S21 Prison: The Gateway to Cambodia’s Killing Fields

in the suburbs of phnom penh lies an ordinary building with a terrifying secret seen from the outside that you're saying school doesn't look like much four small blocks arranged around a leafy courtyard but this appearance belies a backstory so dark it's almost beyond comprehension converted into a prison by pol potzkyma rouge during cambodia's year zero teol slang now renamed s21 was intended to hold enemies of the regime instead it wound up becoming one of the deadliest prisons in history of the fifteen thousand to twenty thousand people to pass through its doors only twelve survived the rest became victims of cambodia's killing fields one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century but how did this happen how did a quiet school in a small asian country become ground zero for a genocide well today we're gonna delve into the history of both s21 and the bloodthirsty regime that made it possible and just before we get into it today there's gonna be some pronunciation in here that i'm definitely gonna get wrong i'm looking it up when i can if i don't get it right it is what it is i am doing my best it was january the 8th 1979 when holventae's life changed forever the day before the vietnamese army had marched on the cambodian capital to find it almost utterly deserted a combat photographer who had been one of the first civilians to witness the eerie silence of phnom penh its streets still filled with rusted cars abandoned four years earlier now as he crept through the dead city that cool january day ho could have no idea that he was about to achieve another terrifying first out in the suburbs of phnom penh the photographer noticed an unpleasant smell along with a colleague he followed the stench to a quiet leafy school from the outside the building looked peaceful an empty school in an empty city but then ho looked closer and saw the wire netting lining the open-air corridors the kymeruge slogan painted above the entrance it was at this point that hoe entered his long nightmare inside the school the bodies of men lay chains to metal bed frames their throat slits and their skin already infested with maggots upstairs whole classrooms have been subdivided into makeshift cells barely large enough to hold an adult outside their walls hung whips and chains and other instruments of torture the vietnamese photographer couldn't have known it that day but he had just stumbled across the site of the worst atrocity since the holocaust the name of this death camp s-21 the heart of the cambodian genocide the school complex that would become s-21 had first been constructed 17 years earlier in 1962. originally named after the legendary cambodian king ponheya yat it was built at a time when royalty was all the rage back then the country was ruled by prince cyanuk at this stage still a hero to his people crowned king before the outbreak of world war ii cyanu could steered his country through a japanese occupation then used diplomatic pressure to win independence from france in the post-war years since then it carefully plotted cambodia on a course of non-alignment skillfully balancing his nation between the capitalist and communist blocs as neighboring countries like vietnam were literally split in two by the pressures of the cold war this came to be seen as a great achievement but don't go thinking cyanuke was some benign figurehead the prince was a dude who craved power in 1955 cnu could abdicate it in favor of his father and founded a political movement sangam reister nyum he'd then used a mixture of his genuine popularity and a heavy dose of voter suppression to win every seat in the national assembly when his father died five years later ceonuke refused to replace him leaving himself as both cambodia's prime minister and its head of state so yes while cyanuk may have been beloved in the early 60s he was also clearly someone who'd sell his own mother to a dutch brothel in return for power but although ceonuke was broadly popular not all of his subjects were on board with his reign in phnom penh a disaffected teacher at a private school had clocked cyanuke's growing authoritarianism and decided to stop him that teacher's name was saloth sarr but you probably know him by his alias paul pott in no time at all the coming clash between pol pot and cyanuk would bring cambodia to its knees [Music] one of the great ironies of communism is that so many of its leaders came from the same privileged background that they rallied against paul pott's family had been relatively prosperous landowners allowing the boy to travel to france for his education there pol pot had fallen in with the french communist party and returned to cambodia determined to ignite a peasant revolution unfortunately cambodia's presence were all pretty much like we're cool bro and paul pott had instead taken a job teaching french at a private school in the capital even when he founded the local communist party in 1960 it just attracted a handful of members in a sane world that would have been pol pot's biography a middle class teacher secretly daydreaming of revolution but sadly this wasn't a sane world it was a world drenched in cold war paranoia and that paranoia was about to turn this wannabe revolutionary into the real deal in 1963 prince cyanuk became concerned about communism in cambodia although the movement was basically just paul pott and his mates farting around phnom penh crackdown was ordered and the communists fled into the jungle there in the forests on the vietnamese border they began their slow transformation into real revolutionaries over the next two years pol pot formed his political philosophy he came to respect the local hill tribes who had no use for money or buddhism and