The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is a museum for the Cambodian genocide. Located in Phnom Penh, the site is a former secondary school that had been turned into an internment facility known as Security Prison 21 (S-21) by the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 until its fall in 1979. From 1976 to 1979, an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng; it was one of between 150 and 196 torture and execution centers established by the Khmer Rouge and their secret police.

On 26 July 2010, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia convicted the prison's chief, Kang Kek Iew, for crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. He died in 2020 while serving a life sentence.

History

thumb|Most of the school rooms were divided into cells

thumb|A brick cell inside Cambodia's S-21 prison thumb|View from inside an S-21 Prison Cell

thumb|Cells in the prison

thumb|[[Razor wire around the perimeter]]

thumb|Inside the museum

To accommodate the victims of purges that were important enough for the attention of the Khmer Rouge, a new detention center was planned in the building that was formerly known as Tuol Svay Prey High School, named after a royal ancestor of King Norodom Sihanouk. The five buildings of the complex were converted in March or April 1976 into a prison and an interrogation center. Other buildings in town had already been used as prison S-21. The Khmer Rouge renamed the complex "Security Prison 21" (S-21) and construction began to adapt the prison for the inmates: the buildings were enclosed in electrified barbed wire, the classrooms converted into tiny prison and torture chambers, and all windows were covered with iron bars and barbed wire to prevent escapes and suicides.

From 1976 to 1979, an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng (the precise number is unknown). At any one time, the prison held between 1,000 and 1,500 prisoners. They were repeatedly tortured and coerced into naming family members and close associates, who were in turn arrested, tortured and killed. In the early months of S-21's existence, most of the victims were from the previous Lon Nol regime and included soldiers, government officials, as well as academics, doctors, teachers, students, factory workers, monks, engineers, etc. Later, the party leadership's paranoia turned on its own ranks, and purges throughout the country brought thousands of party activists and their families to Tuol Sleng, where they were murdered. The unhygienic living conditions in the prison caused skin diseases, lice, rashes, ringworm and other ailments. The prison's medical staff were untrained and offered treatment only to sustain prisoners' lives after they had been injured during interrogation. When prisoners were taken from one place to another for interrogation, they were blindfolded. Guards and prisoners were not allowed to converse. Moreover, within the prison, people who were in different groups were not allowed to have contact with one another. It is proven that medical experiments were performed on certain prisoners. There is clear evidence that patients in Cambodia were sliced open and had organs removed with no anesthetic. The camp's director, Kang Kek Iew, has acknowledged that "live prisoners were used for surgical study and training. Draining blood was also done."

In their confessions, the prisoners were asked to describe their personal background. If they were party members, they had to say when they joined the revolution and describe their work assignments in DK. Then the prisoners would relate their supposed treasonous activities in chronological order. The third section of the confession text described prisoners' thwarted conspiracies and supposed treasonous conversations. At the end, the confessions would list a string of traitors who were the prisoners' friends, colleagues, or acquaintances. Some lists contained over a hundred names. People whose names were in the confession list were often called in for interrogation. There, they were killed by a group of teenagers led by a Comrade Teng, Khmers of Indian and Pakistani descent were also victims. A number of Western prisoners, many picked up at sea by Khmer Rouge patrol boats, also passed through S-21 between April 1976 and December 1978. No foreign prisoners survived captivity in S-21.

Two Franco-Vietnamese brothers named Rovin and Harad Bernard were detained in April 1976 after they were transferred from Siem Reap, where they had worked tending cattle. Another Frenchman named Andre Gaston Courtigne, a 30-year-old clerk and typist at the French embassy, was arrested the same month along with his Khmer wife in Siem Reap.

It is possible that a handful of French nationals who went missing after the 1975 evacuation of Phnom Penh also passed through S-21. He was sailing with his New Zealand companion, Kerry Hamill, and their Canadian friend Stuart Glass when their boat drifted into Cambodian territory and was intercepted by Khmer patrol boats on 13August 1978. Glass was killed during the arrest, while Dewhirst and Hamill were captured, blindfolded, and taken to shore. Both were executed after having been tortured for several months at Tuol Sleng. Witnesses reported that a foreigner was burned alive; initially, it was suggested that this might have been John Dewhirst, but a survivor later identified Kerry Hamill as the victim of this particular act of brutality. Robert Hamill, his brother and a champion Atlantic rower, years later made a documentary, Brother Number One, about his brother's incarceration.

One of the last foreign prisoners to die was 29-year-old American Michael S. Deeds, who was captured with his friend Christopher E. DeLance on 24November 1978, while sailing from Singapore to Hawaii. His confession was signed a week before the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge. In 1989, Deeds's brother, Karl Deeds, traveled to Cambodia in attempts to find his brother's remains, but was unsuccessful. On 3 September 2012, DeLance's photograph was identified among the caches of inmate portraits.

