Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum Totally Explained

Everything about Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum totally explained

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; [tuəlslaeŋ] means "Hill of the Poisonous Trees" or "Strychnine Hill".

History

Norodom Sihanouk, the five buildings of the complex were converted in August 1975, four months after the Khmer Rouge won the civil war, 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.. 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 couldn't make prisoners confess, they'd 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.

Security 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:
ť 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're strictly prohibited to contest me. ť 3. Don’t be a fool for you're a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.

   4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect. ť 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. ť 7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there's 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. ť 9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you'll get many many lashes of electric wire.

   10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you'll 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.

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

S-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 can't escape the horror of the genocide they helped create.

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