Ramsamiksopiya Reya was 12 years old the day a casual act of kindness changed his life—and ultimately nearly killed him in Tuol Sleng prison.
It was 1968, and he was walking down a road in Pailin when an old man named Ta Tep called him over. He said he’d been bitten by an animal and needed help.
“He asked me to buy medicine, cotton and alcohol so he could treat the bites.” The boy came back with ampicillin, a compress and alcohol. “I felt sorry for the old man,” he said recently. “I also brought back some old people from the village to make a party and have a drink together.”
The boy thought no more about it. But seven years later in 1975, the old man came back to Pailin. He was wearing black clothes now and had a car and seven bodyguards.
Ta Tep turned out to be a high official in the Khmer Rouge, and he did not forget the boy’s kindness. He gave Ramsamiksopiya Reya’s family a sack of rice and other food and took the boy to live with him.
“When I was in the car with him, I saw many people dead and dying along Route 10. But he told me, “Don’t think about it, or pay attention. It is their problem.’”
Ta Tep gave him black clothes, sandals made of tires, a soft cap and a carbine and ammunition. Within a month—in June of 1975—he was a Khmer Rouge chief with a new name, Hov.
He was 19 years old.
“Later, I was promoted to chief of the mobile organization for the Northwest region,” which covered six districts in Zone Three. During the Khmer Rouge years, 80,000 people died in Zone Three, of disease, hunger and execution.
Hov admits he has blood on his hands. “I ordered the deaths of 42 leaders,” he said. “They were shot dead 100 meters from Komping Pouy dam,” for crimes ranging from starving people to rape to betraying Angkar.
And then they came for him.
By March of 1977, he had 32 bodyguards of his own. He thought nothing of it when he was summoned to a big meeting in Battambang, but when he got to Phnom Sampov, only five guards were allowed to proceed with him.
He still didn’t realize he was in trouble.
In Battambang, he was warmly greeted, invited to take a bath and ushered into the party, where he saw many leaders from six zones. They ate and drank for an hour; as he raised a glass of water to his lips, soldiers pointed guns at the guests.
The soldiers tied their hands behind them. “They told us this was an order from the upper leaders, and they would send us to the upper leaders to solve the problem,” he recalls. “They told me not to worry or to look so horrified, they would continue the investigation.”
All 122 guests were loaded into trucks and driven to Bavel. “I expected to be killed,” said Hov. “At that time, anybody taken away was killed. But I didn’t understand what I had done wrong.”
The prisoners were untied in Bavel and told they would be killed if they ran. “We are investigating who is sympathetic to Vietnam, and who is our enemy,” they were told.
For 17 days, the prisoners awaited their fate. They were well fed, and on the last day their captors organized another party. The food was so good—beef soup, sweets and cigarettes—that they began to think they might survive.
After lunch they were loaded onto trucks again, but 67 of the original 122 were missing. “I didn’t know where they had been taken,” he said. “I figured they had been killed.”
Cloths were tied over the prisoners’ faces and the trucks set off on a 24-hour trip. Hov remembers getting water only twice during the trip, and having to drink it through the cloth.
Eventually, they were unloaded at a nondescript high school. He remembers sitting at a student desk where they asked him what he had been doing before the Khmer Rouge took over.
He didn’t know he was in Phnom Penh. He didn’t know he was at Tuol Sleng, the infamous S-21 interrogation center. He was handcuffed and chained and left in a room with the others for13 days.
At some point he was branded on the back with a number, he says. Then he was taken into a room with about 30 other prisoners, and the interrogations started.
“There were four men in black uniforms. Two of them beat and tortured people, one asked questions and the fourth stood guard with an AK-47 assault weapon.
“They asked each of us in front of the others. As people were questioned, they were sent into other rooms,” he said. When they got to him, they asked again about his life before the Khmer Rouge.
“The final question was, ‘Isn’t it true that you are a [Vietnamese] in the KGB?’” Hov, who is a member of the Kola ethnic minority, said, “I didn’t know any Vietnamese, and what was the KGB?”
