Moon Angkor Wat by Tom Vater

Author:Tom Vater
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avalon Travel
Published: 2012-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

S-21 Tuol Sleng Museum

In August 1975, four months after the Khmer Rouge had taken control of Phnom Penh, the Tuol Svay Prey High School, south of Sihanouk Boulevard on Street 350, was converted into Security Prison 21, an interrogation and torture center, also called Tuol Sleng. Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated 17,000 people—men, women, and children—were imprisoned here. Many of them, especially in later years, were themselves members of the Khmer Rouge who had been accused of betraying the party in an ever-expanding cycle of internal purges. Even high-ranking members of the Cambodian communists were incarcerated and tortured. A few foreigners, mostly caught at sea, were also sent to S-21.

All prisoners were photographed and forced to tell their life stories, from childhood memories to the moment of their arrest. They were then assigned their cells and systematically tortured in order to force a confession that suited the interrogators. Food was virtually nonexistent, and any challenge to the guards or failure to obey the myriad of rules of S-21 resulted in severe, often deadly beatings. Prisoners were hung, electrocuted, and suffocated with plastic bags, and water-boarding was routinely applied to inmates. The confessions extracted usually contained the names of all the people prisoners knew. Often, those named were then also arrested and tortured. Most importantly, interrogators pried confessions of spy conspiracies out of the prisoners, a reflection of the regime’s paranoia. Inmates confessed to either working for the CIA or the KGB. Few if any of the inmates were likely to have done any such thing.

Initially, prisoners who had been killed were buried in the school yard, but as more space was needed, those inmates who had been “processed” were taken to Choeung Ek, executed, and buried in mass graves. More than 1,700 people worked at the prison, many of them teenagers. They were led by Comrade Duch, real name Kang Kek Iew, a former school teacher who had been imprisoned and tortured in 1967 by King Sihanouk’s security services for his affiliation with Cambodia’s fledging communist movement. Prior to the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975, Duch established torture centers in the communist-controlled provinces and developed his interrogation techniques. When Phnom Penh fell, he set up several prisons in the capital, which were amalgamated into one large center, S-21, in 1976.

When the Vietnamese liberated Phnom Penh in 1979, Duch fled with other Khmer Rouge cadres, too hurried to destroy the meticulous files kept on inmates. Nevertheless, he did take the time to execute the few remaining prisoners. Duch, who became a schoolteacher once more in refugee camps in Thailand, distanced himself from the Khmer Rouge after the movement’s collapse in 1997. He became a Christian and worked for World Vision, an NGO. He was eventually recognized by photojournalist Nic Dunlop and arrested in 1999. In 2007, Duch was indicted on charges of crimes against humanity by the Cambodia Tribunal. His trial began in February 2009, and in 2011 he was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison. He claims that he just followed orders.

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