As
the Director of the S-21, Comrade Duch was sentenced to life imprisonment on
this date, 3 February 2012, I will post information about the Tuol Sleng Prison
from Wikipedia. Some people compared Tuol Sleng Prison with the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, that is why I call them The Southeast Asian Auschwitz.
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| PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.amazon.com/Duch-Master-Kaing-Guek-Eav/dp/B00CPQ81FI |
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The exterior of the Tuol Sleng Genocide
Museum, Phnom Penh
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The main gate at the
former German Nazi death camp of Auschwitz II (Birkenau). Note that this is
inside the camp looking back from the loading ramp to the "Gate of
Death".
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The
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (Khmer: សារមន្ទីរឧក្រិដ្ឋកម្មប្រល័យពូជសាសន៍ទួលស្លែង) is a museum in Phnom Penh, the capital
of Cambodia. The site is a former high school which was used as the notorious Security
Prison 21 (S-21) by the Khmer Rouge
regime from its rise to power in 1975 to its fall in 1979. Tuol Sleng (Khmer [tuəl slaeŋ]) means "Hill of the Poisonous Trees" or
"Strychnine Hill". Tuol Sleng was only one of at least 150 execution
centers in the country, and as many as 20,000 prisoners there were killed.
History
Formerly
the Chao Ponhea Yat High School, named after a royal ancestor of King Norodom
Sihanouk, the five buildings of the complex were converted in August 1975, four
months after the Khmer Rouge won the Cambodian Civil War, into a prison and
interrogation center. The Khmer Rouge renamed the complex "Security Prison
21" (S-21) and construction began to adapt the prison to the inmates: the
buildings were enclosed in electrified barbed wire, the classrooms converted
into tiny prison and torture chambers, and all windows were covered with iron
bars and barbed wire to prevent escapes.
From
1975 to 1979, an estimated 17,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng (some
estimates suggest a number as high as 20,000, although the real number is
unknown). At any one time, the prison held between 1,000–1,500 prisoners. They
were repeatedly tortured and coerced into naming family members and close
associates, who were in turn arrested, tortured and killed. In the early months
of S-21's existence, most of the victims were from the previous Lon Nol regime
and included soldiers, government officials, as well as academics, doctors,
teachers, students, factory workers, monks, engineers, etc. Later, the party
leadership's paranoia turned on its own ranks and purges throughout the country
saw thousands of party activists and their families brought to Tuol Sleng and
murdered. Those arrested included some of the highest ranking communist
politicians such as Khoy Thoun, Vorn Vet and Hu Nim. Although the official reason for
their arrest was "espionage", these men may have been viewed by Khmer
Rouge leader Pol Pot as potential leaders of a coup
against him. Prisoners' families were often brought en masse to be
interrogated and later executed at the Choeung Ek extermination center.
In
1979, the prison was uncovered by the invading Vietnamese army. In 1980, the
prison was reopened by the government of the People's Republic of Kampuchea as
a historical museum memorializing the actions of the Khmer Rouge regime.
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Many
of the school rooms were divided into crude cells
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cells of S-21
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Razor wire
around the perimeter
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The rooms are mostly empty now, but posters
on the wall tell the stories of those who suffered and perished here. The walls
are also full of all kinds of stains and marks.
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Life
in the prison
Upon
arrival at the prison, prisoners were photographed and required to give
detailed autobiographies, beginning with their childhood and ending with their
arrest. After that, they were forced to strip to their underwear, and their
possessions were confiscated. The prisoners were then taken to their cells.
Those taken to the smaller cells were shackled to the walls or the concrete
floor. Those who were held in the large mass cells were collectively shackled
to long pieces of iron bar. The shackles were fixed to alternating bars; the
prisoners slept with their heads in opposite directions. They slept on the
floor without mats, mosquito nets, or blankets. They were forbidden to talk to
each other.
The
day in the prison began at 4:30 a.m. when prisoners were ordered to strip for
inspection. The guards checked to see if the shackles were loose or if the
prisoners had hidden objects they could use to commit suicide. Over the years,
several prisoners managed to kill themselves, so the guards were very careful
in checking the shackles and cells. The prisoners received four small spoonfuls
of rice porridge and watery soup of leaves twice a day. Drinking water without
asking the guards for permission resulted in serious beatings. The inmates were
hosed down every four days.
The
prison had very strict regulations, and severe beatings were inflicted upon any
prisoner who tried to disobey. Almost every action had to be approved by one of
the prison's guards. They were sometimes forced to eat human faeces and drink
human urine. The unhygienic living conditions in the prison caused skin
diseases, lice, rashes, ringworm and other ailments. The prison's medical
staffs were untrained and offered treatment only to sustain prisoners’ lives
after they had been injured during interrogation. When prisoners were taken
from one place to another for interrogation, their faces were covered. Guards
and prisoners were not allowed to converse. Moreover, within the prison, people
who were in different groups were not allowed to have contact with one another.
