Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum Archives, Cambodia

Chreng Yeng pointing at her brother’s Tuol Sleng photograph. Photo by Kalyanee Mam.  Appears courtesy of the Documentation Center of Cambodia.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is located at the side of the former S-21 prison and interrogation centre where it is estimated that over 15,000 prisoners were held, tortured and then executed by the Khmer Rouge regime. Only a handful of people survived the ordeal.

The archive of the Museum contains photographs of over 5,000 of these prisoners, as well as "confessions", many extracted under torture, and other biographical records of prisoners and prison guards and officials in the security apparatus.

This archive is of world significance as a warning and a grim example. It was inscribed on the Asia-Pacific Memory of the World Register in 2008 and the International Memory of the World Register in 2009.

Want to learn more?

See the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and inscription on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

A detailed description of the archive can also be found in pages 32-33 of the publication Memory of the World: Documentary Heritage in Asia and the Pacific.