The room at K-3 is at the back of the compound, on the ground floor, with the window the staff cover with the louvred shutter at four. I work here when the Standing Committee is not meeting, which is most days; it meets at K-1, the other compound the Angkar maintains. The work moves between the two compounds and arrives at this desk overnight in the folders the secretary brings. There is no name on the folders. The figure named to the country as Pol Pot is the figure at this desk, and the figure at this desk is the figure the country does not see.
The folders this morning are from S-21. S-21 is the security centre at the former Chao Ponhea Yat High School in the south of Phnom Penh, operated by Kang Kek Iew whom the apparatus calls Comrade Duch. The folders are the confessions of the past week. The confessions are the documents the apparatus produces by the methods the security centre uses to produce them. The methods are not the apparatus's contribution to the file. The file is a list of names the prisoner has named. The naming is the work the methods produce. The folder this morning has the names of forty-three cadres the recent prisoners have named, and the forty-three are the next round of arrests the apparatus will execute this week and the week after. In other cells at S-21 the painter Vann Nath is kept alive because the security centre needs a portrait of the figure painted from a propaganda photograph, and the mechanic Chum Mey is kept alive because he can repair the typewriter on which the confessions are typed.
Hu Nim's confession is on top of the folder. Hu Nim was the Minister of Information of Democratic Kampuchea, the man who had been a National Assembly deputy under Sihanouk before going to the maquis in 1967 and rising in the underground party. Hu Nim was arrested in April. The confession is dated the 28th of May. The confession is many pages, typed on the security centre's typewriter, with Hu Nim's signature at the bottom of each page. The confession says Hu Nim was a CIA agent, a KGB agent, a Vietnamese agent, and the leader of a network of intellectuals working to undermine the Angkar. The confession is not what Hu Nim said. The confession is what the methods produced from a man held in the cell of S-21 for forty-eight days. I read the confession this morning. I signed for the executions of the forty-three names it produces.
The categories the apparatus is administratively eliminating are five. The old-people and new-people categorisation runs across all of them and is the first sorting. The five are the ethnic Vietnamese, the ethnic Cham, the ethnic Chinese, the Buddhist monks, and the urban evacuees who were classed new people when they were expelled from the cities. The categorisation is the doctrine of the Four-Year Plan made operational. The work proceeds. In Svay Rieng province on the eastern border, a Vietnamese-Cambodian fishing family in a village along the Mekong tributary has been in the krom, the cooperative, since the krom was formed in 1976. The father is a fisherman whose grandfather came down the river in the 1880s. The mother is from the same village. The four children are six, four, three, and one. The family has been on the list of ethnic Vietnamese families since the categorisation was completed last year. The list this week is the list the Eastern Zone cadres will act on.
In Kampong Cham province, in a Cham Muslim village along the Mekong south of the provincial capital, a Cham family has been in the krom since the regime dissolved their village mosque and broke up the village in 1976. The grandmother knew the imam who was shot at the dissolution. The granddaughter, who is eight, no longer speaks the Cham word for grandmother because the cooperative does not permit the speaking. In Phnom Penh, where the cooperatives have replaced what was the city, an ethnic Chinese family expelled on the 17th of Mesa in 1975 is at a krom in the Northwest Zone. The father had been a shopkeeper on the Monivong. The mother had been a teacher. The two children survive, the others have not. A Buddhist monk who was defrocked in 1975 and assigned to a krom is now an agricultural labourer in the same Northwest Zone, and the apparatus does not know that he is the same man. A second defrocked monk, the abbot of his Kampong Speu pagoda before the 1975 dissolution, is now an agricultural labourer at the same krom.
The urban evacuees were expelled from the cities on the 17th of Mesa 1975, which the apparatus calls 17 April and which is the first day of Saka Sun, Year Zero, the revolutionary calendar the Angkar imposed when the country was emptied. The evacuees were classed new people because they had not been peasants before the evacuation. The new-people families at the Northwest Zone krom where the Chinese family and the defrocked monk are also at this autumn have eaten the rice ration of new people, which is below the ration of old people, since the krom was formed. The deaths in the new-people families have begun and will accelerate through this dry season. The work assignments the Mé Sahakor enforces are the assignments the apparatus has determined the categorisation requires.
The Standing Committee meets this evening at K-1 to approve the operational decisions of the apparatus: Nuon Chea (Brother No. 2, Vice Premier), Ieng Sary (Brother No. 3, Foreign Minister), Khieu Samphan (Brother No. 4, State Presidium president), Son Sen (Brother No. 5, defence and security, to whom Comrade Duch reports), Vorn Vet (Brother No. 7, economics), Ta Mok (Southwest Zone secretary, the enforcer assigned to the Eastern Zone purges against So Phim's apparatus, against the backdrop of the Vietnamese border conflict escalating since the spring). The Standing Committee will approve tonight what the apparatus has produced for it to approve.
I read the confessions. I sign the orders that follow them. I approved the categorisation in the Four-Year Plan. I approved the Vietnamese-family list. I approved the Cham-village list. I approved the monks list. I approved the new-people ration. I authorised the Eastern Zone investigations that have produced the confessions that name So Phim's people. The apparatus that produces the confessions is the apparatus I built. The categories are the categories the doctrine I authored sets. The doctrine the Tung Padevat publishes each month is the doctrine I have written or approved. The orders the Standing Committee approves tonight are the orders I have proposed. The escalation was authored. The escalation is mine.
The folder closes. Tomorrow morning's signature will transmit the orders for the forty-three arrests to the Eastern Zone. The next folder is the draft of the next Tung Padevat issue. The doctrine has been written; the country does not know who has written it; the country knows the Angkar. The cooperatives will continue. The cells at S-21 will continue. The confessions will continue.
