| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. Directed by Rithy Panh. Produced by Cati Couteau. 2002; color; 105 minutes. Distributed by Icarus Films.
In 1975–1979, close to two million Cambodians were murdered by the Khmer Rouge. One of the prominent centers of the mass murder was the Tuol Sleng prison. Rithy Panh's documentary S-21 (the code name of the prison) follows a survivor, the painter Vann Nath, as he revisits the prison and talks to another survivor as well as to the former guards and executioners who now serve as guides in the genocide museum into which the prison (formerly a schoolhouse) has been converted. The film is thus devoted to two issues: the mechanics of the slaughter and the current psychological processing of the past.	1
Pol Pot's regime sought to eradicate all the social circles (prominently including intellectuals) that might resist its agenda of turning the country into an agrarian utopia. Although the basis for the mass murder was not ethnic—in Le Siècle des Camps (2000), Joël Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot refer to it not as genocide but as "democide" or "politicide"—it nevertheless shares one of the main features of genocide: according to the testimony of the guards, not only the suspects but also their families were rounded up for extermination. The Khmer Rouge dispensed with the subtlety of distinguishing among actual, potential, and unlikely individual opponents of their rule.	2
In Tuol Sleng the prisoners were interrogated and forced to write confessions. They were tortured if they refused, until their resistance broke down or until they died. Their confessions had to detail their "crimes" and denounce their "accomplices." The purpose of the torture was to produce these formalized "documents," which served the dual purpose of justifying the executions and producing lists of further victims. The latter procedure is a brutally simplified version of the tactics of the Soviet political police (the NKVD) of 1937–1939, dispensing with even a pretense of legal proceedings that used to be staged in the USSR.	. . .

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