A trip to Phnom Penh is not
complete without paying a visit to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a
blood-curling remainder of the horrors that took place under the Khmer Rouge,
and an excellent exposition of the genocide that shook Cambodia during the 70s.
Formerly a high school, the site
was eventually turned into a detention and interrogation center by the Khmer
Rouge and code-named Security Prison 21 (S-21), the building were enclosed in
electrified barbed wire, and the classrooms transformed into tiny prison and
torture chambers.
S-21 was operational from the
regime’s rise to power in 1975 to its fall in 1979, witnessing the deaths of
between 16,000 to 20,000 peoples. At any one time, the prison held between
1,000 – 1,500 prisoners, who were repeatedly tortured and coerced into naming
family members and close associates. Initially most of the victims were from
the previous regime and included soldiers and government officials, as well as
academics, doctors, teachers, students, factory workers, monks and engineers.
With time the party leadership’s paranoia grew stronger and turned on its own
ranks, engendering purges throughout the country that saw thousands of party
activists and their families brought to Tuol Sleng and slaughtered.
In 1979, the invading Vietnamese army, following
the smell of rotting corpses, discovered the prison. Only twelve peoples are
known to have survived. In 1980, the prison was reopened by the government of
the People’s Republic of Kampuchea as a historical museum memorializing the
actions of the Khmer Rouge regime.
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