Khmer Rouge.

The designation of the two archives is also a function of the different echelons of the Khmer Rouge leadership involved. While the documents in the Tuol Sleng archive were produced and circulated among lower ranking cadres and administrators within the apparatus of the secret security force, documents in the Santebal archive circulated among the top echelon of the Khmer Rouge leadership, including Son Sen, Nuon Chea and Pol Pot among others.

Since the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in January 1979, the archives have changed ownership at least three times. They were first obtained by the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), which governed the country until the United Nations-sponsored elections in 1993. It was during the PRK period that the files in the Santebal archive were given the cataloging codes that they retain to the present. Also during this time Tuol Sleng was transformed into a historical museum and part of the archive was microfilmed by Cornell University.

After the 1993 elections, the documents were kept by the coalition government headed by Hun Sen and Prince Ranariddh. In 1995, a large part of the Tuol Sleng archive was made available to the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) for analysis and inclusion into the databases of the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University (CGP). Then, in March 1996, the DC-Cam obtained the Santebal archive. Since its discovery, information from the Santebal archive has been added to the biographical and bibliographical databases on the website of the CGP as part of a collaborative effort between the CGP, the DC-Cam, and the University of New South Wales in Australia. The tens of thousands of records compiled in these databases enable all scholars and individuals with access to the internet to conduct research on individuals, documents and events from the DK period. In addition, the entire Santebal archive has been microfilmed and is available at the Yale University library. Some of these documents can be viewed directly on the CGP website (www.yale.edu/cgp).

The Tuol Sleng Archive

Turning to the contents of the archives, the information contained in the Tuol Sleng archive has been instrumental to scholars and individuals studying the events that resulted in the death of 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979. The archive is composed of the forced confessions of prisoners, as well as various forms filled out by the prison staff that record the names of prisoners and details concerning their torture and execution. It also includes short biographies and photographs of the prison staff themselves. From this biographical information, the CGP was able to produce the following organizational chart of the Tuol Sleng prison staff:

Tuol Sleng Organizational Chart

What follows are examples of how documents from the Tuol Sleng archive, in combination with other sources, provide a historical record of the torture and execution of prisoners at Tuol Sleng from 1976 to 1978. From the second half of 1976, the number of people who were arrested and brought to Tuol Sleng increased dramatically as the Khmer Rouge leadership attempted to rid the country of any elements that it believed opposed its socialist revolution. A Khmer Rouge document attributed to Pol Pot dated December 20, 1976, that is not part of the Tuol Sleng archive, pronounces the need "to expel treacherous elements that pose problems to the Party and to our revolution." Using characteristic Khmer Rouge euphemisms, the document describes suspected traitors as microbes and calls for their extermination with terms such as "smash" and "sweep aside." The document indicates that the purging of suspected enemies of the revolution had already begun and that there was a clear directive from the Khmer Rouge leadership for them to continue. The document states: "If we wait any longer, the microbes can do real damage." And: "[T]he string of traitors that we smashed recently had been organized secretly during the people's revolution and the democratic revolution." Finally: "If we don't sweep aside treacherous elements and allow them to expand, they will place obstacles in the path of the socialist revolution."

As a testament of the above policy, a Tuol Sleng document entitled "List of the Names of Prisoners Who Entered in the Year 1976" indicates that the security forces had been directed by the Party Center to continue the purging of suspected traitors. The document provides the names of 1,622 persons who were taken to Tuol Sleng in 1976. Among them were 150 members of the regime's own security force; by comparison, a total of 154 prisoners had been incarcerated the previous year. Another Tuol Sleng document, dated September 26, 1976, states that the prison had "received instructions from the Organization to use torture." The document describes how a prisoner was given "about 20 whippings with fine rattan," and in the afternoon, "20-30 whippings with electrical wire." The same document describes how Duch authorized the use of "both hot and cold techniques" on a prisoner in order to extract his confession. Torture was used to extract the confessions of Party members as well. A document dated September 27 th , 1976, records the arrest of Keo Meas, a high ranking CPK official. A Tuol Sleng interrogator named Pon, whose name appears repeatedly in the archive, states that "after threatening him a couple of times, I told him to pull off his shirt and put the arm shackles on him. Prevented him from sleep and put him with the mosquitoes." Among the Khmer Rouge cadres arrested during this time was the Minister of Information, Hu Nim. Before Hu Nim's death, the Tuol Sleng interrogator Pon was able to extract seven confessions from him under torture. To one of these Pon had added a note to Duch stating "... we whipped him four of five times to break his stand, before taking him to be stuffed with water." Hu Nim's confession was found after 1979. The document is over 200 pages and was written during the period between his arrest on April 10, 1977 and his execution on July 6, 1977, the same day 126 other prisoners were executed.

