TUOL SLENG GENOCIDE MUSEUM

It is difficult to imagine a stay in Phnom Penh without visiting at least once the Tuol Sleng museum, better known as S21. Between 1975 and 1979, this former high school built under the French protectorate was the site of the worst atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge during the genocide. Nearly 18,000 men, women and children were incarcerated, tortured and executed there. Only twelve survived the horror: seven adults and five children, hidden under a pile of clothes that belonged to the prisoners, and freed by the Vietnamese during the capture of Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979.

Visiting S21 is above all a duty of memory, so as not to forget the collective and bloody madness that inhabited the regime of Democratic Kampuchea. As a place of remembrance, proper attire is required. The audio-guide is particularly recommended: remarkably well done, it gives many details on the organization of the prison, the conditions of incarceration, the life of some prisoners and the camp officials. The photos and the story of the audio guide are extremely shocking, so much so that the museum management does not recommend the visit to children under 14.

S21 extended far beyond the high school itself: the surrounding houses were used as housing for the administration or as torture centers for the most important prisoners. Large areas of the surrounding area were cultivated in order to feed the staff and the prisoners. Today, only the buildings of the high school keep in memory the atrocities that were committed there.

The Chao Ponhea Yat school consisted of five two-story buildings, forming a U shape around an inner courtyard. It is in this former playground that the visit begins, with the 14 graves of the last prisoners executed by the Khmer Rouge, whose mutilated bodies were found by the Vietnamese army. The visit then begins in the buildings. If some classrooms were converted into torture centers, the vast majority housed prisoners, either in collective cells where more than 50 prisoners were crammed together, their feet tied to iron bars, or in individual cells of about two square meters. Barbed wire was installed on the upper floors to prevent prisoners from committing suicide: the right to life and death was reserved only for the camp management. Every day, systematic searches were carried out by the guards: a pen could be used to open one's throat, a bolt or a screw could be swallowed in order to kill oneself and so on.

The first detainees were former officials of the Lon Nol regime. From 1976, the paranoia of the leaders of Angkar ("The Organization", the nickname of the Khmer Communist Party) led to a systematic purge of the Cambodian population: intellectuals and monks were the first to be targeted. The simple fact of wearing glasses or speaking a foreign language meant a death sentence. Many innocent people were arrested after slanderous denunciations. Foreigners, mainly Vietnamese, but also some Westerners (including four Frenchmen) were imprisoned and executed at S21. Then, in the years that followed, many Angkar cadres and subordinates, suspected of being traitors, joined the ranks of their former victims. S21 guards, usually teenagers, were also incarcerated after failing to comply with the drastic regulations put in place by the administration.

Prisoners were not allowed to communicate with each other, had to relieve themselves in American ammunition boxes (traces of which can still be seen in some cells) and could not drink water without permission. Their meals consisted of four spoonfuls of an infamous rice porridge twice a day and a bowl of soup with a few leaves swimming in it. The promiscuity and lack of hygiene (prisoners were sprayed with a fire hose once every four days as a shower) caused many diseases. The inexperienced medical team was only there to keep the prisoners alive after the torture sessions.

The camp director, Khang Khek Leu, a former schoolteacher who called himself Comrade "Dush" and whose high-profile trial began in 2009, had set up a system that only totalitarian regimes are capable of creating. The camp staff was divided into four sections: photography, administration, surveillance and interrogation. Each section was forbidden to do the work of the other. For example, if a guard assigned to surveillance beat up a prisoner, he was immediately arrested and joined the ranks of the prisoners. When the deportees arrived, the procedure remained invariably the same: each person was photographed, then stripped, searched and questioned once. The complete biography of the prisoner, from birth to arrest, was recorded and then archived. Then, after two or three days, the interrogations began.

