Cambodia S21: Khmer Rouge (41 images)

Tuol Sleng (S-21) Prison was created on the orders of the Khmer Rouge Chief Pol Pot on April 17, 1975. The former Toul Svay Prey high school classrooms were turned into cells 0.8 by 2 metres square. S-21 was designed for detention, interrogation, torture, and murder. The front of the buildings were covered in thick barbed wire to prevent prisoners committing suicide by jumping. When false confession had been extracted prisoners who had not died through torture were sent outside the city to...
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Tuol Sleng (S-21) Prison was created on the orders of the Khmer Rouge Chief Pol Pot on April 17, 1975. The former Toul Svay Prey high school classrooms were turned into cells 0.8 by 2 metres square. S-21 was designed for detention, interrogation, torture, and murder. The front of the buildings were covered in thick barbed wire to prevent prisoners committing suicide by jumping. When false confession had been extracted prisoners who had not died through torture were sent outside the city to the Killing Fields where they were murdered. An estimated 3 million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge regime.

It took Cambodian and international judges 31 years to bring the first Khmer Rouge official to trial for the nation's genocide. The verdict of "guilty" was a foregone conclusion against S-21's chief jailer and torturer, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch. Yet, the sentence handed down by the UN-backed tribunal was 35 years in prison with 16 years off for time served. He will serve 11 years in jail. Exactly 11 and a half hours for each of the recorded 16,000 people he killed. Guilty of some of the worst cruelty recorded in human history, Duch was given a sentence roughly equivalent to those received by drug dealers in Thailand's courts.

Khmer Rouge founder and dictator Pol Pot died in his bed in 1998 without standing trial - tended to by his wife and community. Other top members of his regime have also died of old age. Successive Cambodian goverment's part in this denial of justice is beyond a simple lack of moral courage. Many present members of Prime Minister Hun Sen's cabinet are ex-Khmer Rouge, terrified of a war crimes tribunal with wider reach.
Chum Mey, a survivor of S-21, the most notorious Cambodian death camp of the Khmer Rouge regime, commented on the verdict.
"I'm not happy. My people are not happy. I'm angry once again. We suffered once under the Pol Pot regime and now we are suffering again."
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