As of 1999, there were a total of 79 foreign victims on record, but former Tuol Sleng Khmer Rouge photographer Nim Im claims that the records are not complete. On top of that, there is also an eyewitness account of a Filipino, a Cuban and a Swiss who passed through the prison, though no official records are shown.

Survivors

Out of an estimated 20,000 people imprisoned at Tuol Sleng, there were only twelve known survivors: seven adults and five children. One child died shortly after the liberation. Chum Mey, Bou Meng, and Chim Meth. All three said they were kept alive because they had skills their captors judged to be useful. Bou Meng, whose wife was killed in the prison, was an artist. Chum Mey was kept alive because of his skills in repairing machinery. Chim Meth was held in S-21 for two weeks and transferred to the nearby Prey Sar prison. She may have been spared because she was from Stoeung district in Kampong Thom where Comrade Duch was born. She intentionally distinguished herself by emphasizing her provincial accent during her interrogations. Vann Nath, who was spared because of his ability to paint, died on 5 September 2011. Norng Chan Phal, one of the surviving children, published his story in 2018.

The Documentation Center of Cambodia has recently estimated that, in fact, at least 179 prisoners were freed from S-21 between 1975 and 1979 and approximately 23 prisoners (including five children, two of them siblings Norng Chanphal and Norng Chanly) survived when the prison was liberated in January 1979. One child died shortly thereafter. The hot unit (sometimes called the cruel unit) was allowed to use torture. In contrast, the cold unit (sometimes called the gentle unit) was prohibited from using torture to obtain confessions. If they could not make prisoners confess, they would transfer them to the hot unit. The chewing unit dealt with tough and important cases. Those who worked as interrogators were literate and usually in their 20s.

Discovery

In 1979, Hồ Văn Tây, a Vietnamese combat photographer, was the first journalist to document Tuol Sleng to the world. Hồ and his colleagues followed the stench of rotting corpses to the gates of Tuol Sleng. The photos of Tây<!--"Hồ" is the surname, but Vietnamese people are typically politely referred to by their given name, in this case "Tây"--> documenting what he saw when he entered the site are exhibited in Tuol Sleng today.

Description

thumb|"Cambodia Map of Skulls"

thumb|Cambodian school students tour the museum.

The buildings at Tuol Sleng are preserved, with some rooms still appearing just as they were 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.

The site has four main buildings, known as BuildingA, B, C, and D. BuildingA holds the large cells in which the bodies of the last victims were discovered. BuildingB holds galleries of photographs. BuildingC holds the rooms subdivided into small cells for prisoners. BuildingD holds other memorabilia including instruments of torture.

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 open to the public from 8:00a.m. to 5:00p.m. On weekdays, visitors have the opportunity of viewing a 'survivor testimony' from 2:30p.m. to 3:00p.m. Along with the Choeung Ek Memorial (the Killing Fields), the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is included as a point of interest for those visiting Cambodia. Tuol Sleng also remains an important educational site as well as memorial for Cambodians. Since 2010, the ECCC brings Cambodians on a 'study tour' consisting of the Tuol Sleng, followed by the Choeung Ek, and finishing at the ECCC complex. The tour drew approximately 27,000 visitors in 2010.

thumb|[[Bou Meng (left), Chum Mey (center) and Vann Nath (right) after having received a copy of the Duch verdict on 12 August 2010. They are three of only a handful of survivors from the secret Khmer Rouge prison S-21 where at least 12,273 people were tortured and executed.]]

S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine is a 2003 film by Rithy Panh, a Cambodian-born, French-trained filmmaker who lost his family when he was 11. The film features two Tuol Sleng survivors, Vann Nath and Chum Mey, confronting their former Khmer Rouge captors, including 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.

A number of images from Tuol Sleng are featured in the 1992 Ron Fricke film Baraka.

Notes

See also

  • Enemies of the People (film)
  • Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre

References

Further reading

  • Chandler, David: Voices from S-21. Terror and history inside Pol Pot's secret prison. University of California Press, 1999. (A general account of S-21 drawing heavily from the documentation maintained by the prison's staff.)
  • Dunlop, Nic: "The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge". Walker & Company, 2006. (A first-person encounter with Comrade Duch, who ran S-21. The author's discovery of Duch led to the latter's arrest, and imprisonment.)
  • Douglas Niven & Chris Riley: "The Killing Fields". Twin Palms Press, 1996. (Original photographs from S-21 prison, printed from original negatives by two American photographers.)
  • Piergiorgio Pescali: "S-21 Nella prigione di Pol Pot". La Ponga Edizioni, Milan, 2015.
  • Vann Nath: A Cambodian Prison Portrait. One Year in the Khmer Rouge's S-21. White Lotus Co. Ltd., Bangkok 1998, (An eyewitness report. The author's paintings of many scenes from the prison are on display in the Tuol Sleng museum today.)
  • Photographs from S-21 – The original prisoner photographs from Tuol Sleng (S-21).
  • The horrors of Tuol Sleng
  • Cambodia Tribunal Monitor
  • Photographic archive of S-21 prisoners – University of Minnesota