Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is a museum in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. The site is a former high school which was used as the notorious Security Prison 21 (S-21) by the Khmer Rouge regime from its rise to power in 1975 to its fall in 1979. Tuol Sleng in Khmer; [tuəl slaeŋ] means "Hill of the Poisonous Trees" or "Strychnine Hill".

History

Formerly the Tuol Svay Prey High Schoolcite book | title=A History of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)| publisher=Documentation Center of Cambodia | pages=74 | url=http://www.dccam.org/ | isbn=9995060043] , named after a Royal ancestor of King Norodom Sihanouk, the five buildings of the complex were converted in August 1975, four months after the Khmer Rouge won the civil warcite news |first=Valerio |last=Pellizzari |title=Kang Khek Ieu: 'They all had to be eliminated' |url=http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/kang-khek-ieu-they-all-had-to-be-eliminated-780684.html |accessdate=2008-02-21 ] , into a prison and interrogation centre. The Khmer Rouge renamed the complex "Security Prison 21" (S-21) and construction began to adapt the prison to 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.

From 1975 to 1979, an estimated 17,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng (some estimates suggest a number as high as 20,000, though the real number is unknown). The prisoners were selected from all around the country, and usually were former Khmer Rouge members and soldiers, accused of betraying the party or revolution. Those arrested included some of the highest ranking communist politicians such as Khoy Thoun, Vorn Vet and Hu Nim. Although the official reason for their arrest was "espionage," these men may have been viewed by Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot as potential leaders of a coup against him. Prisoners' families were often brought "en masse" to be interrogated and later murdered at the Choeung Ek extermination centre.

Even though the vast majority of the victims were Cambodian, foreigners were also imprisoned, including Vietnamese, Laotians, Indians, Pakistanis, Britons, Americans, New Zealanders and Australians.

Most non-Cambodians had been evacuated or expelled from the country and those who remained were seen as a security risk. A number of Western prisoners passed through S-21 between April 1976 and December 1978. Mostly these were picked up at sea by Khmer Rouge patrol boats. They included four Americans, three French, two Australians, a Briton and a New Zealander. One of the last prisoners to die was American Michael Scott Deeds, who was captured with his friend Chris De Lance while sailing from Singapore to Hawaii.

In 1979, the prison was uncovered by the invading Vietnamese army. In 1980, the prison was reopened as a historical museum memorializing the actions of the Khmer Rouge regime. The museum is open to the public, and receives an average of 500 visitors every day.Fact|date=September 2007

Life in the prison

Upon arrival at the prison, prisoners were photographed and required to give detailed biographies, beginning with their childhood and ending with their arrest. After that, they were forced to strip to their underwear, and their possessions were confiscated. The prisoners were then taken to their cells. Those taken to the smaller cells were shackled to the walls or the concrete floor. Those who were held in the large mass cells were collectively shackled to long pieces of iron bar. The shackles were fixed to alternating bars; the prisoners slept with their heads in opposite directions. They slept on the floor without mats, mosquito nets, or blankets. They were forbidden to talk to each other.

The day in the prison began at 4:30 a.m. when prisoners were asked to strip for inspection. The guards checked to see if the shackles were loose or if the prisoners had hidden objects they could use to commit suicide. Over the years, several prisoners managed to kill themselves, so the guards were very careful in checking the shackles and cells. The prisoners received four small spoonfuls of rice porridge and watery soup of leaves twice a day. Drinking water without asking the guards for permission resulted in serious beatings. The inmates were hosed down every four days.

The prison had very strict regulations, and severe beatings were inflicted upon any prisoner who tried to disobey. Almost every action had to be approved by one of the prison's guards. They were sometimes forced to eat human feces and drink human urine. The unhygienic living conditions in the prison caused skin diseases, lice, rashes, ringworm and other ailments. The prison's medical staffs 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, their faces were covered. 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.

