Tuol Sleng has been instrumental in the creation of a master narrative of the past that legitimizes Cambodia’s current ruling party and projects the aura of a unified national identity. But the average, everyday Cambodian was entirely detached from the design of the museum. The involvement of Vietnam––as an invading force and historical adversary––in the creation of Tuol Sleng has instilled a sense of suspicion in many Cambodians, who often view the museum as inauthentic.
As Andreas Huyssen writes, the museum can seem to replicate the dehumanization of the Khmer Rouge, in the sense that the nameless photographs of the victims echo “the violent voiding of identity that was the torturers’ explicit goal and always preceded disappearance.” Paul Williams notes that by exhaustively detailing the Khmer Rouge’s favored torture tactics, Tuol Sleng focuses on remembering the perpetrators, not the victims.
This essay was adapted in part from this article: Moore, Lisa. “Recovering the Past, Remembering Trauma: The Politics of Commemoration at Sites of Atrocity.” Journal of Public and International Affairs, Princeton: Princeton University, Spring, 2009.
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Williams, Paul. “The Atrocity Exhibition: Touring Cambodian Genocide Memorials.” In On Display: New Essays in Cultural Studies, edited by A. Smith and Wevers, 197-214. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004.
After taking control of Cambodia in 1979, the Vietnamese, seeking to legitimize their unpopular occupation, quickly capitalized upon Tuol Sleng’s propaganda potential. They enlisted Mai Lam, a Vietnamese colonel turned museologist, to archive the contents and transform the site into a memorial within a year’s time. To research his design, Mai Lam visited the Holocaust concentration camps of Europe. The resulting museum deliberately borrowed imagery from the Holocaust museums in an effort to conflate the Khmer Rouge with the Nazis. He highlighted Tuol Sleng’s most gruesome elements, an approach that culminated in a huge map of Cambodia made from the actual skulls of victims, its rivers painted blood red. (The map was dismantled in 2002.) As Judy Ledgerwood writes, the Vietnamese narrative of Tuol Sleng is one of a “glorious revolution stolen and perverted by a handful of sadistic, genocidal traitors who deliberately exterminated three million of their countrymen. The true heirs to the revolutionary movement overthrew this murderous tyranny…just in time to save the Khmer people from genocide.”
Tuol Sleng’s most famous feature is the display, across several rooms, of thousands of anonymous photographs of the victims of S-21. Khmer Rouge photographer Nhem En took these photos as mug shots when the prisoners were admitted. When the museum was finally opened to the general public, relatives of the victims were prohibited from inscribing the photographs with the victims’ names.
Visitors can also view the preserved artifacts of the prison as left by the Khmer Rouge in 1979, including metal beds, crude brick cells, group shackles, and torture instruments. Mai Lam’s original design and signage now coexist with thoughtful new installations presented by the Documentation Center of Cambodia, including essays and photo exhibits.
This essay was adapted in part from this article: Moore, Lisa. “Recovering the Past, Remembering Trauma: The Politics of Commemoration at Sites of Atrocity.” Journal of Public and International Affairs, Princeton: Princeton University, Spring, 2009.
Ledgerwood, Judy. “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative.” Museum Anthropology 21, no. 1 (1997): 82-98.