Lessons of torture from the Khmer Rouge's black notebook

The notebook is black in every way. For the color that covers it and for the content it contains. In these 53 pages are recorded the instructions given to the interrogators to torture the "enemies" of the Khmer Rouge who took power on April 17, 1975. Pol Pot's men kept it for three years, eight months and twenty days while locking down Cambodia, establishing terror and exterminating at least 1.7 million people. The largest mass massacre of the late 20th century and one of the most forgotten.

In her edifying immersion in the pages of this notebook, Anne-Laure Porée engages in an attempt to deconstruct and analyze a part of the Khmer Rouge death machine. One does not emerge unscathed from this immersive and visceral reading. Her essay, from her thesis in anthropology defended in 2023 at the EHESS, is embellished with a photo notebook. The author dissects a language, an ideology if not a culture that form a system and define the totalitarian and radical enterprise of Angkar, the omniscient and omnipresent "organization" behind which the Khmer Rouge leaders have long hidden. She gets as close as possible to the "genocidal logic and its orchestration" .

In Democratic Kampuchea (DK), the S-21 prison and torture center played a special role. Between 18,000 and 20,000 men, women,