One of the toughest visits I could make in Cambodia was to visit the Cambodian Genocide Museum of Tuol Sleng S-21, a place where impressions leave no one indifferent, and where crimes against humanity were committed. only against the Cambodian people, but against the entire human race. It was difficult to leave Cambodia without forgetting the pain that struck a great nation, which today smiles with the hope of a better future. But I also left with a huge history lesson and with the responsibility to spread what happened here, so that history will never happen again. Friends of Steemit, I would be grateful if you would accompany me to read this experience, and to know a little of the history in which millions of Cambodians were subjected, by the government of the Khmer Rouge, just a few years ago.
In 1975, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge came to Cambodia, after overthrowing the previous dictatorship, to found the Democratic Kampuchea, a dictatorship of the extreme left, of Maoist character. The biography of Pol Pot tells us that the Cambodian dictator had learned about communism, Maoism and anticolonialism. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge installed an absolutely rural society, destroying any factory that was a sign of progress, assassinated all intellectuals and even people who had studies or who could impart them. Teachers, doctors, nurses, writers, students, lawyers ... all of them were accused of being contaminated by capitalist ideas and were killed or deported to concentration and extermination camps, such as the Killing Fields, where they were finally exterminated en masse.
The guerrilla soldiers were received with all the honors by the Cambodian people who thought that they would restore peace and restore the monarchy to the country. 48 hours after the capture of the city, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge ordered that everyone leave the city of Phoem Penh and go to the camp. Entire families were separated, sending each member to different parts of the country to eliminate any affective or sanguine bond that would act as an obstacle to that new society without the past that they intended to create: an agrarian society made up of stupid people, without studies or their own thoughts , on which to write, as in a "blank page", the new history of Cambodia. Private property, currency, market, schools and hospitals were abolished. Temples were destroyed, books and clothing were burned, and the new peasants were forced to dress in exactly the same clothes.
They wanted a society not only communist, but also quite rural. All this led to a series of famines, which together with the extermination programs, meant that during the nearly four years of power of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, a quarter of Cambodia's population died, more than 2 million It was not until the beginning of 1979 that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were removed from power, with the entry of Vietnamese troops into Phnom Penh, on January 7, 1979 although, unfortunately, a good part of their top leaders were never taken to trial.
The madness of Pol Pot went so far as to create "total institutions" where to lock up all those suspected of being enemies of the state to subject them to torture in order to confess their secret activities.
One of them Tuol Sleng, a former institute located in Pnom Penh, capital of Cambodia, which became the "Prison S-21", one of the high security prisons of the regime, famous for the atrocities and tortures that were practiced in it. An authentic house of horrors that today is known as the Museum of the Genocidal Crimes of Tuol Sleng, founded in 1980, in order to preserve evidence of acts that led to the disappearance of between 1 and 3 million people in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The Museum conserves the spaces as they were organized by the direction of the prison S-21.
Museum of the genocidal crimes of Tuol Sleng
S-21 was created with the objective of protecting the Central Party in charge of the government of Democratic Kampuchea, being used as a center for interrogation, arrest and torture, eliminating persons considered enemies of the State, or suspected of collaborating with a foreign force, especially Vietnamese. , Soviet or American, who had collaborated in the past with counterrevolutionary elements. The detention process began when the prisoners arrived at S-21, where they were taken a photograph, the greatest amount of personal information was collected to complete the registration: name , age, occupation, place of birth, name of parents, spouses, children.
Photographs taken of prisoners during their registration at the time of entering S-21
The buildings, with three floors, were the old classrooms of the school, which were transformed in record time, in cells to confine anyone who was suspected of collaborating with the old regime. Any minimal complaint by a citizen was sufficient reason to detain the suspect, often with his or her entire family. On the upper floors you can see how the classrooms were transformed into tiny cells thanks to wooden partitions, or in other classrooms, thanks to brick constructions. Some of these classrooms still have their slate, when the teaching and learning function was the one that prevailed in Tuol Sleng.
Classrooms transformed into cells
The ground floor is even more terrifying, as it is a real museum of torture, which shows part of the devices that the Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot used to frighten and torture the population. Cubes to sink the head, devices to tear the nails, the metal skeletons of the beds where the tortures were executed.
"Electric" bed, where the victim was insured to be electrocuted with auto batteries
Shackles used to immobilize prisoners
The wide corridors of the old school were closed with bars to prevent leaks.
The Khmer Rouge left a scar in the history of Cambodia difficult to erase. It is impossible to get out of there without taking in your mind the faces of thousands of people of all ages, conditions and origins who died at the hands of the bloody Communist Khmer Rouge regime. This is a huge lesson in contemporary history and the extreme suffering to which millions of Cambodians were subjected just a few years ago, chilling figures that make the skin stand up when we enter Tuol Sleng and see photographs and skulls of the murdered. This is the nightmare that It still terrifies Cambodia and shames the world because it happened only decades ago, in the eyes of the entire international community.
Prison "Tuol Sleng" (S-21) | GENOCIDE MUSEUM | Ecency
