TUOL SLENG GENOCIDE MUSEUM

It's hard to imagine a stay in Phnom Penh without at least one visit to the Tuol Sleng Museum, better known as S21. Between 1975 and 1979, this former high school built under the French protectorate was the scene of the worst atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge during the genocide. Nearly 18,000 men, women and children were incarcerated, tortured and executed. Only twelve survived the horror: seven adults and five children, hidden under a pile of clothes that had belonged to the prisoners, and freed by the Vietnamese when they took Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979.

Visiting S21 is first and foremost a duty to remember, so as not to forget the collective, bloodthirsty madness that inhabited the regime of Democratic Kampuchea. As a place of remembrance, proper dress is required. We particularly recommend using the audio-guide: remarkably well produced, it gives many details on the organization of the prison, the conditions of incarceration, the lives of certain prisoners and camp officials. The photos and accounts in the audio guide are extremely shocking, so much so that the museum's management advises children under 14 not to visit.

S21 extended far beyond the high school itself: the surrounding houses were used as housing for the administration or as torture centers for the most important prisoners. Vast areas of the surrounding countryside were farmed to provide food for staff and prisoners. Today, the memory of the atrocities that took place there is only preserved in the high school buildings.

The Chao Ponhea Yat school consisted of five two-storey buildings, forming a U-shape around an inner courtyard. It is in this former playground that the tour begins, with the 14 graves of the last prisoners executed by the Khmer Rouge, whose mutilated bodies were found by the Vietnamese army. The tour then moves into the buildings. While some classrooms had been converted into torture centers, the vast majority housed prisoners, either in collective cells where more than 50 prisoners were crammed together, their feet tied to iron bars, or in individual cells measuring around two square meters. Barbed wire had been installed on the upper floors to prevent prisoners from committing suicide: the right to life or death was reserved solely for the camp management. Every day, systematic searches were carried out by the guards: a pen could be used to open one's throat, a bolt or a screw could be swallowed to kill oneself, and so on.

The first detainees were former officials of the Lon Nol regime. From 1976 onwards, the paranoia of the leaders of Angkar ("The Organization", the nickname of the Khmer Communist Party) led to a systematic purge of the Cambodian population: intellectuals and monks were the first to be targeted. The mere fact of wearing glasses or speaking a foreign language meant a death sentence. Many innocent people were arrested following slanderous denunciations. Foreigners, mainly Vietnamese, but also a few Westerners (including four Frenchmen) were imprisoned and executed at S21. Then, in the years that followed, many Angkar cadres and subordinates, suspected of being traitors, joined the ranks of their former victims. S21 guards, usually teenagers, were also incarcerated after failing to comply with the drastic regulations put in place by the administration.

Prisoners were not allowed to communicate with each other, had to relieve themselves in American ammunition boxes (traces of which can still be seen in some cells) and were not allowed to drink water without authorization. Meals consisted of four spoonfuls of infamous rice porridge twice a day, and a bowl of soup with a few leaves swimming in it. Overcrowding and poor hygiene (prisoners were showered with a fire hose once every four days) led to numerous illnesses. The inexperienced medical team was only there to keep the prisoners alive after the torture sessions.

The camp's director, Khang Khek Leu, a former schoolteacher who called himself Comrade "Douch" and whose resounding trial opened in 2009, had set up a system that only totalitarian regimes are capable of creating. Camp personnel were divided into four sections: photography, administration, surveillance and interrogation. Each section was forbidden to do the work of the other. For example, if a guard assigned to surveillance beat up a prisoner, he was immediately arrested and returned to the ranks of the prisoners. When the deportees arrived, the procedure was invariably the same: each person was photographed, then stripped, searched and questioned once. The prisoner's complete biography, from birth to arrest, was recorded and archived. Then, after two or three days, the interrogations began.

