Tuol Sleng, l’histoire inachevée d’un musée mémoire

Abstract

A high school the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison under the code-name S-21 between 1976 and 1979, then a genocide museum opened to visitors in 1979, Tuol Sleng is nowadays a major site of Cambodian heritage. Every year several thousand people, foreign tourists and Cambodians alike, visit the place. How was Tuol Sleng established, in what context and for what purpose? The transformation of the prison into a memorial museum is deeply related to an extraordinary justice process (the People’s Revolutionary Tribunal, which sentenced to death in absentia two former leaders of Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary), the new authorities’ dire need of domestic and international legitimacy, and the will to represent and identify the victims of the former regime. Memorialization went hand in hand with the elaboration of a national narrative that a majority of Cambodians could accept in spite of the limitations of this narrative and the propaganda around it. The territory chosen to build this heritage is very small compared to the actual territory of S-21. In this sense, it is emblematic of the parts of history that were discarded in the process. The population returning to Phnom Penh after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime appropriated the neighborhood anew. Lately, these people’s recollections and the traces the past left in the landscape have become an object of research. They open up new perspectives of inquiry regarding the museum, and consequently Cambodian heritage.

Keywords

• Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
• S-21
• memory
• Cambodia
• Southeast Asia