were completely self-sufficient such self-sufficiency would become a pillar of cambodian communism and the reason that it was so destructive come 1965 pol pot was ready to act that year the u.s escalated its war in north vietnam frightened the vietcong would respond by entering cambodia prince ceonuke signed a secret agreement letting hanoi build bases on his side of the border sadly for cenu the agreement didn't stay secret for very long in cambodia vietnam had classically been seen as the enemy sort of like how poland feels about russia so when word got out that the prince was collaborating with the bad guys people were pissed in 1967 a revolt exploded in bat dambang province manipulated by pol podskyma rouge terrified of being overthrown ceonic responded by going full authoritarian his police began abducting people off the streets torturing them and murdering them prominent dissidents were assassinated entire villages were burned to the ground it was meant to cow the population instead it became pol pot's greatest recruiting tool over the next three years clashes between sienuk's army and the kaima rouge increased as the communists gained ground but then 1970 rolled around and brought a deeply ironic twist that march prince ceonuke visited the ussr to try and drum up support for his regime having already made overtures to china while he was away general lon knoll deposed him in a coup establishing a pro-west military dictatorship so cenu decided to retake his throne in the maddest way possible turning to beijing seanuk was all like you know that pol pot guy of financing to overthrow me and establish a communist state turns out i'm super into the idea where do i sign up and just like that prince ceonuke was no longer fighting the kaima rouge but he was fighting with them he even went on radio telling his subjects to join paul potts army and overthrow general lon noll this was the start of the cambodian civil war when it finally ended it would usher in an era of unparalleled bloodshed [Music] at this point in the narrative most videos skip ahead to 1975 when polpot's army finally took phnom penh but while this does propel the story forward it fails to explain how how did the kaima rouge go from being obscured jungle communists to ruling a country the answer there is a deadly combination of greed and incompetence we've already seen prince cianuk's greed push him to make a devil's pact with the kaima rouge and now it's time for general lon noll to add the incompetence in this case by vowing to destroy ceonuke's secret viet cong bases the result was a north vietnamese invasion of cambodia suddenly the military dictatorship was no longer just fighting paul pott and prince cyanuk but the communist vietnamese army then south vietnam and its american allies also invaded and everything went to hell in five bloody years the cambodian civil war killed around 300 000 people at its height the vietcong were handing huge swaths of territory to the khmer rouge while u.s bombers were dropping more munitions onto the countryside than were dropped onto japan during the whole of world war ii although both north vietnam and the u.s pulled back when they realized their actions were only adding to the carnage by then it was too late come 1975 the half decade of constant brutality had driven nearly all the population either into the arms of the kaimaruge or into phnom penh's refugee camps aslon nol's regime crumbled around him communist troops surrounded the capital for a final assault on april 17 1975 the apocalypse arrived that day kaimuru's troops mostly armed teenagers entered the capital to cheers after five brutal years people just wanted an end to the war it didn't matter who won things just couldn't get any worse than they already were but oh boy if there's one thing we've learned producing hundreds of history videos it's that things can always get worse the same day they took phnom penh the kaima rouge set the wheels of genocide in motion that afternoon troops fanned out across the capital armed with bull horns outside every home every school every hospital they issued their orders evacuate immediately abandon your possessions and leave the city now anyone who refused to listen was shot as were the slow the elderly and anyone too sick or disabled to walk by evening the entire capital over two million people was on the move it was perhaps the largest death march in history tens of thousands were murdered on april the 17th alone not just the stragglers but also intellectuals the religious and anyone who showed any emotion it was the beginning of cambodia's year zero before the month was out hundreds of thousands of executions would take place entire buddhist communities would be slaughtered the extended families of the rich would be exterminated the survivors would find themselves separated from their loved ones and sent to toil in the countryside on starvation rations inside phnom penh itself the population dropped to a mere fifty thousand all kaima rouge loyalists at some point these loyalists stumbled across the abandoned pond here yat high school renamed tjeol slang following general lon noll's coup the site must have made an impression because shortly after the kaima rouge converted it into a prison known as s-21 it would soon become one of the deadliest prisons on earth the kaimurugi's attitude to human life can be neatly summed up by one of their slogans to spare you is no profit to destroy you is no loss in s21 that slogan would reach its perverse height the name s21 first appears on kaimaru's documents in september 1975 some five months after the fall of phnom penh however it wasn't until the end of the year that its site was chosen that winter tillslang school was converted into a prison barbed wire topping its