Cambodge & Testimony : Tuol Sleng, I wanted to know...

S21

It's a July day in Phnom Penh, where the hot and humid air makes breathing difficult. The streets leading to Tuol Sleng are noisy and crowded: the calls of tuk-tuk drivers to potential customers mix with the smell of grilled fish from street vendors.

At Tuol Sleng, photograph by Charly Unterwegs

Soon, these fade as the visitor reaches an old school building. S-21, the main prison of the Khmer Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1978. It is now a museum where foreign tourists queue to confront the horrors of the Cambodian genocide and the ambiguities of its legacy.

Perplexed

Cambodia's history has long left me perplexed. Films like Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields and those by Rithy Panh only added to my stupefaction. The most incomprehensible is the violence the Khmer Rouge unleashed against their own people: emptying cities and villages, forcing people into the countryside to produce rice, exterminating the country's intelligentsia.

Perhaps I could find answers and, if possible, make sense of this senseless violence by observing the Khmer Rouge victims' photographs myself?

Knowledge

I was particularly surprised that Khmer Rouge cadres photographed their victims upon arrest, then tortured them, extracted confessions, and finally murdered them. More broadly, how has Cambodian society dealt with issues of memory and denial, victim and perpetrator, life management after the genocide? I wanted to know.

At the entrance to Tuol Sleng, known as S-21 prison under the Khmer Rouge regime, the visitor faces a poster—in Khmer, with French and English translations—announcing the facility's ten "security rules." Number six states: "During whipping or electrification, crying is absolutely forbidden." Even under torture, expressing suffering was prohibited.

Three Years and Eight Months of Horror

There are also two striking wall posters. One depicts a scene from April 1975, days after the Khmer Rouge occupied Phnom Penh and forcibly exiled its entire population to the rice fields, suffering, and death. The other shows January 10, 1979, the day Vietnamese forces entered Tuol Sleng and saved four children, including two infants. The beginning and end of Khmer Rouge rule: three years and eight months of horror.

Cells

Next comes a large room with a single metal bed to which prisoners were chained. Beside it, a box where the prisoner had to relieve themselves, and on the other side of the room, the interrogator's table. Later, I learned this was a VIP cell for high-ranking prisoners: the lowest ones were kept either in collective rooms with floor chains or in individual cells no more than two meters long and wide.

Photographs

The museum is filled with photographs and posters of prisoners. Men and women stare directly at the camera lens, some in horror, others defiantly. Some seem unable to comprehend what is happening to them or why their compatriots, comrades from their own victorious party, would inflict such horrors. Others seem to have understood. Some are mere children. Most are young. There are photos of mothers holding their babies, all condemned to die. There are two series of photos: upon the prisoner's arrest and upon their death under torture.

Condemned to Death

Of the 18,000 detainees at Tuol Sleng, only seven were saved in 1979 when the Vietnamese army liberated the prison. The number of those who entered and survived is probably under fifty. In other words, almost everyone sent there was condemned to death. Many died under torture or succumbed to hunger and disease.

Those who survived, whether they "confessed" or not, were taken to Choeung Ek on a path where an old Chinese cemetery stood, and killed with iron bars—to save bullets. This is the place known as the "Killing Fields," one of 20,000 Cambodian sites where mass graves are identified.

Victims of Tuol Sleng

Henry Kissinger and Pol Pot

Cambodia's tragedy was largely a side effect of the Vietnam War. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who had tried to keep the country out of the conflict, was overthrown in 1970 by pro-American General Lon Nol. The U.S. Air Force then pounded forested areas in eastern Cambodia to prevent weapons and North Vietnamese fighters from reaching Vietcong guerrillas. This was Henry Kissinger's grand strategy, seen by many as a war criminal. About 250,000 tons of bombs were dropped, causing around 500,000 Cambodian victims.

War Crimes

U.S. war crimes are only part of the Cambodian tragedy. What followed is even more nauseating. In the days before the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Saigon, the power vacuum in Cambodia opened the door to Khmer Rouge forces, who entered Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. In the capital, its population had swelled to 2 million. Leaving rural areas, these rebels were first seen as liberators, the population hoping their victory would at least end the war.

Agrarian Society

But within days, the Khmer Rouge ordered the entire population of the capital and other urban centers deported to the countryside to build an agrarian society based on collective rice cultivation. Under the Khmer Rouge, cities were abandoned. Phnom Penh's population dropped to just 20,000, consisting only of party leaders, soldiers, and a handful of factory workers.

Between 1.3 and 1.7 Million Dead

The Cambodian people paid a huge price for such an experiment. Thousands died of hunger, disease, or exhaustion. The Khmer Rouge executed many others: estimates put the death toll between 1.3 and 1.7 million. Minority groups suffered disproportionately: all ethnic Vietnamese were killed, half of ethnic Chinese, 40% of Thais and Laotians, and 36% of Chams. Buddhist monks were decimated: of about 50,000 monks, only 800 remained after Pol Pot's regime (some had fled to neighboring Thailand). Yet, most victims were ethnic Khmers, urban and educated, or rural and illiterate.

Vietnamese Intervention

Pol Pot also turned against his former allies, the Vietnamese communists. He even ordered his armed forces to attack Vietnam, sparking a war that led to his downfall. The Khmer Rouge regime literally collapsed under a concentrated Vietnamese assault: in two weeks from late December 1978, Vietnamese troops had seized Phnom Penh.

"It took military action to end the genocide," explains Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. "I don't think there was any other way to stop it. That's why the Vietnamese were here," he concludes.

But according to Youk Chhang, S-21 or Tuol Sleng cannot be a sufficient memorial for Cambodia's genocide victims. "Over 80% of S-21 victims were Khmer Rouge themselves. It was one of 196 prisons," but the only one surviving as a museum.

"The Khmer Rouge didn't document all victims; they documented 'their' victims at S-21, because they were ex-Khmer Rouge," he exclaims.

This was part of Pol Pot's paranoia, fearing conspiracy within his own party and leadership. Over thirty S-21 victims had once belonged to the Khmer Rouge Central Committee, "purged" in classic Stalinist tradition. Could this explain why very few Cambodians visit Tuol Sleng and most visitors are foreigners?

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About the Author

Vicken Cheterian is a journalist and political analyst. He teaches at Webster Geneva's media faculty and lectures on international relations at the University of Geneva. His latest book is Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide (C Hurst, 2015). From Perestroika to the Color Revolutions: Reform and Revolution after Communism (C Hurst, 2013) and War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia’s Troubled Frontier (C Hurst, 2009; Columbia University Press, 2009).

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