S-21

See this or all of Arie's photos at flickr.

I went to Tuol Sleng this weekend. Tuol Sleng, a former high school in the southern part of Phnom Penh, was used as a torture center during the Democratic Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) era, when it was known as Security Prison 21 (S-21). More than 17,000 people were tortured here--of them, fewer than a dozen survived. Not many were killed here, only the ones that died during torture, suicide, or inadvertently through malnutrition or mistreatment. Generally, once the Khmer Rouge were satisfied a prisoner's confessions, they drove the prisoner to the killing fields and hit the prisoner in the head with a hammer (they were short of ammunition). The nearest killing fields are Choeung Ek, about ten miles outside of the city.

As the Vietnamese army was closing in on Phnom Penh in 1979, the Khmer Rouge instructed Duch, the head of the prison, to kill all the remaining prisoners and destroy all documentation. He killed all the prisoners, but did not have time to destroy any documents, and so today we have very detailed records of who was killed, the extent to which they were tortured, their confessions, etc.

When the Vietnamese found S-21, they immediately saw its propaganda potential. Within a year, they had opened the "Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum", which catalogs the horrors that occurred on the site. The title is a little problematic because it's not clear that the Khmer Rouge committed "genocide", and if they did, it almost certainly wasn't here, but more on that later.