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Photos
taken before execution at Tuol Sleng Prison
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PHNOM
PENH
City of Loss
Tuol Sleng Museum
Tuol Sleng was a school before the Khmer Rouge turned the classrooms
into torture chambers and converted it into one of the regime's
most infamous death camps. The curator of Tuol Sleng Museum,
Chey Sopheara, went to school here as a child. Now he's taking
Adam and me on a tour of the site.
It's jarring to visit Tuol Sleng today. The former prison is
located in the heart of a bustling suburb. It's rimmed by apartment
buildings -- you almost miss the barbed wire as you walk by.
In front of the gates, it's business as usual. An enterprising
man has set up a cart that holds a portable station to cut keys.
A phalanx of one-legged beggars prowl for the handful of foreign
tourists who come here. On the day we visit, canned music is
blaring from a Cambodian wedding next door.
Chey
was part of the team that helped clean out the hair and blood
from the building when the prison was first discovered, after
the Khmer Rouge were finally driven from power in 1979. Now he
walks the halls with a sad, sober air, lamenting over how one
of the most important monuments of the genocide -- sometimes called
Cambodia's Auschwitz -- is crumbling around him.
Chey shows us where the roof is collapsing and the walls are
starting to cave in. Black rags that look like old prison uniforms
lie in forgotten piles. He shakes his head and quietly explains
through a translator that the museum doesn't have the funds
for repairs. He takes us into the main records room, where the
evidence recovered from the prison is stored. It's so dark we
can barely film. He shrugs and apologizes -- the museum can't
pay the electricity bill.
He takes down a box at random and slowly leafs through one of
the thousands of documents that the Khmer Rouge left behind.
He reads from the forced confession of Mom Tip, a doctor, one
of the estimated 14,000 people who were imprisoned here. Only
eight are known to have survived Tuol Sleng. Mom Tip is not
one of them.
"This
is what they did," Chey says. "They made people write their own
biography and work background and then they killed them." He squints
at the prison report. "Mom Tip was arrested on Dec. 14, 1975.
Then he was killed on May 27, 1976. He was kept in Tuol Sleng
prison for five months."
The Khmer Rouge targeted anyone who was educated, which was
most likely Mom Tip's "crime." His penciled confession is written
in a child's primer with a cartoon of a happy student on the
cover. The booklet -- this man's last testament -- is already
starting to disintegrate. The neat careful writing is fading,
and the delicate paper is crumbling from the heat and the bugs.
"I'm very worried that if we don't do anything to fix this now,
in the next 10 or 20 years all the evidence will be gone," Chey
says. "If we don't maintain what we have here, such as these
documents, one day such a horrible thing will happen again."
The halls of Tuol Sleng are lined with thousands of haunting
photographs of the prisoners who were tortured and executed
here. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records
of their victims. Before prisoners were killed, they were photographed.
These photographs are the most indelible images of the atrocities.
Old men, young women, even children as young as 2 or 3 stare
back from the black and white portraits. Each photograph was
proof that Tuol Sleng had received the prisoner and was intended
to convince leaders that all the enemies of the regime were
being found and "smashed," as the Khmer Rouge put it.
We
meet with one of the official photographers at Tuol Sleng, the
man who looked in the eyes of all the people murdered there, knowing
every one was doomed. He was just 17 years old when he worked
at Tuol Sleng.
Nhem En says that he knew most everyone he was photographing
would be executed. "As a Buddhist, I felt pity for them," he
tells us. "But I could not help -- if I did, I would not survive."
In a familiar refrain, he says he was not guilty of any crimes
because "I was just following organizational orders." He even
says that the current government should thank him for his work
at the death camp. "Without those pictures, how could we know
what happened at that time?"
Half of Cambodia's population is too young to remember the genocide,
and the stories they hear from parents are so horrific they
sound like nightmarish fairy tales or overblown stories of the
bogeyman -- be good or the Khmer Rouge will get you. Most children
don't learn about the Khmer Rouge in school, so they have only
rumors to go on. Chey says that even his own sons don't believe
the scope of the atrocities. He brought them here once. "They
were shocked," he says. "They asked, 'Why? It's so horrible,
maybe it's not true ... Why did they kill people? For what reason?
It's not believable.'"
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Chey
takes us to a newly whitewashed room, where workers are sanding
over a blank wall. Until a few days ago, this is where the famous
"skull map" hung -- a representation of Cambodia fashioned from
the skulls of execution victims dug up from one of the thousands
of mass graves. The Vietnamese-backed government put up the skull
map as testimony to the atrocities, but it had always been controversial.
Some Buddhists believe that without proper religious burial rites
the souls of the dead cannot rest in peace. The skulls are now
carefully stacked in wooden bookcases. There's been a movement
to keep them here, unburied, as evidence and testimony to what
happened. Chey gestures to the remains. "All these skulls remind
me," he says, "that it could have been my father or my brother
or sister who was killed."
Chey asks us to pass on a message to Americans "for funds to
renovate this building and to maintain the documents so that
the young generation will be educated and this will not happen
again."
Later that night, in our hotel, we're looking over the day's
footage from Tuol Sleng and the true scope of the atrocities
starts to hit home. As we fast-forward through the tape, the
faces of the victims come up in the viewfinder, one after another
-- mother, soldier, child -- like an indictment.
NEXT:
PREY TA TAUCH: The Killer Next Door
PREVIOUS: PHNOM PENH: City of
Loss
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