walls its classrooms hastily partitioned into tiny cells wire netting placed along the outer facing corridors to deter suicides a workforce of 1725 were brought in ranging from guards and interrogators to on-site chefs and a barrage of record keepers each of whom was forbidden contact with the outside world but the most important appointment was that of kang kulu better known as brother duch a former schoolteacher duck was the camp commander and a guy so sadistic he'd make ammon goth from schindler's list look like a sane reasonable guy s-21 began operation in may 1976. officially it was a place for relocation but this was just a euphemism s21's real function was to kill anyone who set foot there we mean anyone some of the things people were imprisoned for were unbelievable there was an inmate from a work camp who neglected to water the plants or the kaima rouge soldier who was accused of planning to fall asleep while on duty there was even a former s21 guard whose crime was we kid you not beating a prisoner to death without permission but then that was the kama rouge one of their slogans went it is better to arrest 10 people by mistake than to let one guilty person go free those arrested included their own members 500 high-ranking kaima rouge were tortured to death inside s-21 victims of pol pot's paranoia tempting as it is to see this as evidence of karma no one deserved what happened in s-21 prisoners would arrive at the school blindfolded in groups they would then be photographed and taken to the guards for their first interrogation speaking of the gods all of s21's guards and interrogators were teenagers from pleasant backgrounds often as young as 15. that meant they had no problems being as violent as possible the first interrogation was often benign compared to what came later prisoners were forced to strip naked and give their entire life story from birth until their moment of arrest this done they were either taken to a tiny cell and chained to the floor or taken to a larger room and shackled to a group of other prisoners wherever they ended up it was a nightmare any action a prisoner undertook required permission this included sitting up using the toilet or just shifting their weight a little anyone who failed to get permission would be beaten and anyone who cried out while being beaten would be beaten some more the cells were filled with mosquitoes and severe overcrowding meant disease was rife but while there was an average population of 1 500 prisoners on site at any time you rarely saw the same faces the life expectancy of s21's inmates was anywhere from a few weeks to only a few days when those few weeks were finally up well we're about to find out if there's a single vaguely positive thing you can say about brother duck it's that he kept excellent records as a result we have an extremely good idea of what daily life looked like in s21 a 4 30 a.m sharp prisoners were woken up and made to strip for inspection that done they were led from their cells and the daily rounds of interrogation would begin now interrogation is a misleading word it makes it sound like the guards were looking for evidence of guilt but under the kaima rouge simply being a prisoner was proof of being guilty in fact the cambodian term for prisoner nyx those translates as guilty person yet it wasn't enough for the gods to just kill you they needed you to confess to a crime first and these confessions were extracted in the most horrific ways prisoners were subjected to mock drownings to electric shocks to having their hands tied behind their backs and being suspended from the ceiling until their limbs broke people were beaten with clubs and whipped with cables salt water was poured into open wounds the craziest part is that the guards didn't know what they were looking for the prisoners would confess to the wildest things to stop the pain only for brother duch to read the report declare it phony and authorize yet more torture to get a real confession when duke finally had the arbitrary confession he wanted he'd send his report to central committee who'd compile that day's must-smash list smashing someone was kaima rouge speak for killing them their list compiled the committee would send it back to sign off on it what happened next depended entirely on who you were former kaima rouge officials who wound up on brother duke's list would be killed then and there in s21 their bodies buried in the courtyard any westerners and a handful of brits americans australians and canadians did pass through the prison were killed and their bodies were burnt to prevent identification any vietnamese meanwhile were made to dress up in vietcong uniforms photographed as spies and then murdered but for the vast majority of prisoners a place on the must smash list meant a seat in one of the trucks that arrived around 9 pm each night anywhere between several dozen and 300 prisoners were loaded onto these trucks and driven 14 kilometers outside of phnom penh to a place called chong ek the prisoners were told they were being transferred but if you had known cheongyak's other name you'd know that this was a cruel lie cheongyak is better known as the biggest of the killing fields after the trucks arrived the prisoners would be herded into a small building where their names were checked against another copy of the day's list once everyone had been accounted for they were taken out in small groups to pre-dug pits there they would be told to kneel and their hands tied behind their backs finally a guard would kill them with one or two blows to the back of the neck usually with an iron axle in the kaimurugi's twisted world view bullets were too expensive to waste killing dissidents the blow delivered the victims were buried in the pit rare survivors suffocated