Lessons from Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

We visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum today. It was our first full day in Cambodia and first “tourist” stop in Phnom Penh. I had told Cam it was the one place I wanted to visit while we were in the city. I didn’t know much about it apart from the little I had read that recommended it as an emotionally heavy but necessary thing to do in Phnom Penh. 

Tuol Sleng is the memorial site of the Security Prison 21 (S-21) interrogation and detention center of the Khmer Rouge regime. It was a school before being converted into a prison.

The audio tour you can take of S-21 (highly recommend) shares information on the Khmer Rouge and its leaders, stories from survivors of the prison, and the horrors of what happened at the prison as you walk through the buildings and around the museum.

The Khmer Rouge, known as Angkar (“the organization”) at the time, was a brutal regime and communist movement that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, wanted to start over in building a new society at what he called “Year Zero.” He believed that the country should return to a “golden age” when the land was cultivated by peasants and ruled for and by the poor. People were expelled from cities, separated from their families, and subjected to forced labor in the countryside. A rural, agricultural lifestyle was the only lifestyle accepted by the regime. Angkar abolished money; formal education; religious practices; civil and property rights; family ties; music and radio; and personal items of any kind. Factories, hospitals, schools and universities were shut down, and temples and libraries were destroyed. Anyone seen as an intellectual – doctors, teachers, lawyers, qualified professionals in all fields, and even people who wore glasses – was thought to be a threat to the new regime and was targeted and executed. 

Many of these intellectuals ended up at one of the 189 known interrogation centers in Cambodia at the time. S-21 was the most infamous. Of the estimated 20,000 prisoners that were tortured and interrogated at S-21, only 12 survived. Most were held at the prison for a few months and tortured up to three times a day in order to solicit false confessions of crimes against Angkar as well as the names of collaborators. Once these false confessions were documented and signed, the prisoners were almost immediately sent to another site for execution. Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum covers the horrors of what happened here as well as the overall Cambodian genocide, which resulted in the deaths of up to 3 million people. 

Building C of Tuol Sleng still has the rooms that were subdivided into small cells for prisoners. The wire on the outside was added to prevent prisoners from jumping out of the building to attempt suicide.

I share this brief history because it’s not common knowledge, at least for most Americans. Even my parents, who were alive at the time, weren’t fully aware of what happened. 

Visiting Tuol Sleng was completely eye-opening. It does not hold back and does not try to spare your feelings. It is direct, honest and brutal, and it left me both incredibly sad and angry– sad that this kind of thing could happen and angry that it’s still happening nearly 50 years later. 

The mission of the museum is to educate visitors about this period of Cambodian history with the aim of encouraging them to be “messengers of peace.” I imagine each visitor takes comfort in the idea they can be a messenger of peace. No one could witness the horrors of that place and leave without a heightened sense of humanity, even if only temporary. You think, “How could that happen'' and “How could anyone support that.” Yet it still happens, and people still support it, or at least stand by. Excuses are made and eyes turn away while innocent people are killed or their welfare is taken from them. 

It’s the people that already have their peace that can easily watch from the outside as atrocities take place and do nothing. 

Two quotes from the audio tour of the museum speak on this. They really stuck with me, and they’re the reason I felt compelled to write something about our visit. 

The first is from New Zealander Rob Hamill, who spoke on the loss of his brother, Kerry Hamill, at the trial for the man who ran S-21. Kerry was on a sailing trip when his boat drifted into Cambodian waters in 1978. He, along with his friend John, were captured, brought to S-21, tortured, and executed. After 16 months of no news from Kerry, his family learned what had happened to him from a local newspaper. 

“If anything, if anything at all is to come from this trial and from my statement on behalf of those I love,” Rob Hamill said, “let it be that the world takes notice of the evil that can happen when people do nothing. And let it be that the world decides that doing nothing is not an option.” 

The second quote is from Joachim Baron van Marschall, a previous German ambassador to Cambodia, from a speech he gave at the unveiling of the memorial monument at Tuol Sleng in 2015. 

Speaking on the Khmer Rouge, he said,

“It reminds us to be wary of people and regimes which ignore human dignity. No political goal or ideology, however promising, important, or desirable it may appear, can ever justify a political system in which the dignity of the individual is not respected.” 

After I heard these quotes, I had a strong desire to share them, to give them another place to live and be discovered. They are a better reminder than I could ever give that, in order to be a messenger of peace, you must be a protector of peace. You must speak up and act when others do not have it. The right to peace is not, and should never be, political. 

When there is already so much pain and suffering in the world, why would anyone choose to contribute to it?