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Waterboard
displayed at Tuol Sleng. Prisoners' legs were shackled to the bar on the right,
their wrists were restrained to the brackets on the left and water was poured over
their face using the blue watering can.
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Photos of the victims of the Khmer Rouge line
the walls
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Cabinets filled with human skulls,
disinterred from the grounds of the prison. Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photographed and uploaded to English Wikipedia by
User:Adam Carr
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Photographic display of inmates in Tuol Sleng
(one panel out of the many on display). Photo taken by me (Gary
Jones) April 2004
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Torture
and extermination
Most
prisoners at S-21 were held there for two to three months. However, several
high-ranking Khmer Rouge cadres were held longer. Within two or three days
after they were brought to S-21, all prisoners were taken for interrogation.
The torture system at Tuol Sleng was designed to make prisoners confess to
whatever crimes they were charged with by their captors. Prisoners were
routinely beaten and tortured with electric shocks, searing hot metal
instruments and hanging, as well as through the use of various other devices.
Some prisoners were cut with knives or suffocated with plastic bags. Other
methods for generating confessions included pulling out fingernails while
pouring alcohol on the wounds, holding prisoners’ heads under water, and the
use of the waterboarding technique (see picture). Females were sometimes raped
by the interrogators, even though sexual abuse was against Democratic Kampuchea
(DK) policy. The perpetrators who were found out were executed. Although many
prisoners died from this kind of abuse, killing them outright was discouraged,
since the Khmer Rouge needed their confessions. The "Medical Unit" at
Tuol Sleng, however, did kill at least 100 prisoners by bleeding them to death.
Medical experiments were performed on certain prisoners. Inmates were sliced
open and had organs removed with no anaesthetic. Others were attached to
intravenous pumps and every drop of blood was drained from their bodies to see
how long they could survive. The most difficult prisoners were skinned alive.
In
their confessions, the prisoners were asked to describe their personal
background. If they were party members, they had to say when they joined the
revolution and describe their work assignments in DK. Then the prisoners would
relate their supposed treasonous activities in chronological order. The third
section of the confession text described prisoners’ thwarted conspiracies and
supposed treasonous conversations. At the end, the confessions would list a
string of traitors who were the prisoners’ friends, colleagues, or
acquaintances. Some lists contained over a hundred names. People whose names
were in the confession list were often called in for interrogation.
Typical
confessions ran into thousands of words in which the prisoner would interweave
true events in their lives with imaginary accounts of their espionage activities
for the CIA, the KGB, or Vietnam. Physical torture was combined with sleep
deprivation and deliberate neglect of the prisoners. The torture implements are
on display in the museum. It is believed that the vast majority of prisoners
were innocent of the charges against them and that the torture produced false
confessions.
For
the first year of S-21’s existence, corpses were buried near the prison.
However, by the end of 1976, cadres ran out of burial spaces, the prisoner and
their family were taken to the Choeung Ek extermination centre, fifteen
kilometers from Phnom Penh. There, they were killed by being battered with iron
bars, pickaxes, machetes and many other makeshift weapons owing to the
scarcity, and subsequent price of ammunition. After the prisoners were
executed, the soldiers who had accompanied them from S-21 buried them in graves
that held as few as 6 and as many as 100 bodies.
Non-Cambodians
in the prison
Even
though the vast majority of the victims were Cambodian, some foreigners,
including 488 Vietnamese, 31 Thai, 1 Laotian, 1 Arab, 1 British, 4 French, 2
Americans, 1 New Zealander, 2 Australians, 1 Indonesian, many Indians and
Pakistanis were also imprisoned.
Almost
all non-Cambodians had left the country by early May 1975, following an
overland evacuation of the French Embassy in trucks. The few who remained were
seen as a security risk. Though most of the foreign victims were either
Vietnamese or Thai, a number of Western prisoners, many picked up at sea by
Khmer Rouge patrol boats, also passed through S-21 between April 1976 and
December 1978. They included four Americans, three French, two Australians, a
Briton and a New Zealander. No foreign prisoners survived captivity in Tuol
Sleng.
Two
Franco-Vietnamese brothers named Rovin and Harad Bernard were detained in April
1976 after they were transferred from Siem Reap where they had worked tending
cattle. Another Frenchman named Andre Gaston Courtigne, a 30-year-old clerk and
typist at the French embassy, was arrested the same month along with his Khmer
wife in Siem Reap.
