SWD 3

Be on guard! Portrait of Voeuk Peach, murdered by Khmer Rouge soldiers

The full title: "Be on Guard Against The Strategy & Tactics Of The Enemy So As To Defend The Country, The People & The Party!”

(Portrait of Cambodian Voeuk Peach, murdered at the S-21 killing center, Phomn Penh, on or before October, 11, 1977)

Ink, gouache on 4 pieces of drawing paper.
Framed: 30 inches H x 24 W
The bird wing was drawn at the ornithology lab, Burke Museum, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

The portrait was inspired by a photo in the book Voices from S-21 - Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison, by David Chandler (Univ. of California Press, '99).

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Next to a mug shot of Peach (which the drawing was done from) is a post-mortem photo of Peach with a hand-painted sign on his chest dated 11-10-77. The photos are attributed to the Photo Archive Group. Footnotes state the PAG staff cleaned, developed and archived over 6 thousand negatives found at the site in 1994-95.

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S-21 had been a high school before the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia in 1975. It became a museum in 1979. Most of the photos are viewable on the CD-Rom prepared by the Cambodia Genocide Program at Yale University. [Check the Yale U website for more info].

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Chanler writes that when the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia in January 1979, most of Phnom Penh (the capital city) was empty. "No people or animals could be seen."

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"On Jan. 8th two Vietnamese photojournalists were drawn towards a particular compound by the smell of decomposing bodies...they found themselves on the grounds of what appeared once to have been a high school. Over the gate was a red placard inscribed in yellow with a Khmer (Rouge) slogan:

FORTIFY THE SPIRIT OF THE REVOLUTION! BE ON YOUR GUARD AGAINST THE STRATEGY AND TACTICS OF THE ENEMY SO AS TO DEFEND THE COUNTRY, THE PEOPLE AND THE PARTY."

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"....Between April '75 and the first week of 1979...at least 14,000 men, women and children had been held by S-21. Because the entry records for several months of 1978 were incomplete, the true number of victims was undoubtedly higher.

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"...Of the documented prisoners, all but a dozen specially exempted ones, including Ung Pech [who became the director of the museum when it opened in 1980] had been put to death...Since 1979, seven of those 12 prisoners have come forward [for interviews.]

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"...The resemblance between S-21 and Nazi deaths camps are striking...Works discussing the Holocaust provide insight in the psychology of torturers, administrators and victims at the prison.

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"...The most striking difference between the German and Cambodian cases lies in the extent of documentation

produced at S-21....In Nazi Germany, political prisoners were kept in separate camps from those targeted for execution and were somewhat better treated. At S-21, all were charged with political offenses and were to be killed.

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"...Like the Nazi death camps and the Argentine torture facilities, S-21 was a secret facility...a factory worker in a nearby compound, interviewed in 1989, referred to S-21 as "the place where people went in but never came out."

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For those interested in learning more about how this "auto-genocide" [mass murder of Cambodians by Cambodians] began and history, Chanler also addresses the Reign of Terror in 18th century France; the Moscow "Show Trials" of the 1930's; land reform and "re-education" campaigns in the late 1940's and in Vietnam a decade later.