Product Description

The horrific torture and execution of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge during the 1970s is one of the century's major human disasters. David Chandler, a world-renowned historian of Cambodia, examines the Khmer Rouge phenomenon by focusing on one of its key institutions, the secret prison outside Phnom Penh known by the code name 'S-21'. The facility was an interrogation center where more than 14,000 'enemies' were questioned, tortured, and made to confess to counterrevolutionary crimes. Fewer than a dozen prisoners left S-21 alive. During the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) era, the existence of S-21 was known only to those inside it and a few high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials. When invading Vietnamese troops discovered the prison in 1979, murdered bodies lay strewn about and instruments of torture were still in place. An extensive archive containing photographs of victims, cadre notebooks, and "DK" publications was also found. Chandler utilizes evidence from the S-21 archive as well as materials that have surfaced elsewhere in Phnom Penh. He also interviews survivors of S-21 and former workers from the prison. Documenting the violence and terror that took place within S-21 is only part of Chandler's story. Equally important is his attempt to understand what happened there in terms that might be useful to survivors, historians, and the rest of us. Chandler discusses the 'culture of obedience' and its attendant dehumanization, citing parallels between the Khmer Rouge executions and the Moscow Show Trails of the 1930s, Nazi genocide, Indonesian massacres in 1965-66, the Argentine military's use of torture in the 1970s, and the recent mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda. In each of these instances, Chandler shows how turning victims into 'others' in a manner that was systematically devaluing and racialist made it easier to mistreat and kill them. More than a chronicle of Khmer Rouge barbarism, "Voices from S-21" is also a judicious examination of the psychological dimensions of state-sponsored terrorism that conditions human beings to commit acts of unspeakable brutality.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #312767 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 251 pages

Review
"Grisly but lucid." --"Publishers Weekly

Customer Reviews

A study in political paranoia
I have recently finished David Chandler's excellent work on the infamous S21 prison in Cambodia, and found it absorbing, well written, well researched and asking probing questions that left me feeling quite uncomfortable, particularly about the capacity of someone to inflict such pain and misery on their fellow countrymen.

The book examines the role of S21 during the Khmer Rouge period as well as considering those that ran the prison, were employed there and those unfortunate souls that were imprisoned there. The book features interviews with guards/torturers/executioners that worked in the facility as well as some of the survivors (of which out of approximately 14,000 prisoners, there were just 7 known survivors). But for me, the most fascinating aspect of this book was the paranoia and the drive by the "Upper Brothers" to route out unseen enemies. The handbook the guards used and the dual interrogation approach of "doing politics" and "doing torture" were grotesquely fascinating. The idea that a prisoner who ended up in S21 was guilty by the fact that they were present in such an institution, is indicative of the paranoia that raged through every level of Khmer Rouge society. Chandler's final chapter then considers the capacity of mans inhumanity to man, and notes - in a very chilling fashion - that while we are happy to dismiss the actions of those who committed the crimes as evil, there is very little evidence that the perpertrators were evil, but merely following orders, or in the guards case doing what they were told to avoid ending up as an inmate in S21. Chandler then poses the question about what we would do as individuals in the same circumstances and the realisation of the possibilities is not at all palatable.

I found the book fascinating and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge reign. However, I would caution potential readers that the author writes in a style that assumes his reader has a reasonable knowledge of events in Khmer Rouge Cambodia. That said it is definitely worth a read.