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I have found it disheartening to hear some conservative commentators brush aside the Iraqi prison abuse scandal by arguing that Saddam's prisons were much worse. That's true, but it's setting the bar pretty low. At Saddam's trial, he might use a similar excuse, "Well at least I wasn't as bad as the Khmer Rouge." That would also be true, as a powerful new documentary illustrates.

S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine focuses on the Phnom Penh prison where 17,000 Cambodians were detained during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror in the 1970s. Of those 17,000, three survived. Three. The film focuses on one of them--Vann Nath, who is now a painter. We first meet Nath as he's painting a stunning picture of a blindfolded man. As he paints, he describes how he was tortured at S21 (the name of the prison). His flat vocal delivery makes his chilling account even more difficult to take. It's as if his emotion is expressed through his art instead of his memories. Later, Nath returns to S21, where he meets one of the other survivors, Chum Mey. But Mey becomes so distraught just from being outside the jail that he can't remain.

The core of the film, though, takes place inside the prison as Nath comes face-to-face with some of the guards who tortured him. Those expecting repentance and reconciliation will be deeply disappointed. Rather, the guards seem unwilling, even 25 years later, to acknowledge what they did. In an early scene, one of the guards is sitting in a house with his mother, who admonishes him to tell the truth about whom he killed. But he instead excuses himself, saying he wished he had been at the front instead and that he only did what he did because he was afraid of dying. That lament is repeated throughout the film as guards excuse their behavior, citing their youth at the time, their ignorance, and their fear of being beaten as well. One man even invokes his devotion to the Khmer Rouge, "If the Party arrests them, they're enemies...the Party never makes mistakes." It's hard to say if he's talking about the past or if the Khmer Rouge propaganda still holds sway.

The most startling moments in the movie occur when Nath and the guards reenact various scenes of torture, describing what they would do to the prisoners. A doctor talks about treating a prisoner just so he could be beaten again. And the descriptions of executions are too brutal to print in a family newspaper.

These scenes and narratives are often intercut with other paintings, which is an incredibly powerful technique. I've seen this same device used recently in The Lost Boys of Sudan and James' Journey to Jerusalem. In each case, the effect was to move the story into the world of imagination, and thereby make it even more real. Particularly when reality is almost too horrible to contemplate, mediating it through a static work of art both allows us to look at it and singes it on our memories. Objective photographs (or films) are sometimes a poor substitute for the subjective emotion of a painting.

Still, the photographs of various S21 prisoners are haunting, in the same way Americans have been haunted by more recent prison photographs. And while I would never think of comparing what the Khmer Rouge did in its genocidal rule to what's going on now in Iraq, S21 is not merely a historical record. It is a stark reminder of how easy it is for the powerful to abuse their power, how easy it is for normal people to transform themselves into sadistic torturers, and how easy it is for propaganda to override any hint of morality. One former guard remarked, "Better to make a wrong arrest than let the enemy eat away at us from within." When the enemy is absolutely evil and we are absolutely sure of our own innate rightness, it's amazing what horrors we can justify to ourselves. 

J. Robert Parks  5/17/2004