The S-21 prison camp.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is a museum in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. The site is a former high school which was used as the notorious Security Prison 21 (S-21) by the Khmer Rouge regime from its rise to power in 1975 to its fall in 1979. Tuol Sleng in Khmer; means "Hill of the Poisonous Trees" or "Strychnine Hill".

Tuol Sleng(S21 Prison)


The Khmer Rouge regime ruled over Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.The moment they came to power, they started implementing the philosophy of "Year Zero" very rigorously.

Approximately 20000 people entered the notorious S21 prison, but only 6 people survived the genocide that was perpetrated in the prison complex..

The term Year Zero, applied to the takeover of Cambodia in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge, is an analogy to the Year One of the French Revolutionary Calendar.The idea behind Year Zero is that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and a new revolutionary culture must replace it, starting from scratch. All history of a nation or people before Year Zero is largely irrelevant, as it will (as an ideal) be purged and replaced from the ground up.

Year Zero

The moment prisoners were brought to the S21 prison camp, they were shown a set of rules that are as follows. These rules are still displayed at the genocide museum and were translated to English from the original Cambodian version.

1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

Prison Rules

S21 Rules Image

A large number of foot soldiers in the Khmer Rouge movement were children and there was a specific reason for that.

the Khmer Rouge often took advantage of children and molded them into fanatical communists. Young children were seen as being pure and untainted by capitalism and family influence. From an early age children were propagandized and brainwashed to believe in nothing but Angka - even their parents might become their worst enemies. Khmer Rouge brainwashing techniques were often so successful that children would spy on their parents or report on their families' activities during the Lon Nol regime.

Life and Death in the Farming Cooperatives

The top leadership of the Khmer Rouge regime was filled with conspiracy theorists of the worst kind. This leadership thought that 1 to 5 % of all Cambodians were traitors.

each confession fanned the fires of conspiracy by offering new names (and people) to target. Because prisoners would often name names in their forced confessions, the confessions served as a misguided, but self-fulfilling prophecy to the Khmer Rouge, allowing them to proove to themselves that there was indeed a massive web of traitors amongst them.

Though many prisoners died from the constant abuse, killing them outright was discouraged, for it was much more important for the Khmer Rouge to get confessions on paper first. As part of its quest to wipe out traitors, the Khmer Rouge leadership sought to "investigate their personal biographies clearly" in order to get at what caused the prisoners to become traitors as well as to find out who their co-conspirators were.

The Horrors of Tuol Sleng

One man named Mr. Vann Nath, was brought to this prison. He was not executed by the prison guards because of one reason- he was a skilled painter. The following URL shows the painting of Mr. Vann Nath that describes the torture methods used in the prison.

Vann Nath

It is indeed scary to see what brainwashing is capable of achieving.

Wow. How awful and frightening. Thank you for the history about that. It wasn't exactly taught when I was in school (big surprise, huh?).

S&F

G'Day All,

All this happend just next door to my country Australia, so ashamed that the Australian government let this happen.

They will send our boy's to be killed over sea's in a hart beat if the US or the UK ask's us too, but when something like genocide happens next door they turn away.

Maybe Vietnam was still fresh in our mind's.

Enjoy Life Wile We Have It.
Blessed Be: Kernoonos.....

The frightening part here is that the Utopian communist fantasy was successfully imparted to every single foot soldier of the regime. Children were even more easier targets for brainwashing. Cambodia's neighbor Vietnam was the focus of mainstream media in those days whereas the bloodbath happening in Cambodia went virtually unnoticed.

Some members of the then US admin supported (if not publiclly)the khmer rouge,from "Time Magazine",1989:

The consequences of U.S. intervention in Kampuchea have made a mockery of American intentions before, and they could do so again. The emergence of Pol Pot's ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge was partly a result of misguided American policy 20 years ago.
Richard Nixon's secret bombing of Kampuchea in 1969 and the CIA's support for a coup by a feckless military junta the following spring contributed to the chaos in which the Khmer Rouge thrived. In 1975 Pol Pot seized power and unleashed a holocaust.
Four years and nearly 2 million deaths later, the Vietnamese invaded and installed their own regime in Phnom Penh. To much of the world, Hanoi's aggression against a neighbor mattered more than Pol Pot's atrocities against his own people. After all, Viet Nam was expanding not only its own influence but also that of its backer, the Soviet Union. The Khmer Rouge, whom the arch-moralist Jimmy Carter called "the worst % violators of human rights in the world," became an instrument to drive the Vietnamese out of Kampuchea.
"I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot," recalled Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National Security Adviser, in 1981. "Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him. But China could." The U.S., he added, "winked semipublicly" as the Chinese funneled arms to the Khmer Rouge, using Thailand as a conduit.

www.time.com...

That "person" Brezinski works for Obama today...

"I think the Khmer Rouge would already have been demolished," he said of their status by 1970. "But Mr Kissinger (then US secretary of state) and Richard Nixon were quick [to back coup leader Gen Lon Nol], and then the Khmer Rouge noted the golden opportunity." Because of this alliance, the Khmer Rouge were able to build up their power over the course of their 1970-75 war against the Lon Nol regime, Duch said.

www.news24.com...

Kissenger now works for Obama as an advisor...

Conflicts across the globe and an international respect for Barack Obama have created the perfect setting for establishment of "a New World Order," according to Henry Kissinger, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former secretary of state under President Nixon.
Kissinger has long been an integral figure in U.S. foreign policy, holding positions in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. Author of over a dozen books on foreign policy, Kissinger was also named by President Bush as the chairman of the Sept. 11 investigatory commission.
Kissinger made the remark in an interview with CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" hosts Mark Haines and Erin Burnett at the New York Stock Exchange, after Burnett asked him what international conflict would define the Obama administration's foreign policy.

www.wnd.com...

Evil is rewarded it seems.

[edit on 20/4/2010 by Silcone Synapse]