Torture and extermination

Most prisoners at S-21 were held there for two to three months. However, several high-ranking Khmer Rouge cadres were held longer. Within two or three days after they were brought to S-21, all prisoners were taken for interrogation. The torture system at Tuol Sleng was designed to make prisoners confess to whatever crimes they were charged with by their captors. Prisoners were routinely beaten and tortured with electric shocks, searing hot metal instruments and hanging, as well as through the use of various other devices. Some prisoners were cut with knives or suffocated with plastic bags. Other methods for generating confessions included pulling out fingernails while pouring alcohol on the wounds, holding prisoners’ heads under water, and the use of the waterboarding technique (see picture). Females were sometimes raped by the interrogators, even though sexual abuse was against DK policy. The perpetrators who were found out were executed. Although many prisoners died from this kind of abuse, killing them outright was discouraged, since the Khmer Rouge needed their confessions.

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.

Typical confessions ran into thousands of words in which the prisoner would interweave true events in their lives with imaginary accounts of their espionage activities for the CIA, the KGB, or Vietnam. The confession of Hu Nim ended with the words "I am not a human being, I'm an animal". A young Englishman named John Dawson Dewhirst who was arrested in August 1978 claimed to have joined the CIA at age 12 upon his father receiving a substantial bribe from a work colleague, also an agent. Physical torture was combined with sleep deprivation and deliberate neglect of the prisoners. The torture implements are on display in the museum. The vast majority of prisoners were innocent of the charges against them and their confessions produced by torture.

For the first year of S-21’s existence, corpses were buried near the prison. However, by the end of 1979, cadres ran out of burial spaces, the prisoner and their family were taken to the Choeung Ek extermination centre, fifteen kilometers from Phnom Penh. There, they were killed by being battered with iron bars, pickaxes, machetes and many other makeshift weapons. After the prisoners were executed, the soldiers who had accompanied them from S-21 buried them in graves that held as few as 6 and as many as 100 bodies.

urvivors of Tuol Sleng

Out of an estimated 17,000 people imprisoned at Tuol Sleng, there were only twelve known survivors. Only four of them are thought to be still alivewhen: Vann Nath, Chum Mey, Bou Meng and Chim Math, the only woman among the survivors. All three of the men were kept alive because they had skills their captors judged to be useful. Vann Nath had trained as an artist and was put to work painting pictures of Pol Pot. Many of his paintings depicting events he witnessed in Tuol Sleng are on display in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum today. Bou Meng, whose wife was killed in the prison, is also an artist. Chum Mey was kept alive because of his skills in repairing machinery. Chim Math was held in S-21 for 2 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 was also distinguished by her provincial accent during her interrogations. [http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2007/07/24/internacional/1185271081.html?a=517c30d7e0b26770bf7e792978a9296e&t=1185292668] [http://www.bangkokpost.com/topstories/topstories.php?id=120417]

taff of S-21

The prison had a staff of 1,720 people. Of those, approximately 300 were office staff, internal workforce and interrogators. The other 1,400 were general workers, including people who grew food for the prison. Several of these workers were children taken from the prisoner families. The chief of the prison was Khang Khek Ieu (also known as Comrade Duch), a former mathematics teacher who worked closely with Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. Other leading figures of S-21 were Khim Vat aka Hor (deputy chief of S-21), Peng (chief of guards), Chan (chief of the Interrogation Unit), and Pon (interrogator). Pon was the person who interrogated important people such as Keo Meas, Nay Sarann, Ho Nim, Tiv Ol, and Phok Chhay.

The documentation unit was responsible for transcribing tape-recorded confessions, typing the handwritten notes from prisoners’ confessions, preparing summaries of confessions, and maintaining files. In the photography sub-unit, workers took mug shots of prisoners when they arrived, pictures of prisoners who had died while in detention, and pictures of important prisoners after they were executed. Thousands of photographs have survived, but thousands are still missing.

The defense unit was the largest unit in S-21. The guards in this unit were mostly teenagers. Many guards found the unit’s strict rules hard to obey. Guards were not allowed to talk to prisoners, to learn their names, or to beat them. They were also forbidden to observe or eavesdrop on interrogations, and they were expected to obey 30 regulations, which barred them from such things as taking naps, sitting down or leaning against a wall while on duty. They had to walk, guard, and examine everything carefully. Guards who made serious mistakes were arrested, interrogated, jailed and put to death. Most of the people employed at S-21 were terrified of making mistakes and feared being tortured and killed.

