The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum also know by it's khmer rouge name, S-21, was the primary prison for the interrogation and processing of prisoners before being executed at the killing fields. It's in Phnom Penh and doesn't look like much from the outside. Disturbingly it used to be a high school before it's enclosed nature and the space from it's playing areas made it an ideal choice for an interrogation facility. I took very few photos as it seemed so inappropriate to snap away like a fascinated tourist when you consider what happened here just a few decades ago, well within living memory. The re-bar and the D shackles where used to cuff the prisoners by their ankles and force them to lie down in ordered lines on the tiled floor. You can see the steel hoops sticking out of the tiled floor in the picture on the right. There was nothing sophisticated about what went on here. The khmer rouge were an agricultural bunch who tied to return the country to the way it was a millenia ago and they used agricultural methods and tools in here too.

I actually took very few photos of the killing fields themselves. Today they are are a series of meter high rolling depressions and hills covered by grass. This is the result of the many excavations that have taken place as well as the bulging of the land from methane gases from the rotting corpses and also from the ground collapsing as the bodies reached a higher state of decay. Again, everything was done in an agricultural way, mostly people were hit over the head with a cart axle and then had their throats cut with a palm knife. The tools are still there in a glass cabinet. It's a very sobering place. It is extra-ordinary to think that many of the people who did this are still living in Cambodia today.