Memory of the World; 2012 - unesdoc - Unesco

Pol Pot, became convinced that party members were
plotting against him, and many leading party cadres were
brought here as well.
The archives, which cover around a third of those
imprisoned, provide an irreplaceable and chilling view
of the machinery of terror. Prisoners were required to write
their own biographies and were encouraged to betray
family, friends and colleagues; over 5000 biographies
(complete with photographs) exist. There are records
of over 4000 ‘confessions’, many obtained under torture,
in which prisoners were forced to implicate themselves
and others. The bureaucracy of terror is made manifest
in Khmer Rouge notebooks, lists of prisoners arriving
and those implicated in the confessions of others, prison
statistics, and implements of torture and restraint,
including over 1200 leg or arm shackles, for all prisoners
were shackled.
While crimes of humanity have happened elsewhere
in the world, nowhere have they reached the extremes
of systematic and nationwide suffering inflicted on
Type-written ‘confessions’ of detainees held at �
Tuol Sleng prison by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.
the people of Cambodia by their own regime. In the
unique experiment in seeking justice for the victims,
the Royal Government of Cambodia and the United
Nations have joined together to establish a hybrid
tribunal involving national and international judges,
prosecutors and defence lawyers, working under national
and international law and under national procedure
to international standards. The first person charged by
the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
(ECCC) was Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, who was
Chief of the Security Office-21 (S-21 prison). Evidence
from this archive formed an essential part of his trial, in
which he was found guilty of crimes against humanity
and, after an appeal in 2012, was sentenced to remain in
prison for the remainder of his life.
The site was turned into a museum after the fall of the
Khmer Rouge in 1979 and the archives have achieved
iconic status internationally because they tell the shocking
tragedy of the crimes that were committed against the
people of Cambodia and form an unflinching record of the
inhumanity that can be committed by totalitarian regimes.
541