They hit him in the back with a heavy stick, and he fell down under the table. They hauled him back upright by the collar and asked him again, “‘Are you the enemy or not?’ I said no, and they hit me again with the stick. This time I lost consciousness.”
When he came to, he knew what the answer was supposed to be. He didn’t even wait for the question, but just started saying, “yes, yes.” He thumb-printed a confession.
“The truth is, I was not KGB and I was not [Vietnamese]. I answered yes because I knew I would be tortured seriously, and even if I survived, my brain would be damaged. I did not want them to torture me more. I thought it would be better to be shot dead than to face chronic torture.
“I did not say anything more, because I thought I would be killed. I no longer hoped I could survive.”
Hov was chained up again, this time in a room on the ground floor. For two weeks he lay there, unable to move. He lay in his own excrement, able only to use a little of his daily two liters of water to wash himself.
Some days they fed him some rice; other days it was vegetables and water. He was ordered not to talk, but at night he cried, and he heard others crying. His buttocks, legs and back became infected and are scarred to this day.
After four weeks, some men from the Angkar came to the prison, looking for young men to work. Forty-four prisoners around the age of 20 were chosen, including two others from Battambang.
“They loaded us onto Chinese military trucks, and took us out about five kilometers past Pochentong Airport,” to some ricefields. “Another man and I pulled a cultivator,” like a pair of oxen, he said.
Those sent to the camp knew absolute obedience was their only chance to stay alive. The Khmer Rouge overseers drove them like cattle, using a whip to make them go faster.
“I never worked harder in my life. In Cambodia, no one ever used human beings to work like that.”
After two months, he was given a large knife and assigned to guard duty along the Tonle Sap and in front of the Royal Palace. “They told me to guard against Vietnamese troops, and if I saw any I was to arrest them,” he said.
When Phnom Penh fell in early 1979, he retreated with the Khmer Rouge troops. “I did not want to join them, but I had no choice. If I had tried to escape I would have been killed.”
He returned to Pailin and remained within the Khmer Rouge. In 1990, he married; in 1996, he defected to the government along with Ieng Sary. He and his wife took a trip to Phnom Penh the following year; it wasn’t long before he heard talk of Tuol Sleng.
It sounded like the place where he had been taken. He went with his wife to look.
“When I stepped into the Tuol Sleng compound, I looked around, as I did in 1977. I remembered it, and knew it was S-21,” he said. “It was horrible. It made my hair stand on end, remembering my experiences and the torture. I never thought I would live through it. Not many did.
“I walked straight to the place where I was shackled. I remembered it. I pointed to it, telling my wife, ‘This was my room. I was detained here.’”
Everything was as he remembered it, and the experience was almost unbearable. He forced himself to go from place to place, looking at the photographs and exhibits.
“I remember the photographs of four women and eight men. We all came on the same truck from Battambang, and we knew each other when we were detained those 17 days in Bavel.
“Their photos looked very fresh, as though they were still alive.”
He visited Tuol Sleng three times on that 14-day trip to Phnom Penh, trying to understand what had happened there and why. “I wanted to show my wife it was a terrible and horrible place.”
And he struggled to understand.
“I wondered why, when I had done nothing wrong, I was accused of being KGB and [Vietnamese]. And especially, I hoped that other prisoners would be visiting it and I might meet them.”
But, he said, he never did. He found out later that only a handful of people ever came out alive.
“I remember all of this very well,” he said recently. “I will tell my children about it, and when they grow up I will take them to see it. I want them to know it is a cruel and inhuman place and that they must not follow this way.”
He was once a believer in communism, he says. “I thought it was clean and free of corruption, and that it helped the poor people.” But having lived through it, he suffered terribly and lost even his will to survive.
“I will tell them never to become communists, because communist ideology and theory is just lies.”
He remains grateful he will get the chance to tell his children anything. Of the 122 people who climbed into the trucks that day in Battambang, only three survived.
