Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, 2017. Wikicommons, Bjørn Christian Tørrissen. Some rights reserved.
It is a July day in Phnom Penh, the hot and humid air making it difficult to breathe. The streets leading to Tuol Sleng are noisy and crowded: tuc-tuc drivers' call for potential clients mingles with the smell of street-vendors' grilled fish. Soon, these fall away as the visitor reaches a former school building that would serve as the major prison under the Khmer Rouge regime which ruled Cambodia from 1975-78. Now it is a museum where foreign tourists are queuing to be confronted with the horrors of the Cambodian genocide and the ambiguities of its legacy.
The history of Cambodia has puzzled me for a long time. Movies such as Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields and those by Rithy Panh only added to my bewilderment. Cambodia was the trigger for the China-Vietnam war of 1979, conducted between two supposedly fraternal socialist countries. Most incomprehensible was the violence the Khmer Rouge unleashed against its own people: emptying cities and towns, expelling people to the countryside for rice production, exterminating the nation’s intelligentsia. Perhaps I could find some answers, and if possible make sense of this senseless violence, by seeing for myself the photographs of Khmer Rouge victims?
