Sunday, November 12, 2006
Tuol Sleng
Visiting Tuol Sleng genocide museum is a profoundly depressing experience. It is located in a former high school in an ordinary suburb of Phnom Penh. Like concentration camps such as Auschwitz or Belsen, Tuol Sleng (or Prison S-21) was primarily a torture and execution centre, rather than a place of detention. Between 1975 and 1978 several hundreds of thousands of ordinary Cambodians were tortured and murdered by the Khmer Rouge at prisons and killing fields throught the country. Those murdered at Tuol Sleng included an estimated 2,000 children. When Phnom Penh was 'liberated' by the Vietnamese in 1979, bodies still lay gruesomely shackled to the beds where they had died at Tuol Sleng, and pools of congealed blood flooded the floors beneath. Photographs of these victims hang in the same rooms and the shadows of bloodstains can still be seen on the tiled floors.
Obsessive record-keeping on the part of the Khmer Rouge resulted in a significant archive of photographs and documentation. These images are now part of a permanent exhibition and walking by hundreds and hundreds of staring faces, many of them children, is incredibly moving. It is also nauseating to think that this genocide took place during our lifetime and, despite our promises of 'never again' has continued to happen in our lifetime, in Rwanda and Darfur. Mith, a taxi driver who had taken us on several journeys by now, offered to walk around the prison with me. His eyes filled with tears when we looked at one photograph of a young boy. He told Ken of his own experience as a six-year old at the height of the Khmer Rouge regime, where he was imprisoned for three days for stealing an egg from a neighbouring farm in rural Cambodia. Everyone in this country has a story to tell.
Visiting Tuol Sleng genocide museum is a profoundly depressing experience. It is located in a former high school in an ordinary suburb of Phnom Penh. Like concentration camps such as Auschwitz or Belsen, Tuol Sleng (or Prison S-21) was primarily a torture and execution centre, rather than a place of detention. Between 1975 and 1978 several hundreds of thousands of ordinary Cambodians were tortured and murdered by the Khmer Rouge at prisons and killing fields throught the country. Those murdered at Tuol Sleng included an estimated 2,000 children. When Phnom Penh was 'liberated' by the Vietnamese in 1979, bodies still lay gruesomely shackled to the beds where they had died at Tuol Sleng, and pools of congealed blood flooded the floors beneath. Photographs of these victims hang in the same rooms and the shadows of bloodstains can still be seen on the tiled floors. 
Obsessive record-keeping on the part of the Khmer Rouge resulted in a significant archive of photographs and documentation. These images are now part of a permanent exhibition and walking by hundreds and hundreds of staring faces, many of them children, is incredibly moving. It is also nauseating to think that this genocide took place during our lifetime and, despite our promises of 'never again' has continued to happen in our lifetime, in Rwanda and Darfur. Mith, a taxi driver who had taken us on several journeys by now, offered to walk around the prison with me. His eyes filled with tears when we looked at one photograph of a young boy. He told Ken of his own experience as a six-year old at the height of the Khmer Rouge regime, where he was imprisoned for three days for stealing an egg from a neighbouring farm in rural Cambodia. Everyone in this country has a story to tell.# posted by Ruth @ Sunday, November 12, 2006 