A Tuol Sleng document entitled "List of Names of Prisoners Who Entered from 17 February 1977 to 17 April 1977" (the second anniversary of the Khmer Rouge victory over the Lon Nol regime) gives the names of 1,566 prisoners, recording also their alias, gender, position, organizational unit, date of entry, and a final column noting whether the prisoner had been "smashed." The number of prisoners recorded in this document equals approximately to the total number of people who had been imprisoned in the previous year. The document states that 633 of these had already been "smashed." The nine hundred or so remaining prisoners were presumably killed after the 17th. The same document also notes the execution of suspected cadres during that time. On April 4, 1977, for example, the document indicates that 110 troops belonging to a Northern division were smashed. A later document indicates that the executions increased following the return of Pol Pot from a trip to China in late September 1977. The document states that an unprecedented 418 prisoners were executed on a single day in October. On other days that month, the document records the execution of 179 prisoners, 88 prisoners, and 148 prisoners respectively. A letter from Son Sen to Duch during that month concerning the need to conserve paper when extracting confessions indicates that the Khmer Rouge leadership closely followed the Santebal's activities.

The Tuol Sleng Prison 
(photographed in 1980 by Ben Kiernan, former director of the Cambodia Genocide Project)

In 1978, the Party Center focused its attention on the Northern and Eastern Zones. The Eastern Zone, under the command of So Phim, was associated with Vietnam with whom Cambodia was at war, and the people who lived in that zone were suspected of supporting the Vietnamese army. A Tuol Sleng document entitled "Daily List of Prisoners Held 20 April 1978" shows that there were at least 437 cadres from the Eastern Zone being held prisoner at Tuol Sleng at that time. This was almost ten times more than the number of cadres from any other zone. Another document entitled "List of Names of Prisoners Who Entered in May 1978" gives the names of ninety-two high-ranking cadres from the Eastern Zone who were brought to Tuol Sleng. Many of these prisoners were immediately executed. As Eastern Zone forces mounted an armed rebellion against the Party Center's forces, the Eastern Zone commander, So Phim, was still reluctant to believe that Pol Pot had targeted his zone. He went to Phnom Penh to speak with the Center but was attacked along the way. He committed suicide on June 3 rd after taking refuge in a temple west of the capital city.

This purge was the Center's most deadly wave of killings. The purge was not limited to high-ranking cadres but included women and children as well. A Tuol Sleng document from June 1978 shows that the number of prisoners who had entered Tuol Sleng since January of that year had reached 5,675. This was close to the total amount for the entire previous year. Another Tuol Sleng document with the heading "3rd division units: short biographies of those associated with the tendency" lists 17 family members of soldiers from the 3rd division of the Eastern Zone, nine of whom were under sixteen years old. They were targeted by the Santebal because their parents or husbands had been suspected of treason. Duch had signed the document and added a note instructing his wardens: "Kill them all."

The Santebal Archive

The Santebal archive is considered the most valuable find of any set of documents from the DK period. While the Tuol Sleng archive primarily concerns the torture and execution of prisoners in the capital, the Santebal documents record the regime's military and security activities throughout the country and may well connect individual top leaders to specific crimes. As mentioned above, the coding system used by the PRK to identify the individual documents of the Santebal archive is still used today. The government's coding system divided the Santebal archive into two groups. The first group was identified as the "BBKK" collection and consists of approximately 11,000 biographies of KR cadres, some of whom were later suspected of treason. The biographies were written in response to an eleven-page questionnaire that asked about the date and circumstances of the individual's recruitment into the Party, as well as potentially incriminating information about the individual's family members and their political history. (A translation of this questionnaire can be viewed on the CGP website:www.yale.edu/cgp.) The second group was identified by the code "BBKKH" and consists of over 800 files, primarily confessions, written communications between KR leaders and accounts of the "traitorous activities" of victims. These documents record the political violence against suspected enemies of the regime. This would include, for example, documents sent from Duch to Son Sen, many of which have margin notes directing copies to other high ranking leaders, such as Ieng Sary, Nuon Chea and Mok.

Khmer Rouge documents have been reviewed by a number of legal experts to assess their evidentiary value. A preliminary study of existing evidence was completed in 1995 for the United States Department of State after the passage of the 1994 Cambodian Genocide Justice Act. At the time of this study, however, the Santebal archive was not yet available. Drawing from experience gained from other tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda, the study recommended mechanisms for the future gathering and evaluation of evidence. The 1995 study also underlined an important principle to guide future assessments of the archives for their evidentiary value. The study states: "It is highly advisable not to put the proverbial cart before the horse. That is, it is important to determine the purposes for the information and the forum in which it is to be used before investigators are tasked with developing evidence. ...Investigators will be most effective if investigators have... a thorough understanding of the elements of the relevant offenses."