It
is possible that a handful of French nationals who went missing after the 1975
evacuation of Phnom Penh also passed through S-21. Two Americans were captured
under similar circumstances. James Clark and Lance McNamara in April 1978 were
sailing when their boat drifted off course and sailed into Cambodian waters.
They were arrested by Khmer patrol boats, taken ashore, where they were
blindfolded, placed on trucks, and taken to the then deserted Phnom Penh.
Twenty-six
year-old John D. Dewhirst,
a British tourist, was one of the youngest foreigners to die in the prison. He
was sailing with his New Zealand companion, Kerry Hamill, and their Canadian
friend Stuart Glass when their boat drifted into Cambodian territory and was
intercepted by Khmer patrol boats on August 13, 1978. Glass was killed during
the arrest, while Dewhirst and Hamill were captured, blindfolded, and taken to shore.
Both were executed, with Dewhirst possibly having been burned alive, after
having been tortured for several months at Tuol Sleng.
One
of the last foreign prisoners to die was twenty-nine-year old American Michael
S. Deeds, who was captured with his friend Christopher E. DeLance on November
24, 1978 while sailing from Singapore to Hawaii. His confession was signed a
week before the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge. In
1989, Deeds's brother, Karl Deeds, traveled to Cambodia in attempts to find his
brother's remains, but was unsuccessful. On September 3, 2012, DeLance's
photograph was identified among the caches of inmate portraits.
As
of 1999, there were a total of 79 foreign victims on record, but former Tuol
Sleng Khmer Rouge photographer Nim Im claims that the records are not complete.
On top of that, there is also an eyewitness account of a Cuban and a Swiss who
passed through the prison, though no official records of one was shown.
Survivors
of Tuol Sleng
Out
of an estimated 17,000 people imprisoned at Tuol Sleng, there were only twelve
known survivors. As of September 2011, only three of them are thought to be
still alive: Chum Mey, Bou Meng and Chim Math. All three
were kept alive because they had skills their captors judged to be useful. Bou
Meng, whose wife was killed in the prison, is an artist. Chum Mey was kept
alive because of his skills in repairing machinery. Chim Math was held in S-21
for 2 weeks and transferred to the nearby Prey Sar prison. She may have been spared
because she was from Stoeung district in Kampong Thom where Comrade Duch was
born. She intentionally distinguished herself by emphasising her provincial
accent during her interrogations. Vann Nath, who was spared because of his
ability to paint, died on September 5, 2011.
Staff
of S-21
The
prison had a staff of 1,720 people. Of those, approximately 300 were office
staff, internal workforce and interrogators. The other 1,400 were general
workers, including people who grew food for the prison. Several of these
workers were children taken from the prisoner families. The chief of the prison
was Khang Khek Ieu (also known as Comrade Duch), a former mathematics teacher
who worked closely with Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. Other leading figures of
S-21 were Khim Vat aka Hor (deputy chief of S-21), Peng (chief of guards), Chan
(chief of the Interrogation Unit), and Pon (interrogator). Pon was the person
who interrogated important people such as Keo Meas, Nay Sarann, Ho Nim, Tiv Ol,
and Phok Chhay.
The
documentation unit was responsible for transcribing tape-recorded confessions,
typing the handwritten notes from prisoners’ confessions, preparing summaries
of confessions, and maintaining files. In the photography sub-unit, workers
took mug shots of prisoners when they arrived, pictures of prisoners who had
died while in detention, and pictures of important prisoners after they were
executed. Thousands of photographs have survived, but thousands are still
missing.
The
defense unit was the largest unit in S-21. The guards in this unit were mostly teenagers.
Many guards found the unit’s strict rules hard to obey. Guards were not allowed
to talk to prisoners, to learn their names, or to beat them. They were also
forbidden to observe or eavesdrop on interrogations, and they were expected to
obey 30 regulations, which barred them from such things as taking naps, sitting
down or leaning against a wall while on duty. They had to walk, guard, and
examine everything carefully. Guards who made serious mistakes were arrested,
interrogated, jailed and put to death. Most of the people employed at S-21 were
terrified of making mistakes and feared being tortured and killed.
The
interrogation unit was split into three separate groups: Krom Noyobai or
political unit, Krom Kdao or 'hot' unit and Krom Angkiem or 'chewing'
unit. The hot unit (sometimes called the cruel unit) was allowed to use
torture. In contrast, the cold unit (sometimes called the gentle unit) was
prohibited from using torture to obtain confessions. If they could not make
prisoners confess, they would transfer them to the hot unit. The chewing unit
dealt with tough and important cases. Those who worked as interrogators were
literate and usually in their 20s.