Three groups were in charge of the confession sessions: the "nice guys", who were not allowed to lay hands on the defendants, the "biting guys", who dealt with the most important cases, and the "hot guys" who could use any means they thought fit to extract confessions. The "hot" ones usually started with a thorough beating, and if that wasn't enough, extreme means were used. Pliers heated to white to tear off the flesh, venomous insects placed on the genitals, electrocution, "waterboarding", suffocation with a plastic bag, hanging by the feet until they fainted (to wake them up, the guards plunged them into jars filled with rotting water and excrement), etc. If rape was outlawed by Comrade Dush, some guards did not hesitate to sexually assault female prisoners (caught in the act, the guards joined the ranks of the prisoners). When the prisoner finally broke down, he confessed to working for the KGB or the CIA, denounced members of his family, who were then arrested and taken to S21. And it all started again. His confessions under torture were absurd: an American arrested in Khmer territorial waters while sailing around the world had confessed that his CIA contact was Colonel Sanders, the founder of the famous American fried chicken brand.

On the walls of the prison were written the rules that the deportees had to follow (transcribed here with the original grammatical mistakes):

Answer according to my question that I asked you. Do not try to deflect mine.

Do not try to escape by taking pretexts according to your hypocritical ideas. It is absolutely forbidden to challenge me.

Don't play the fool, because you are the man who opposes the revolution.

Answer my question immediately without taking time to think.

Don't tell me about your little incidents against propriety. Don't talk about the essence of the revolution either.

During the beating or the electric shock, it is forbidden to shout loudly.

Sit quietly. Wait for my orders, if there are no orders, don't do anything. If I ask you to do something, do it immediately without protesting.

Don't use Kampuchea Krom as an excuse to cover your traitorous face.

If you do not follow all the above orders, you will be beaten with sticks, electric wires and electric shocks (you will not be able to count these blows).

If you disobey every point of my regulations, you will either get ten lashes or five electric shocks.

Prisoners were kept alive for two to three months, sometimes longer for the most important ones. Then, once their confessions seemed sufficient to the camp management, they were executed. The first years, they were killed on the spot, then for lack of space and for hygiene reasons, the condemned were brought to the site of Choeung Ek, today called "Killing Fields", about ten kilometers south of the camp.

This Kafkaesque system of torture lasted for four years. The care that Dush took with the camp's archives is astonishing: keeping a written record of this death industry may seem absurd, but as with the Nazi camps, the management of S21 was convinced of the soundness of their method and the durability of the regime they were creating. When Pol Pot gave the order to evacuate S21 on January 5, 1979, Dush did not have the time to destroy these archives. All the photos of the prisoners taken during those bloody years, often of unknown people, are now exposed in the old cells. Walking around with all those eyes on you is a difficult but liberating ordeal for the families of the victims, who still go to S21 today in the hope of identifying a loved one who disappeared during the reign of Democratic Kampuchea.

In the last buildings are exposed the instruments of torture but also paintings of a former prisoner, Bou Meng, kept alive by his jailers in order to sculpt busts of Pol Pot; his wife was killed at S21. These works, of unprecedented violence, provide a chilling testimony to the living conditions of prisoners. Bou Meng is still alive, and regularly gives lectures to the younger generations, so that the memory of the genocide will live on as long as possible. Memory that each visitor of S21 must keep in him and transmit.

Beyond the visit of this place of terror, we recommend a number of works dedicated to S21 or the Khmer Rouge regime. Notably, Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell, is a French-Cambodian documentary by director Rithy Panh, which received much praise upon its release in 2011. The film, simple in concept, is a meeting between the director and the torturer, to whom Rithy Panh asks questions about his responsibility while awaiting the appeal of his trial. The whole thing, eye to eye, is a heavy dive into what could be called pure evil. Not to be watched on a day when you are feeling depressed.

In 2003, the same director made S21, the Khmer Rouge death machine, already a moving and frightening work, giving the testimony of two survivors of the hell of S21.

This museum, as well as the works mentioned below, are not moments of pleasure, but will greatly help you to understand the Cambodian people through its tormented history.