In February 1999, an assessment of the archives by a United Nations panel of experts, entitled "Report of the Group of Experts for Cambodia Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 52/125" was completed. The report was produced in response to a June 1997 request by then-First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh and then-Second Prime Minister Hun Sen "for the assistance of the United Nations and the International community in bringing to justice those persons responsible for the genocide and crimes against humanity during the rule of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979." While this report makes some specific assessments of the documents' evidentiary value, it was not intended to be an exhaustive evaluation of the archives. The report did conclude, however, that sufficient evidence exists to prosecute the Khmer Rouge leadership for serious crimes under Cambodian and international law.

Exhumation at Choeung Ek
(photographed in 1980 by Ben Kiernan, former director of the Cambodia Genocide Project)

Prior to the group of experts report, a study of the Santebal archive, along with other documents, was sponsored by DC-Cam. This study, completed in November 1998, used the same list of documents that was later provided to the U.N. group of experts. The study's main purpose was to identify specific documents with probative value in order to facilitate the experts' use of the archives. Because of time limitations, the 1998 study limited its scope to those documents pertaining to five living Khmer Rouge leaders: Nuon Chea, Mok, Ke Pauk, Ieng Sary and Duch. Most of the documents analyzed in the 1998 study were selected specifically for their relevance to crimes against humanity rather than genocide. The study states that while the documents could be used in charges of genocide with regard to the Vietnamese, Cham and Chinese minority populations, "the evidence does not indicate that a charge of genocide against the general Khmer population is a strong one." According to the 1998 study, the documents do not indicate the Khmer Rouge leadership's intention to destroy the Khmer population as a group. With this in mind, it should be noted that the problem of the specific nature of the crimes, i.e., whether they constitute crimes against humanity or specifically genocide, remains unresolved. Genocide, as defined in the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, consists of killing, serious assault, starvation, and measures aimed at children "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." The UN convention does not include in its definition of genocide what has been called "politicide," which would describe many of the killings of the Khmer population. However, the inclusion of politicide in a Cambodian genocide law would not be without precedent. Politicide was included, for example, in the Ethiopian constitution to bring charges of genocide against the leaders of the Dergue.

The definition of crimes against humanity, on the other hand, involves mass or systematic killing against a protected group, including political groups. The 1998 study concludes that the confessions, meetings and other memos included in the Santebal archive provide evidence for crimes against humanity against the Khmer population by the top leaders in question, particularly Duch, Nuon Chea and other top leaders who received documents detailing acts of torture and extermination. The study also mentions "the doctrine of superior authority" by which leaders are liable for the actions of their subordinates. According to this doctrine, the Khmer Rouge leadership can be held accountable for crimes in which they were not directly involved. For this reason, "any documents that indicate members holding certain positions of authority are relevant insofar as they prove de jure authority." These types of documents would include standing committee minutes, communications, etc., which indicate members' ranks and responsibilities and help to confirm the chain of command necessary for establishing legal accountability. According to the report, the existence of these documents would then shift the burden of proof to the accused to show they were not aware of the reports of torture and extermination. This conclusion applies particularly to Ieng Sary, for example, who attended meetings with Son Sen, who in turn regularly received the Tuol Sleng confessions from Duch. It would also implicate Khieu Samphan, whose presence at important CPK Standing Committee meetings is documented in at least 12 of 15 of its meeting minutes.

The 1998 study provides a number of examples from Santebal documents giving this kind of information. The confession of a Tuol Sleng prisoner named Tiv Mei, included in the category of Santebal documents identified with the code BBKKH, has a note from Duch to Nuon Chea dated November 1977. In his confession, the prisoner, who was from the Northern Zone, wrote: "In my village, Angkar [the Organization] has swept away [killed] all people including military police, and even low-ranking soldiers and police officers." Another Santebal document used in the 1998 report was the confession of Tuol Sleng prisoner Pech Chay, a former ice factory worker. The document is cataloged in the BBKKH group, and handwriting on the cover states that two copies were sent to Nuon Chea. A note dated October 23, 1977, by Chay's Tuol Sleng interrogators, Oeun, Seng and Khon, reads: "First, I asked about his previous background. ...Then, I asked about his working for Chinese for wages. ...And then when I tortured him, he conceded speaking about CIA spies." The original front page of the confession indicates that two copies of the confession had been "sent to Brother Nuon."

The Tuol Sleng and Santebal archives will be given greater scrutiny as a trial becomes more imminent. In-depth studies of the documents are currently being conducted by Cambodia scholars such as David Chandler and Steve Heder. These and other analyses of the DK archives will play a vital role in assisting legal experts to make those responsible for the death of 1.7 million people accountable for their actions.