Three former torture and execution sites used by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime have been added to the UNESCO World Heritage list, in recognition of their journey “from centers of repression to places of peace and reflection.”
Two prisons and an execution site were inscribed on the list by UNESCO on Friday during the 47th Session of the World Heritage Committee in Paris, the AFP news agency reported.
The sites include the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (formerly S-21 security prison) and the Choeung Ek “killing fields” attached to S-21, both in the capital Phnom Penh. The third site is the former M-13 prison on the border between Kampong Chhnang and Kampong Speu provinces, where the communist Khmer Rouge honed their security techniques prior to coming to power.
As such, the three sites played an important role in the proceedings at the U.N.-backed tribunal set up to try surviving members of the Khmer Rouge, especially in the case of Kaing Guek Eav (alias Comrade Duch), the zealous former captain of both M-13 and S-21. After being convicted of crimes against humanity by the court in 2012, Duch died in prison in 2020.
The UNESCO listing comes shortly after the 50th anniversary of this takeover of the communist Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975, which initiated three years, eight months, and 20 days of intense suffering and privation for the country’s people. By the time the Vietnamese military overthrew it in January 1979, the regime – its official name was Democratic Kampuchea – had caused the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people from overwork, sickness, and execution.
The listing was greeted with government-sponsored ceremonies yesterday, including at both S-21 and Choeung Ek, during which monks and government officials beat drums and hit gongs in celebration.
The three sites – referred to collectively by UNESCO as “Cambodian memorial sites” – are the first modern and non-classical archaeological sites that Cambodia has nominated for World Heritage status, and is among the first in the world to be submitted as a site associated with recent conflict, Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts said in a statement cited by AFP.
Four other Cambodian sites have previously been added to the UNESCO list: the Angkor temple complex outside Siem Reap; Preah Vihear temple, an eleventh-century temple on the border with Thailand; and the temple complexes of Sambor Prei Kuk and Koh Ker.
According to Cambodia’s submission to UNESCO, the three memorial sites “bear irrefutable evidence of events amounting to one of the most serious abuses of human rights in the 20th century.” In justifying their joint nomination, it noted that the three locations “embod[y] the essential stages of the development and functioning of the Khmer Rouge security system.”
S-21, a former primary school, was perhaps the most important and best known of the regime’s dozens of prisons and security centers. Within its classrooms and crudely constructed isolation chambers, at least 14,000 “enemies of the revolution” were interrogated, tortured, forced to confess often imaginary crimes, and butchered at Choeung Ek. These eventually included many members of the Khmer Rouge revolution itself.
After Vietnam’s overthrow of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Vietnamese museum experts helped transform S-21 into a museum showcasing the atrocities of Democratic Kampuchea. The museum’s displays are today dominated by the hypnotic black and white portraits of its thousands of victims, which were taken upon their admission to S-21. The museum also houses extensive archives related to the Khmer Rouge era, including the chilling interrogation files compiled by Duch and his subordinates. Choeung Ek was similarly transformed into a memorial site known as the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center.
By contrast, M-13 was active prior to the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, when it was used to punish and interrogate people living in “liberated zones” controlled by the Khmer Rouge. It was here that many of the Khmer Rouge’s security “techniques” were tested and honed. As the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung noted in a recent study of the site, “understanding what happened at M-13 is an important part of understanding the evolution of the Khmer Rouge ideology and its development of imprisonment and torture even before the regime seized full power over the country in April 1975.”
In its submission to UNESCO, the Cambodian government said that the nomination of the three sites “encourage visitors to take a critical look at the dynamics of violence and the consequences of political persecution under repressive ideologies.” It added that the proposed listing “encourages peaceful coexistence among peoples and fosters a commitment to never repeat such atrocities.”
