Several months after the Khmer Rouge won the civil war and took over Cambodia in 1975, the Tuol Sleng Prey High School in Phnom Penh was converted into a prison and interrogation center and renamed Security Prison – 21. For the next 5 years, thousands of Cambodians (estimated 17,000) were imprisoned and repeatedly tortured then murdered in Tuol Sleng. Khmer Rouge prison staff fled when the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia in 1979, and left thousands of written and photographic records of prisoners, interrogations and torture activities. The abandoned prison was discovered by a Vietnamese photographer who followed the stench of rotting corpses to the gates of Tuol Sleng.
Today, the building is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The building is left largely as-is and visitors are allowed to freely walk around in the building (though I’ve been told that over the years, its been “cleaned up” – supposedly in the early years of the museum, there were still blood stains and extremely gruesome photographs were displayed).
This was one the most disturbing places I’ve ever visited. The Khmer Rouge were brutal and inhumane. Over the 5 years of Pol Pot’s genocidal rule in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge basically wiped out the population of Cambodia. The “intellectuals” were primary targets — academics, teachers, students, doctors, engineers — leaving Cambodia with mostly women and children. The country came to a stand still and fell behind in terms of development relative to its neighboring countries. Cambodia is still trying to rebuild today; it is only in the last 5 years that tourists were allowed into the country. Today, Cambodia relies heavily on tourists and foreign NGO’s for development, education and financial help.