and yet this awful fate wasn't the worst way to die at s-21 the records show that several prisoners were harvested for their blood their bodies drained dry so transfusions could be given to kaimuru soldiers at least one teenage girl was even used as a medical experiment cut open alive without anesthetic to help train the regime's surgeons in short s21 was hell on earth a place so brutal that it could rival nazi germany luckily the regime behind it though they were on the edge of collapse while the kaimuru had been busy establishing their communist utopia of forced labor and genocide across the border a different kind of communist government had emerged just days after the fall of phnom penh north vietnamese forces had captured saigon ending the vietnam war but while both cambodia and unified vietnam were now communist they were far from comrades remember how he said that cambodians viewed vietnamese as their historical enemies well turns out the kaima rouge were no different despite the vietcong helping them win the civil war the kaimarus were terrified hanoi had plans to absorb their nation into a vietnamese superstate so they elected to kill as many vietnamese as possible as the 1970s rolled on the kaima rouge began a series of attacks on vietnam that soon escalated into massacres the worst came in 1978 when some 3157 vietnamese civilians were murdered by cambodian death squads at first hanoi tried to negotiate they were both communist after all surely they could come to some sort of agreement but the kaima rouge just kept on attacking until hanoi declared well to hell with this on december 25th 1978 the full might of the vietnamese army came crashing across the border although still backed by china the kaimuruge simply weren't capable of fighting back their army collapsed by january the 6th the vietnamese were closing in on phnom penh when brother got the news he calmly ordered all remaining prisoners at s21 be massacred then he fled the city possibly the last kaimaru official to leave the capital the next day the vietnamese army took phnom penh one day after that a photojournalist named hovante followed a sickly smell through the dead city suburbs and stumbled across the horror show that was s-21 by now up to 20 000 had been murdered there across the whole of cambodia some two million had died equivalent to a quarter of the entire population per capita it was one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century worse even than the rwandan genocide or stalin's gulags yet its architect would never face justice as the vietnamese rolled in polpot fled into the jungle there he remained part of the kaima rouge until he was deposed in 1997 and placed under house arrest he died of natural cause in 1998 unrepentant to the last prince cyanuk 2 lived out the rest of his days in comfort despite being the guy who helped paul pot take power cyanuk was re-crowned king of cambodia after the vietnamese occupation ended only abdicating his throne in 2004. he died in beijing in 2012 at the ripe old age of 89 convinced to the last that his poisonous lust for power had no connection to the kaimaruja's rise thankfully though this kind of peaceful ending eluded brother after going into hiding this sadistic camp commander converted to christianity and became a preacher when he was arrested at the end of the 90s he declared that his religion made him repentant and he would confess to all his crimes in 2007 he stood before cambodia's genocide court the extraordinary chambers in the courts of cambodia and entered a guilty plea he was convicted in 2010 of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison but what if s-21 itself one year after the vietnamese victory the prison's trove of documents were put on display and it was reopened as a museum it still stands in phnom penh today almost untouched since the day that ho van tay stepped across its threshold and into a nightmare thanks to brother duke's confessions we now have a close to complete understanding of the horrors that went on inside its walls it was here in this former school that the worst crime since the holocaust was perpetrated that one of the worst genocides in recorded history took place even auschwitz although it killed far more people overall had a higher survival rates at around 10 to 15 percent compared to a mere 0.06 percent for s21 given such awful numbers it's tempting to think of s21 as a one-off a freak of history only made possible by one sadistic man but that would be to take the wrong lesson away from this story across the world even now genocides are underway that could be as bad as cambodia's in syria and in iraq the last remnants of isis continue to murder yasidis and central african republic christian and muslim militias slaughter their neighbors in north korea's gulags untold numbers die in silence and that's just the tip of the iceberg a slice of the many atrocities humans commit against one another daily the tale of s21 then isn't something confined to history a story that we can easily dismiss it's a warning a warning about what happens when you divide a population when leaders care only about power when we see our enemies not as people but as slogans sure we can pretend that s 21 could only ever happen in cambodia or only under communism it's comforting to think of it that way simple but the truth is that places like s21 will always be with us only when we accept that they could happen anywhere else or we have the faintest chance of stopping them you

Channel: Geographics

Views: 192,003

Rating: 4.9445829 out of 5

Keywords: S21 Prison, S21 Prison facts, S21 Prison killing fields, S21 Prison cambodia, S21 Prison survivors, The Tuol Sleng Genocide

Id: Fiflq0KX_bw

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2020