Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes

The building now known as Tuol Sleng has lived several lives. In the 1960s, it was a high school known as Tuol Svay Prey. From 1975 to 1979, it was S-21, a secret Khmer Rouge prison facility where supposed traitors to the regime were held and tortured. The school’s classrooms served as torture chambers and the school’s windows were covered with barbed wire and iron bars to prevent captives from escaping. Shortly after the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in late 1978 and overthrew the Khmer Rouge, they discovered ample evidence of atrocity at S-21: bodies of the recent dead, torture instruments, and incriminating documentation, including prisoner inventories and coerced personal confessions. Experts estimate that between 15,000 and 30,000 prisoners were held at Tuol Sleng until its warders fled in 1979. Most of the prisoners were killed at the nearby mass graves of Choeung Ek. Only a handful survived.

Designed primarily as an appeal to the international community for aid and recognition of the new Vietnamese-backed government, the Tuol Sleng museum was initially open only to foreigners to persuade them of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. Ironically, while the museum showcased the suffering of Cambodian people, Cambodians themselves were denied entrance to the museum in its early days. When Tuol Sleng was finally opened to the public, thousands of ordinary Cambodians came to seek information about the disappearances of loved ones.

Today, Tuol Sleng, which means “hill of poisonous trees” in the Khmer language, is one of Cambodia’s most popular tourist attractions, drawing around 500 tourists every day. The current Cambodian government provides no monetary assistance for upkeep; the museum is dependent on unpredictable donations from foreign visitors. With its financing insecure, the museum has sold off parts of its crumbling structure, from its front walls to the barbed wire that once encircled the premises. “Tuol Sleng is literally fading away,” writes Judy Ledgerwood, “and letting the museum fade away may demonstrate an unwillingness to face these issues directly.”

References

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.

Chandler, David. Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Hughes, Rachel. “Memory and Sovereignty in Post-1979 Cambodia: Choeung Ek and Local Genocide Memorials.” In Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives, edited by Susan E. Cook, 257-79. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006.

Ledgerwood, Judy. “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative.” Museum Anthropology 21, no. 1 (1997): 82-98.

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