Some
of the staff who worked in Tuol Sleng also ended up as prisoners. They
confessed to being lazy in preparing documents, to having damaged machines and
various equipment, and to having beaten prisoners to death without permission
when assisting with interrogations.
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Concentration camp rules
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Security regulations
When
prisoners were first brought to Tuol Sleng, they were made aware of ten rules
that they were to follow during their incarceration. What follows is what is
posted today at the Tuol Sleng Museum; the imperfect grammar is a result of
faulty translation from the original Khmer:
1. You must answer
accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the
facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest
me.
3. Don’t be a fool for
you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately
answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either
about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes
or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still
and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do
something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext
about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.
9. If you don’t follow
all the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any
point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of
electric discharge.
During
testimony at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal on April 27, 2009,
Duch claimed the 10 security regulations were a fabrication of the Vietnamese
officials that first set up the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
Discovery
of Tuol Sleng
In
1979 Ho Van Tay, a Vietnamese combat photographer, was the first journalist to
document Tuol Sleng to the world. Van Tay and his colleagues followed the
stench of rotting corpses to the gates of Tuol Sleng. The photos of Ho Van Tay
documenting what he saw when he entered the site are exhibited in Tuol Sleng
today.
The
Khmer Rouge required that the prison staff make a detailed dossier for each
prisoner. Included in the documentation was a photograph. Since the original
negatives and photographs were separated from the dossiers in the 1979–1980
period, most of the photographs remain anonymous today.
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"Skull map"
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Cambodian school students tour the museum
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Bou Meng (left), Chum Mey (center) and Vann Nath
(right) after having received a copy of the Duch-verdict on 12 Aug 2010. They
are three of only a handful survivors from the secret Khmer Rouge prison S21
where at least 12,273 people were tortured and executed.
ECCC Public Affairs Section has started the
job of distributing 10,000 copies of the Duch-verdict (450 pages) and 17,000
copies of the summary (36 pages). These documents will available in all 1,621
communes in Cambodia as well as in libraries, schools and other public
institutions.
Kaing Guek Eav alias Duch was found guilty of
crimes against humanity and war crimes and sentenced to 35 years of
imprisonment on 26 July 2010. He is the first person to stand trial before the
Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, more commonly referred to as
the Khmer Rouge tribunal.
Fore more information: http://www.eccc.gov.kh"
rel="nofollow">www.eccc.gov.kh
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Tuol
Sleng today
The
buildings at Tuol Sleng are preserved as they were left when the Khmer Rouge
were driven out in 1979. The regime kept extensive records, including thousands
of photographs. Several rooms of the museum are now lined, floor to ceiling,
with black and white photographs of some of the estimated 17,000 prisoners who
passed through the prison.
The
site has four main buildings, known as Building A, B, C, and D. Building A
holds the large cells in which the bodies of the last victims were discovered.
Building B holds galleries of photographs. Building C holds the rooms
sub-divided into small cells for prisoners. Building D holds other memorabilia
including instruments of torture.
Other
rooms contain only a rusting iron bedframe, beneath a black and white
photograph showing the room as it was found by the Vietnamese. In each
photograph, the mutilated body of a prisoner is chained to the bed, killed by
his fleeing captors only hours before the prison was captured. Other rooms
preserve leg-irons and instruments of torture. They are accompanied by
paintings by former inmate Vann Nath showing people being tortured, which were added
by the post-Khmer Rouge regime installed by the Vietnamese in 1979.
Today,
the museum is open to the public, and along with the Choeung Ek Memorial (The
Killing Fields), is included as a point of interest for those visiting
Cambodia. Tuol Sleng also remains an important educational site as well as
memorial for Cambodians. Since 2010, the ECCC brings Cambodians on a 'study
tour' to the Tuol Sleng, Choeung Ek and finishing at the ECCC complex. During 2010,
around 27,000 Cambodians visited the museum through this tour. (See ECCC Court
Report January 2011) Some believed that ghosts of the victims continues to
haunt the place.
A
number of images from Tuol Sleng are featured in the 1992 Ron Fricke film Baraka.
S-21
documentary movie
Main
article: S-21:
The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine is a 2003 film by Rithy Panh, a Cambodian-born,
French-trained filmmaker who lost his family when he was 11. The film features
two Tuol Sleng survivors, Vann Nath and Chum Mey, confronting their former
Khmer Rouge captors, including guards, interrogators, a doctor and a
photographer. The focus of the film is the difference between the feelings of
the survivors, who want to understand what happened at Tuol Sleng to warn
future generations, and the former jailers, who cannot escape the horror of the
genocide they helped create.
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