第219页 Revolution in Cambodia

Who were the observers, and who were the observed? People opposed to the revolution, or ‘counterrevolutionaries,’ were ‘moving targets’ depending on the evolving policies and priorities of the party’s leadership. At different stages of DK’s short history, the ‘evil microbes’ were those with middle-class backgrounds or soldiers who had fought for Lon Nol; those who had joined the Communist movement when it was guided by Vietnam or those who had been exposed to foreign countries. By 1978, victims included high-ranking members of the party, military commanders, and officials associated with the eastern zone. To be suspected, a person had only to be mentioned in the confessions of three other people, those accused would name the people they knew, and so on. Hundreds, probably thousands of those who were taken to Tuol Sleng were completely innocent of the charges brought against them, but everyone who was interrogated was considered guilty, and all those who were interrogated were killed. News of people’s ‘disappearances’ was used to keep their colleagues in the party in line, but the deaths themselves were not made public. The regime never expressed regret for anyone it had executed by mistake. For Pol Pot and his colleagues, too much hung in the balance for them to hesitate in attacking enemies of the party: the success of the revolution, the execution of policy, the survival of the leaders themselves. At the end of his December 1976 speech, Pol Pot remarked that such enemies ‘have been entering the party continuously. … They remain – perhaps only one person, or two people. They remain.’[1]
The effect of these brutal, ambiguous threats on the people listening to them is impossible to gauge. Within a year, many of these men and women had been arrested, interrogated, tortured, and put to death. In most cases, they were forced to admit that they had joined the ‘CIA’ (a blanket term for counterrevolutionary activity) early in their careers. Others claimed to have worked for Soviet or Vietnamese intelligence agencies. It is unclear whether Pol Pot and the cadres associated with Tuol Sleng believed in these interconnected conspiracies or merely in the efficacy of executing anyone who was suspected by those in power.[2]
[1] Ibid.,【Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua, Pol Pot Plans the Future】 p. 185.
[2] See ‘The Last Plan,’ a Toul Sleng document from mid-1978 translated by Timothy Carney and Khem Sos, in Jackson, Cambodia 1975-1978, pp. 299-314. Unfortunately, this excellent translation has been printed without any introduction of notes. The linked ideas of a postrevolutionary continuation of class warfare and the ubiquity of antiparty conspiracy was shared by DK leaders with the Cultural Revolution’s leaders in China, who may in turn have been inspired by Stalinist models; see Andrew Walder, ‘Cultural Revolution Radicalism: Variations on a Stalinist Theme,’ in William Joseph et al. (eds.), New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 41-62.