The former S-21 prison, now housing the Tuol Sleng Museum—the largest museum dedicated to the atrocities under Pol Pot’s regime—the Choeung Ek Memorial, known as the “killing fields,” and the old M-13 prison have now been added to the list, reported the AFP news agency.
The first two are located in Phnom Penh, while the third is in the Kampong Chhnang province, northwest of the capital.
“The inclusion of Cambodian memorial sites on the World Heritage List, transforming them from centers of repression to places of peace and reflection, is not just the recognition of a site, but also of a painful history and, above all, the extraordinary resilience of the Cambodian people,” highlighted Prime Minister Hun Manet in a video recorded and broadcast by public broadcaster TVK.
“This is the landscape of our shared memory,” emphasized Youk Chhang, a genocide survivor and director of the Documentation Center of Democratic Kampuchea (DC-CAM), to AFP. The center investigates the Khmer Rouge atrocities.
For Chhang, this decision “will make teaching the history of the Khmer Rouge more effective and relevant.”
Cambodia already had four World Heritage sites, all centuries old, including the famous temples of Angkor.
Led by Pol Pot, who died in 1998 without trial, the totalitarian Marxist regime attempted to impose a new agrarian society without currency, medicine, or education.
Two million people, a quarter of the population at the time, died from exhaustion, disease, torture, or execution.
More than 15,000 men, women, and children were detained at Tuol Sleng, a former school converted into a prison by the Khmer Rouge. Very few survived.
The majority of the rooms now open to visitors remain in the state they were left in by Pol Pot’s soldiers after their fall in January 1979.
Excavation work in the early 1980s revealed the remains of more than 6,000 people scattered across about 100 mass graves in Choeung Ek. The site now houses a Buddhist stupa with thousands of skulls.
A special tribunal supported by the United Nations sentenced three Khmer Rouge officials, including the former chief torturer of S-21, “Douch.”
