S-21 Data

Youk Chhang, of DC-Cam (Documentation Center of Cambodia), provided me with data coming from research associated with the UN sponsored Tribunal.

In a 2017 email, he asked them for confirmation of this paragraph:

‘According to the Office of the Co-Prosecutors (OCP), the S-21 Prisoner List identified a total of 12,273 prisoners.

In paragraph 141 of the 001 Judgment, based on the OCP analysis, the Trial Chambers (TC) noted that “5,609 entries are members of the RAK and 4,371 are Democratic Kampuchea (DK) cadres, while 1,751 are neither members of RAK nor DK cadres.”

Based on those numbers, 81.3% of the prisoners are identified as Khmer Rouge cadres or soldiers’.

In other words, over 80% of those executed via Tuol Sleng (S-21) were actually Khmer Rouge being ‘purged’ from the party by the Pol Pot regime.

Dale Lysak, of the UN, replied:

‘I searched the new OCIJ (Office of Co-Investigating Judges) spreadsheet of 15,101 S-21 prisoners and found an entry for Hang Keo alias Smien, Secretary of Battalion 806 in Division 801, who entered S-21 on 12 June 1977. This entry is based on the List of Prisoners Entering in June 1977 (DC-Cam Document No. D14274, p. 20).

Hopefully someday soon the Court will be able to provide this Excel spreadsheet to DC-Cam and the Tuol Sleng museum. As you probably know from her testimony earlier this month, it was the product of 2 years work of a former DC-Cam staffer Hin Sotheany while she worked for OCIJ from 2014 to 2016. The spreadsheet includes the sources in which the prisoners’ names were found, identified by their DC-Cam document number, so it is an extraordinarily powerful research tool.

OCP has been working to make our own additions to the list, as we have found an additional 1,606 names that are confirmed by contemporaneous records, which would bring the total to 16,707 prisoners. Also, because Hin Sotheany’s work was primarily focused on the entry logs, we have been trying to supplement the incomplete execution dates in the OCIJ list. So while the original OCIJ spreadsheet only had execution dates for 5,512 prisoners, we have so far been able to find matching execution records and dates for an additional 4,000 people in the list’.

So, the number of those executed just keeps going up, as more research is conducted.

Documentation Center of Cambodia

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia