Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
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The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is a museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The site is a former high school which was used as the Security Prison 21 (S-21) by the communist Khmer Rouge regime from its rise to power in 1975 to its fall in 1979. Tuol Sleng is a Khmer name meaning "hill of the poisonous trees."
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[edit] History
Formerly the Tuol Svay Prey High School, named after a Royal ancestor of King Norodom Sihanouk, the five buildings of the complex were converted in 1975 into a prison and interrogation centre. The Khmer Rouge renamed the complex "Security Prison 21" (S-21) and construction began to adapt the prison to the inmates: the buildings were enclosed in electrified barbed wire, the classrooms converted into tiny prison and torture chambers and all the windows were covered with iron bars and barbed wire to prevent prisoner escapes.
From 1975 to 1979, an estimated 17,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng (some estimates suggest a number as high as 20,000, though the real number is unknown). The prisoners were selected from all around the country, and usually were former Khmer Rouge members and soldiers, accused of treason. Those arrested included some of highest ranking communist politicians such as Khoy Thoun, Vorn Vet and Hu Nim. Although the official reason for their arrest was "espionage," these men may have been viewed by Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot as potential leaders of a coup against him. Prisoners' families were often brought en masse to be interrogated and later murdered at the Choeung Ek extermination centre.
Even though the vast majority of the victims were Cambodian, foreigners were also imprisoned, including Vietnamese, Laotians, Indians, Pakistanis, British, Americans, New Zealanders and Australians.
Most non-Cambodians had been evacuated or expelled from the country and those who remained were seen as a security risk. A number of Western prisoners passed through S-21 between April 1976 and December 1978. Mostly these were picked up at sea by Khmer Rouge patrol boats. They included four Americans, three French, two Australians, a Briton and a New Zealander. One of the last prisoners to die was American Michael Scott Deeds, who was captured with his friend Chris De Lance while sailing from Thailand to Hawaii.
In 1979, the prison was uncovered by the invading Vietnamese army. In 1980, the prison was reopened as a historical museum memorializing the actions of the Khmer Rouge regime. The museum is open to the public, and receives an average of 50 visits every day.
[edit] Life in the prison
Upon arrival at the prison, prisoners were photographed and required to give complete biographical information. After that, they were forced to strip naked, and all their possessions were removed. The prisoners were then taken to their cells. Those taken to the smaller cells were shackled to the walls. Those who were held in the large mass cells were collectively shackled to long pieces of iron bar. The prisoners had to sleep on the floors, while still shackled.
The prison had very strict regulations, and severe beatings were inflicted upon any prisoner who tried to disobey. Almost every action had to be approved by one of the prison's guards. Likewise, sanitary and health conditions were awful. The unhygienic living conditions caused skin diseases, lice, and other ailments, and few of the inmates ever received any kind of medical treatment.
[edit] Tortures and extermination
The torture system at Tuol Sleng was designed to make prisoners confess to whatever crimes their captors charged them with. Prisoners were tortured with electric shocks, searing hot metal instruments and hanging, as well as through the use of various other devices. Although many prisoners died from this kind of abuse, killing them outright was discouraged, since the Khmer Rouge needed their confessions. The torture implements are on display in the museum. The vast majority of prisoners were innocent of the charges against them and their confessions produced by torture.
After the interrogation, the prisoner and his/her family were taken to the Choeung Ek extermination centre, fifteen kilometers from Phnom Penh. There, they were killed by being battered with iron bars, pickaxes, machetes and many other makeshift weapons. Victims of the Khmer Rouge were seldom shot as bullets were viewed as too precious for this purpose.
Out of the roughly 14,200 prisoners at the prison, there were only seven known survivors. Only three of them are thought to be still alive: Vann Nath, Chum Mey and Bou Meng. All three of these men were kept alive because they had skills judged to be useful. Vann Nath had trained as an artist and was put to work painting pictures of Pol Pot. Many of his paintings depicting events he witnessed in Tuol Sleng are on display in the museum. Bou Meng, whose wife was killed in the prison, is also an artist. Chum Mey was kept alive because of his skills in repairing machinery.
[edit] Staff of the prison
The prison had a staff of 1,720 people. Of those, approximately 300 were office staff, internal workforce and interrogators. The other 1,400 were general workers. Several of these workers were children taken from the prisoner families. The chief of the prison was Khang Khek Leu (also known as Comrade Duch), a former mathematics teacher who worked closely with Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. The interrogation teams were split into three separate groups: Krom Noyobai or political unit, Krom Kdao or 'hot' unit and Krom Angkiem or 'chewing' unit.
[edit] The Security Regulations
When prisoners were first brought to Tuol Sleng, they were made aware of ten rules that they were to follow during their incarceration. What follows is what is posted today at the Tuol Sleng Museum; the imperfect grammar is a result of faulty translation from the original Khmer:
- 1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
- 2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.
- 3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
- 4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
- 5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
- 6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
- 7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
- 8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.
- 9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
- 10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.
[edit] Discovery of Tuol Sleng
In 1979 Ho Van Tay, a Vietnamese combat photographer, was the first media person to document Tuol Sleng to the world. Van Tay and his colleagues followed the stench of rotting corpses to the gates of Tuol Sleng. The photos of Van Tay documenting what he saw when he entered the site are exhibited in Tuol Sleng today.
The Khmer Rouge required the prison's staff to make a detailed dossier of all the prisoners. Included in the documentation was a photograph. Since the original negatives and photographs were separated from the dossiers in the 1979-1980 period, most of the photographs remain anonymous today.
The photographs are currently being exhibited at the Tuol Sleng Museum and at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
[edit] S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine is the title of a 2003 film by Rithy Panh, a Cambodian-born filmmaker who lost his family when he was 11. The film features a group of Tuol Sleng survivors and a dozen former Khmer Rouge fighters - prison guards, interrogators, a doctor and a photographer. The focus of the film is the difference between the feelings of the survivors, who want to understand what happened at Tuol Sleng to warn future generations, and the former jailers, who cannot escape the horror of the genocide they helped create.
[edit] Tuol Sleng today
The buildings at Tuol Sleng are preserved as they were left when the Khmer Rouge were driven out in 1979. The regime kept extensive records, including thousands of photographs. Several rooms of the museum are now lined, floor to ceiling, with black and white photographs of some of the estimated 20,000 prisoners who passed through the prison.
Other rooms contain only a rusting iron bedframe, beneath a black and white photograph showing the room as it was found by the Vietnamese. In each photograph, the mutilated body of a prisoner is chained to the bed, killed by his fleeing captors only hours before the prison was captured. Other rooms preserve leg-irons and instruments of torture. They are accompanied by paintings by former inmate Vann Nath showing people being tortured, which were added by the post-Khmer Rouge regime installed by the Vietnamese in 1979.
The museum is perhaps best known for having housed the "skull map," composed of 300 skulls and other bones found by the Vietnamese during their occupation of Cambodia, to serve as a reminder of what happened at the prison. The map was dismantled in 2002, but the skulls of some victims are still on display in shelves in the museum.
Today, the museum is open to the public, and along with the Choeung Ek Memorial (The Killing Fields), is included as a point of interest for those visiting Cambodia. Despite the disturbing images it contains, the museum is visited by large parties of Cambodian school children.
A number of images from Tuol Sleng are featured in the 1992 Ron Fricke film Baraka.
[edit] Gallery
 Many of the rooms are divided into crude cells |
 Photos of the victims of the Khmer Rouge line the walls |
 Paintings of scenes of torture, painted by a former inmate |
 Cabinets filled with human skulls, disinterred from the grounds of the prison |
 "If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five electric shocks" |
 Photos of genocide victims on display |
 More photos |
 Cambodian school students tour the museum |
 Razor wire around the perimeter |
 Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum |
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Vann Nath: A Cambodian Prison Portrait. One Year in the Khmer Rouge's S-21. White Lotus Co. Ltd., Bangkok 1998, ISBN 974-8434-48-6 (An eyewitness report. The author's paintings of many scenes from the prison are on display in the Tuol Sleng museum today.)
- Chandler, David: Voices from S-21. Terror and history inside Pol Pot's secret prison. University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0-520-22247-4 (A general account of S-21 drawing heavily from the documentation maintained by the prison's staff.)
[edit] External links
- From Sideshow to Genocide - A history of the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge, including survivor stories.
- Killing Fields and S-21
- The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
- The horrors of Tuol Sleng
- A Day in the Killing Fields - 1997 travel essay by Andy Carvin
- Photographic archive of S-21 prisoners
- Tuol Sleng slideshow
