Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, museum and former prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, that commemorates the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge government under Pol Pot in the 1970s. It opened to the public as a museum and war memorial in 1980.
Located around a courtyard lined with palm trees, these four whitewashed, three-story buildings with corridors running alongside the upper balconies were formerly a school. The structures were built in 1962. Under the Khmer Rouge, the compound became a brutal security prison and interrogation facility code-named “S-21” (shortened from “Security Office 21”). Between April 1975 and January 1979, it was enclosed by electric barbed wire, and the classrooms were turned into cell blocks with barred windows, interrogation rooms, and torture chambers. Many of the cell blocks were made of rough brickwork or wood partitions and measured only 2.6 feet (0.8 meter) wide and 6.5 feet (2 meters) long. Prisoners were brought in and abused until they confessed to “crimes” against Pol Pot’s regime. They were then executed and buried in mass graves at the killing fields of Choeung Ek.
Only 12 out of Tuol Sleng’s estimated 20,000 prisoners survived. The chilling exhibits on display include torture instruments, a rusty iron bedframe where many prisoners were murdered, and walls lined with black-and-white mug shots taken before, and sometimes after, victims’ interrogation and torture ordeals. A series of paintings by Vann Nath, a Cambodian artist who survived only because he was chosen to make portraits of Pol Pot as propaganda for the masses, depict life at Tuol Sleng and the various torture methods used on prisoners.
Since its opening in 1980 as a memorial to one of the 20th century’s most disturbing events, the buildings have been largely left as they were when the Khmer Rouge were driven out by Vietnamese forces in 1979. Were it not for a noticeboard outside one of the blocks listing the security regulations to which prisoners had to adhere, it would seem unthinkable that a genocidal holocaust had taken place within this peaceful, sun-soaked compound. In 2015 a memorial monument was erected in the courtyard, featuring a nonreligious stupa 20 feet (6 meters) in height surrounded by black marble plaques listing the names of all known victims of S-21.