The Khmer Rouge Genocide Museum

Tuol Svay Pray High School, named after a Royal ancestor of King Sihanouk, is located in a peculiar side road in Phnom Penh. Inside the gates, it looks like several high schools: five buildings face a grass courtyard with pull-up bars and bowling greens. 

In 1976, the Khmer Rouge took it over, renamed the school Safety Prison 21 (S-21) and turned it right into a torture, interrogation and execution centre.  

The buildings were enclosed by corrugated iron sheets covered in electrified barbed wire, and the category rooms converted into tiny prison cells for particular person prisoners and larger mass cells.  

All the windows had been secured with iron bars and covered with tangled barbed wire to prevent escape. Extra cells had been built to hold female prisoners, and houses around the school buildings have been converted into rooms for administration, interrogation and torture. 

About 1,720 staff controlled the prison. A lot of the personnel had been girls and boys from peasant backgrounds ranging from ten to nineteen years of age who have been educated to work as guards and interrogators.  

The prisoners included Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, Indian, Pakistani, British and American nationals; however the majority had been Cambodians. Civilian prisoners had been workers, farmers, engineers, technicians, intellectuals, professors, college students, politicians, and so on.  

Whole families were taken to S-21 to be interrogated, tortured to acquire a ‘confession’, after which sent to the Choeung Ek extermination centre. The average interval of imprisonment was from two to four months 

Of the 14,000 individuals recognized to have entered S-21, only seven survived. Not only did the Khmer Rouge transcribe the prisoners' interrogations, but also carefully photographed the vast majority of inmates.  

Every of the just about 6,000 portraits that have been recovered inform the same stories: shock, resignation, confusion, defiance and horror.  

Though essentially the ugliest images to come back out of Cambodia have been those of the mass graves, probably the most haunting had been the portraits taken by the Khmer Rouge at S-21. 

At this time, S-21 Prison is named the Tuol Slang Museum of Genocide: the title means ‘poison hill’, an apt description. The ground-floor classrooms in a single building have been left as they had been in 1977.  

The interrogation rooms are furnished with solely a school desk and chair going through a steel bed frame with shackles at every end. On the far wall are photographs of the sights that confronted the two Vietnamese photographers who discovered S-21 in January 1979: bloated, decomposing our bodies chained to bed frames with pools of moist blood underneath. 

In another building, the walls are covered with 1000 of S-21 portraits. At first glance, the photograph of a shirtless young man appears typical of the prison photos. Closer inspection reveals that the quantity tag on his chest has been safety-pinned to his pectoral muscle.  

With a bruised face and a pad-locked chain around his neck, a boy stands together with his arms at his sides and looks straight into the camera. A mom with her baby in her arms stares into the camera with a look of indignant resignation.  

The photographs and ‘confessions’ had been collected with a view to prove to the Khmer Rouge leaders that their orders had been carried out. 

The Killing Fields

Fifteen kilometres from the centre of Phnom Penh is the Choeung Ek extermination centre, the final vacation spot of some 20,000 adults and children who had been imprisoned and interrogated at S-21 Prison.  

Effectively over a hundred burial pits lie in what was once an orchard. About eighty had been exhumed - the entire variety of our bodies was around 9,000.

Most had been battered or hacked to dying with iron bars, pickaxes, machetes and many different makeshift murder weapons.  

Guns have been seldom used - ammunition was valuable. It is mentioned that small children and babies had been swung in opposition to timber to smash their heads before throwing their bodies into the pits. 

It’s a bleak place. Shallow depressions point out the graves where our bodies were disinterred, some labeled with temporary notices itemizing the physique count. Bone fragments are scattered around, and a large monument contains the skulls of about 8,000 victims. 

S-21 Prison was one in all a 167 prisons throughout Cambodia, and Choeung Ek was however certainly one of 343 'killing fields'. In all, 19,440 mass graves have been identified. 

Visiting S-21 Prison and Choeung Ek

Visiting the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide is a harrowing expertise more likely to distress anybody of a sensitive disposition.

The prosaic torture tools - hammers, pincers, and electric cable, the photographs of blank faces hoping for execution to flee their agony seem nearly unreal. 

In contrast, the killing fields seem peaceful, a pleasant stroll by way of a shady orchard. Nonetheless, while you realize that what seems to be random litter is the garments of the victim, and the white slivers of plastic are actually shards of human bones, the fact of children and teenagers executing helpless adults and children combine to conjure up an image of hell.