The Killing Fields and S-21 (Stories of Horror)

In order to appreciate Cambodia today we need to understand their sad past.  We travelled by Tuk Tuk to Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre, 15km down dusty, pot-holed roads from Phnom Penh, winding through small villages of people who battle poverty and struggle to recreate day by day a country that just 30 years ago was so sadly damaged.



The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre are just one of many to be found throughout Cambodia.

The Khmer Rouge —the communist regime that dictated Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and led by Pol Pot forced all city dwellers into the countryside and to labor camps—, used these fields to eradicate people who had been detained and tortured in prisons.


This field was used in combination with Phnom Penh’s notorious S-21 prison, used specifically to eliminate the country’’s most educated citizens such as teachers, doctors, lawyers, and high-ranking officials.


By the time Pol Pot’’s Khmer Rouge was overthrown in 1979, it had killed an estimated two million people.


Cambodia was devastated during the Khmer Rouge years and the country has embarked on the daunting task of recovery.




S-21 - Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide

Tuol Svay Pray High School sits on a dusty road on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In 1976, the Khmer Rouge renamed the high school S-21 converting it into a torture, interrogation and execution center.

Of the 14,000 people known to have entered, only seven survived. Not only did the Khmer Rouge carefully transcribe the prisoners' interrogations; they also carefully photographed the vast majority of the inmates and created an astonishing photographic archive.

Blackboard in the original classroom

The ground-floor classrooms in one building have been left to appear as they were in 1977. The spartan interrogation rooms are furnished with only a desk and chair set that faces a steel bed frame with shackles at each end.

On the far wall are the gruesome photographs of decomposing bodies chained to bed frames with pools of blood underneath documenting the savagery of the brutal Khmer Rouge.  These were the sights that greeted the two Vietnamese photojournalists who first discovered S-21 in January of 1979.

Today, S-21 Prison is known as the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide. Inside the gates, it looks like any high school, five buildings face a lush grass courtyard containing fragrant frangipani trees . Difficult to imagine the brutality that occurred within these walls.

Each of the almost 6,000 S-21 portraits that have been recovered tells a story shock, resignation, confusion, defiance and horror.  The walls contain some of the most haunting images taken by the Khmer Rouge at S-21. 

In another building the walls are covered with thousands of S-21 portraits of victims of the brutality. The photographs and confessions were collected in order to prove to the Khmer Rouge leaders that their commands had been obeyed and these documents now remain as a sad testimony to the horror of that era.