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S 21 prison camp
In May 1976 the Khmer Rouge established 'Security Office 21' (S-21) in a former high school at Tuol Sleng (meaning hill of the poisonous tree or hill of guilt) in Phnom Penh. The purpose of S-21 was the interrogation and extermination of those opposed to 'Angkar' (the organisation), which is what the Khmer Rouge regime called itself.
Henri Locard, who has studied and visited many of Cambodia's prisons, believes that there may have been as many as 150 other centres at least the size of S-21 where more than 500,000 Cambodians were tortured and executed.
The Tuol Sleng school buildings were enclosed with a double fence of corrugated iron topped with dense, electrified, barbed wire. The classrooms were converted into prison cells and the windows were fitted with bars and barbed wire. The classrooms on the ground floor were divided into small cells, 0.8m x 2m each, designed for single prisoners, who were shackled with chains fixed to the walls or floors. The rooms on the upper floors were used as communal cells. Here prisoners had one or both legs shackled to iron bars.
Before being placed in their cells, prisoners were photographed, all their possessions were removed and they were stripped to their underwear. They slept on the floor without mats, mosquito nets or blankets. To do anything, even to alter their positions while trying to sleep or to relieve themselves in the buckets provided, prisoners had first to ask permission from the prison guards. Failure to do so incurred a severe beating. Bathing was irregular, and was carried out by playing a hose on to a roomful of prisoners.
Some prisoners were used for surgical study and training while still alive. Blood was also drawn from prisoners' bodies. Prisoners' babies brought to S-21 with them were killed by having their heads smashed against trees. Hundreds of children between the ages of 12 and 17 were rounded up from poor families in the countryside to serve as "special and honest security guards" at S-21.
Although the vast majority of prisoners interrogated and executed at S-21 were Cambodians, other victims were of Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, Indian, Pakistani, British, United States, Canadian, New Zealand and Australian nationalities. Those who died at S-21 were taken to Choeung Ek, outside Phnom Penh, to be buried in mass graves. Inmates of S-21 who survived interrogation were taken to Choeung Ek for execution. The burial ground is now a memorial to those who perished under the Khmer Rouge.
The number of prisoners passing through S-21 is estimated as:
1976 - 2,250 prisoners
1977 - 2,330 prisoners
1978 - 5,765 prisoners
These figures do not include the number of children killed at S-21, estimated to be 2,000. Today Tuol Sleng is a museum of genocide, displaying prison cells, torture instruments, photographs taken by the Khmer Rouge of their victims, and paintings of some of the atrocities perpetrated at S-21.
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