The interrogation unit was split into three separate groups: "Krom Noyobai" or political unit, "Krom Kdao" or 'hot' unit and "Krom Angkiem" or 'chewing' unitcite book | author=Nic Dunlop | title=The Lost Executioner - A Journey into the Heart of the Killing Fields | publisher=Walker & Company, New York | year=2005) | id=ISBN 0-8027-1472-2] . 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 .

Some of the staff who worked in Tuol Sleng also ended up prisoners. They confessed to being lazy in preparing documents, damaging machines and other equipment, or beating prisoners to death without permission when assisting with interrogations.

ecurity regulations

When prisoners were first brought to Tuol Sleng, they were made aware of ten rules that they were to follow during their incarceration. What follows is what is posted today at the Tuol Sleng Museum; the imperfect grammar is a result of faulty translation from the original Khmer:

: "1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.":"2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.":"3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.":"4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.":"5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.":"6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.":"7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.":"8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.":"9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.":"10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge."

Discovery of Tuol Sleng

In 1979 Ho Van Tay, a Vietnamese combat photographer, was the first media person to document Tuol Sleng to the world. Van Tay and his colleagues followed the stench of rotting corpses to the gates of Tuol Sleng. The photos of Van Tay documenting what he saw when he entered the site are exhibited in Tuol Sleng today.

The Khmer Rouge required the prison's staff to make a detailed dossier of all the prisoners. Included in the documentation was a photograph. Since the original negatives and photographs were separated from the dossiers in the 1979-1980 period, most of the photographs remain anonymous today.

The photographs are currently being exhibited at the Tuol Sleng Museum and at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.Fact|date=November 2007

Tuol Sleng today

The buildings at Tuol Sleng are preserved as they were left 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.

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 perhaps best known for having housed the "skull map", a huge map of Cambodia composed of 300 skulls and other bones found by the Vietnamese during their occupation of Cambodia, to serve as a reminder of what happened at the prison. The map was dismantled in 2002, but the skulls of some victims are still on display in shelves in the museumFact|date=November 2007.

Today, the museum is open to the public, and along with the Choeung Ek Memorial (The Killing Fields), is included as a point of interest for those visiting Cambodia. Despite the disturbing images it contains, the museum is visited by large parties of Cambodian school childrenFact|date=November 2007.

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

-21 documentary movie

"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.

References

ee also

* Democratic Kampuchea
* The Killing Fields

Further reading

*Vann Nath: "A Cambodian Prison Portrait. One Year in the Khmer Rouge's S-21". White Lotus Co. Ltd., Bangkok 1998, ISBN 974-8434-48-6 (An eyewitness report. The author's paintings of many scenes from the prison are on display in the Tuol Sleng museum today.)
*Chandler, David: "Voices from S-21. Terror and history inside Pol Pot's secret prison". University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0-520-22247-4 (A general account of S-21 drawing heavily from the documentation maintained by the prison's staff.)
*Dunlap, Nic: "The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge". Walker & Company, 2006. ISBN 0-8027-1472-2 (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. ISBN 978-0-944092-39-2 (Original photographs from S-21 prison, printed from original negatives by two American photographers.)
*cite book | title=Museums of Southeast Asia| last=Lenzi| first=Iola| date=2004| pages=200 pages| publisher=Archipelago Press| location=Singapore| id=ISBN 981-4068-96-9

External links

* [http://www.tuolsleng.com/ Photographs from S-21] - The original prisoner photographs from Tuol Sleng (S-21).
* [http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/ From Sideshow to Genocide] - A history of the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge, including survivor stories.
* [http://www.cybercambodia.com/dachs/killing/killingfields.html Killing Fields and S-21]
* [http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/khmeryears/s21.html The horrors of Tuol Sleng]
* [http://www.edwebproject.org/seasia/killingfields.html A Day in the Killing Fields] - 1997 travel essay by [http://www.andycarvin.com Andy Carvin]
* [http://www.cambodiatribunal.org/ Cambodia Tribunal Monitor]
* [http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Cambodian_Genocide/Prisoners_at_S-21_Prison/prisoners_at_s-21_prison.html Photographic archive of S-21 prisoners]
* [http://commonlanguageproject.net/?page_id=34 Tuol Sleng slideshow]