Tuol Sleng Prison and the Killing Fields

S-21 was the name for the security prison units that the Khmer Rouge built and maintained throughout their control of Cambodia from 1975-79. The Tuol Sleng was a large high school in southern Phnom Penh before it was converted into a prison for political prisoners that had fallen on the bad side of Angkar (the Khmer Rouge ideals).

The prison could hold as many as 1,500 prisoners at one time. The prisoners were either housed in communal cells, where their limbs would be chained with a padlock to a long iron bar, and they would be lying side by side with 40 other prisoners in the same room. They had to ask permission to go to the bathroom otherwise they would be lashed 10 times or shocked with an electrical discharge 5 times. The bathroom would just be buckets in the cell. The other cell isolated the prisoner in a cell of their own with no room for anything else other than own bodies besides small buckets that would be used for going to the bathroom.

When prisoners were taken to these prisoners, it was termed by the Khmer Rouge being sent "to study." Here were the rules that were written on the blackboards for the prisoners to follow or else incur severe punishment:

1) You must answer according to my questions. Do not turn them away.
2) Do not try to hide the facts by making pretexts of this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3) Do not be a fool for you are a chap who dares to thwart the revolution.
4) You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5) Do not tell me either about your immoralities or the revolution.
6) While getting lashes and 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) Do not make protests about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
9) If you do not 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 electrical wire.

As you can tell from the above rules, various forms of torture were institutionalized at Tuol Sleng, such as water torture, removing the fingernails and pouring alcohol on the wounds, exposure to poisonous insects, and applying electrical shocks to sensitive parts of the human body. Photos taken upon the arrival of prisoners show that some of them had already had their arms amputated before they were even imprisoned. Perhaps the most perverted transformation of the schoolground into the scene of torture was the security guards' use of the jungle gym to hang prisoners from with their arms and legs all bound together to create unbearable agony on the joints so that the prisoners would soon pass out. Then the prisoners' head would be dunked in water in order for them to regain consciousness so torture could resume. The facades of some of the buildings still were covered with barbed wire to prevent prisoners the opportunity of killing themselves by jumping over the balcony to the ground below.

There was a documentary shown at the museum about the troubled romance and the lives of two prisoners at Tuol Sleng. Perhaps the most disturbing part of the movie was one of the 7 prisoners who survived incarceration at Tuol Sleng leading one of the old S-21 security guards around his studio. The prisoner showed the guards paintings that he had completed of various forms of torture that happened at Tuol Sleng and was asking him, "Did I get this right? Is this how it happened?"And the security guard would uncomfortably smile and say, "Yes, that's how it happened."

As I mentioned before, of the 12-15,000 prisoners that passed through Tuol Sleng, only 7 survived. The rest died of torture or starvation in Tuol Sleng or were transported by trucks about 15 km southwest of Phnom Penh to the killing fields of Cheong Ek, where they were lined up and executed by gunshot wounds, cutting of the throat, or blows to the head with blunt objects.

The Khmer Rouge tried to hide evidence of this extermination by destroying the detention building and the buildings which housed manacles and chemicals to cover the stench of the decomposing bodies. They didn't do a very good job of hiding the evidence. Soon after the Vietnamese defeated the Khmer Rouge and ended the revolution, mass graves in Cheong Ek were excavated, revealing thousands of intact human skeletons. One mass grave contained decapitated skeletons. Some of the prisoners were executed using the razor-sharp leaves of a palm tree. Some babies and young children were killed by bashing their bodies repeatedly against the base of a tree. These methods of murder were used to conserve bullets.

On the grounds of the former death camp, a white stupa stands, filled with level upon level of human skulls and the mostly intact clothes of the victims. Estimates vary about the number of deaths in Cambodia, but the memorial plaque at the Killing Fields put the number at 2 million people who died because of torture, execution or starvation during the Pol Pot regime. Combined with the secret American bombing of Cambodia during the early 1970s, the civil war which led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and the defeat of the Khmer Rouge at the hands of the Vietnamese army, highest estimates put the total number of deaths in Cambodia at 3 million people.