Tuol Sleng
Prisoners' mugshots, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh.
I have been poring through notes and photographs from my time in Cambodia as I work to complete the first draft of my book. These images from the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh never fail to give me pause.
When the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh in 1975, they converted a former high school to a prison. S-21, as it was known, became the busiest and most notorious of Cambodia’s prison and torture centers. More than 14,000 prisoners - men, women and children - entered S-21 after being accused of betrayal or disloyalty to the revolution; only seven are known to have survived.
Today Tuol Sleng is open to the public as a museum of the Khmer Rouge era. It is tucked away in a modest Phnom Penh neighborhood, surrounded by houses and the street-level storefronts of tailors and restaurants. The road to the museum was paved a few years ago. Outside the gates a battalion of motorbike taxi drivers, postcard hawkers and one-legged beggars compete noisily for the business of the tourists streaming in and out.
In one wing of the building, usually the last toured by Tuol Sleng visitors, are a series of former classrooms used as interrogation rooms. Each contains only a single iron bed frame with no mattress, a pair of metal shackles and a gory black-and-white photograph mounted to the wall of the corpse found in that room when the Vietnamese entered the compound in 1979. The prisoners in the photographs are barely identifiable, beaten so severely that some of the bed frames still hold the imprint of their prisoners’ bodies. The photographs are awash in blood. You can still see dark stains on the tiles. Decades after the last victim was buried, the screams continued at Tuol Sleng: agonized cries for help echoing from the building, thumps with no human cause, ghostly forces that attacked hapless night watchmen who slept on the museum’s grounds. Cambodia is a place that believes in its ghosts, and in few places were the spirits as aggressive as those at Tuol Sleng. A guard died of a heart attack after being visited by specters in his sleep, his coworkers said; another docent abandoned her shift and ran home in terror after a sudden darkness descended in midday. Buddhist monks came twice a year to the grounds of the old prison to placate the spirits there with their chants. The spirit activity flared up in 1999, when the prison director Duch was arrested. That was when guard Keo Lundi heard what sounded like desperate screams for help coming from the back of the building in the middle of the day. He raced toward the sounds but found nothing.
“It sounded like a real person being beaten or killed,” he told the New York Times’ Seth Mydans. “I’d never heard a sound like that. We looked and looked, but there was nobody there. So we think it was a ghost, come to take revenge now that Duch is back.” Duch converted to Christianity in 1993. In February 2009, he became the first person to face an international court for crimes committed during Democratic Kampuchea. Survivors of the prison called to the witness stand broke down and cried when faced with their alleged torturer, who sometimes cried as well. Duch pled guilty, but asked to be released from jail, arguing that he did what he did only under orders. “So it was a life-or-death situation for me myself, and my family as a whole,” he told the court. “As the person in charge, of Tuol Sleng, I never attempted to find an alternative other than obeying an order, even though I knew that obeying the order meant that numerous people would perish.”
Duch's sentencing is expected in June. Prosecutors have asked for 40 years. His lawyers have asked for leniency.
What do you think?
Posted on Friday, May 7, 2010
