ABSTRACT
After the overthrow of Democratic Kampuchea, Cambodia and Vietnam revealed to the outside world the horrors of Tuol Sleng, a high school in Phnom Penh where more than 15 000 people are reported to have been imprisoned and tortured before being executed on the outskirts of the city at Choeung Ek, often called ‘the killing field’. Tuol Sleng became a Museum of Genocide, preserving the remains of the horror that took place there, and a memorial stupa was erected at Choeung Ek (Fig. 9.1 provides an example of a stupa). But these are only two such genocide sites of the many hundreds scattered throughout the country. During the three years, eight months and twenty days that the Khmer Rouge held power, more than 1.6 million people perished, over one quarter of the total population, dying in miserable circumstances of starvation and untreated illness, if not from brutal torture and execution, in one of the twentieth century’s most destructive episodes (Kiernan 1996; Sliwinski 1996).
