Female prisoner of Tuol Seng, 1975-1979. At Security Prison 21 over 15,000 men, women, and children were tortured and executed by the Khmer Rouge. These photographs were taken just before their death.
In 1975, the Khmer Rouge party, under the leadership of Pol Pot, launched a bloody campaign to transform Cambodia into a Communist agrarian based society. Soldiers emptied out cities and marched inhabitants to the surrounding countryside. They were separated from their families and forced into slave labor, digging trenches, planting, and gathering resources for the state. Thousands died from starvation, malnutrition, and other diseases. Many more were tortured, used for medical experiments, or killed en masse in what were to be dubbed Cambodia’s ‘killing fields.’ Among these were men and women targeted as potential traitors and supporters of a free market economy, or those who might oppose the leveling effect of Communism – doctors, lawyers, teachers, and artists.
As in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which encouraged a radical stripping away of the ‘Four Olds:’ Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas, the Khmer Rouge enforced a discontinuity with the past and the severing of family ties in order to create greater allegiance to the state. The valuing of individual life over the collective was considered heretical. Children were forced to denounce or even kill their parents, and many were separated from their family and trained as child soldiers. By 1979, when the Socialist Republic of Vietnam invaded Cambodia and stopped the genocide, as many as two million people had perished under the Khmer Rouge’s violent program of reform. (For a first-person account of the KR’s brutal campaign, please read the next post on Cambodian-American writer Loung Ung)
Cambodia is a geographically beautiful and culturally rich country. However, after thirty years of internecine war, it is still in a process of recovery, hampered in part by slow economic growth, violent crime, sex trafficking, corruption within the judicial system, and the presence of thousands of unexploded land mines left over from war. Tribunals of former Khmer Rouge leaders are now underway. Kaing Guek Eav, also known as ‘Duch,’ who headed the Tuol Seng prison, or S-21, orderd the torture and death of over 15,000 Cambodians, is now on trial. In a precedent-setting move backed by the UN, Duch’s victims, known as ‘civil parties’ have been permitted to testify and question the defendant, but with mixed results. A verdict is supposed to be reached early next year.
– by Jacqueline Blair Holt
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