Others are women with babies.Īll of them put a human face on what was an inhuman regime hell-bent on extinguishing every last spark of individuality and family loyalty from its citizenry, for the Khmer Rouge referred to itself only as “Angkar” (the Organization). They are the most haunting part of this memorial site. These black and white portraits hang in the second of four buildings. Upon arriving at the prison, each inmate was photographed. Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is set in a former high school, later used by the Khmer Rouge as a prison and interrogation center. INTERACTIVE: Five faces of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge Over the course of four years as many as 20,000 prisoners passed through here, including four Frenchmen, one Brit and two Americans.
THE KHMER ROUGE REGIME A PERSONAL NIGHTMARE SPARK NOTE CODE
Known by the code name S-21, the former high school of Tuol Sleng became the Khmer Rouge’s secret prison and the most potent symbol of its brutality. That legacy is on grim display in Phnom Penh’s most popular dark tourism sites of the secret prison at Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields. Instead, they wound up masterminding a genocide that left an estimated 1.7 million Khmers dead. With an agenda of half-baked Maoism and class warfare that included emptying cities, banning money, and executing intellectuals – or anyone wearing glasses – the Khmer Rouge tried to create an agrarian utopia. The “secret bombing” campaign in the early 1970s, orchestrated by the soon-to-be-impeached President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, the most contentious of Nobel Peace Prize winners, pushed many moderates towards the Khmer Rouge, who stormed into Phnom Penh in April 1975 to declare victory and begin a reign of tyranny that some historians have called the most radical experiment in communism ever conducted. Few countries in Asia have suffered as much turmoil and internecine warfare in recent decades as Cambodia.
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