Three groups were in charge of the confession sessions: the "nice guys", who were not allowed to lay a hand on the defendants; the "biting guys", who dealt with the most important cases; and the "hot guys", who could use any means they saw fit to extract confessions. The "hot" ones usually started with a thorough beating, and if that wasn't enough, extreme means were used. Pliers heated to white to rip off flesh, venomous insects placed on the genitals, electrocution, "waterboarding", suffocation with a plastic bag, hanging by the feet until they fainted (to wake them up, the guards would plunge them into jars filled with rotting water and excrement), and so on. Although rape was outlawed by Comrade Douch, some guards did not hesitate to sexually assault female prisoners (caught in the act, the guards joined the ranks of the prisoners). When the prisoner finally cracked, he would confess to working for the KGB or CIA, denouncing family members who were then arrested and taken to S21. And so it began all over again. His confessions under torture were absurd: an American arrested in Khmer territorial waters while sailing around the world had confessed that his CIA contact was Colonel Sanders, the founder of the famous American brand of fried chicken.

On the walls of the prison were inscribed the rules to be followed by the deportees (transcribed here with the original grammatical errors):

Answer my question as I asked it. Don't try to deflect mine.

Don't try to escape by taking pretexts according to your hypocritical ideas. It is absolutely forbidden to challenge me.

Don't play the fool, for you are the man who opposes the revolution.

Answer my question immediately without taking time to think.

Don't talk to me about your little incidents of impropriety. Don't talk about the essence of revolution either.

During caning or electroshock, it's forbidden to shout loudly.

Sit quietly. Wait for my orders; if there are no orders, do nothing. If I ask you to do something, do it immediately without protest.

Don't use Kampuchea Krom as an excuse to cover your traitorous face.

If you don't follow all the above orders, you will be beaten with sticks, electric wires and electric shocks (you won't be able to count these blows).

If you disobey every point of my regulations, you'll get either ten lashes or five electric shocks.

Prisoners were kept alive for two to three months, sometimes longer for the most important ones. Then, once their confessions seemed sufficient to the camp management, they were executed. For the first few years, they were killed on the spot; then, for lack of space and hygiene reasons, the condemned prisoners were taken some ten kilometers south of the camp, to the site of Choeung Ek, today known as "Killing Fields".

This Kafkaesque system of torture lasted for four years. The care taken by Dush with the camp archives is astonishing: keeping a written record of this death industry may seem absurd, but as with the Nazi camps, the management of S21 was convinced of the soundness of their method and the durability of the regime they were creating. When Pol Pot ordered the evacuation of S21 on January 5, 1979, Duch had no time to destroy the archives. All the photos of prisoners taken during those bloody years, often of unknown people, are now on display in the old cells. Walking around with all those eyes on you is a difficult but liberating ordeal for the victims' families, who still visit S21 today in the hope of identifying a loved one who disappeared during the reign of Democratic Kampuchea.

In the last buildings, the instruments of torture are on display, along with paintings by a former prisoner, Bou Meng, who was kept alive by his jailers to sculpt busts of Pol Pot; his wife was killed at S21. These unbelievably violent works bear chilling witness to the living conditions of the prisoners. Bou Meng is still alive, and regularly gives lectures to younger generations, to ensure that the memory of the genocide lives on for as long as possible. A memory that every visitor to S21 must keep alive and pass on.

As well as visiting this place of terror, we recommend a number of works dedicated to S21 and the Khmer Rouge regime. In particular, Duch, le maître des forges de l'enfer, is a Franco-Cambodian documentary by director Rithy Panh, which received widespread acclaim on its release in 2011. The film, simple in concept, is a meeting between the director and the torturer, to whom Rithy Panh asks questions about his responsibility while awaiting the appeal of his trial. The whole thing, eye-to-eye, is a heavy dive into what we might call pure evil. Not to be watched on a day when you're feeling depressed.

In 2003, the same director made S21, la machine de mort Khmère rouge, already a moving as well as frightening work, giving the testimony of two of the survivors of S21's hell.

This museum, as much as the works listed below, is not a moment of pleasure, but will greatly help you to understand the Cambodian people through their tormented history.