Papers

• The black notebook Anne Laure Poree EHESS

  The black notebook at the heart of this presentation is a small square notebook 19 cm wide, almost 27 cm high, taken from the archives of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia. Its black cardboard cover makes it different from the other, simpler notebooks found on the site of S-21. Throughout its 53 pages, someone has diligently transcribed the training of the interrogators who tortured the ‘enemies’ of the regime, compiled the confessions pages, and identified the networks of these alleged enemies. The head of S-21, Duch, who was tried for crimes against humanity in 2009 in Cambodia and sentenced to life, confirmed in court that the content matched his lessons on interrogation techniques. The black notebook, thus, plunges us into the heart of the Khmer Rouge doctrine and its implementation. It reveals in a striking way the obsession with purification which permeates daily life in Democratic Kampuchea at both the individual and collective level. Using a wide range of sources (S-21 photos, interviews, analysis of ECCC records, other Khmer Rouge sources, discourse/linguistic analysis), I will explore the ways in which the notebook makes it possible to assess the weight of ideology. I will dissect the executioners’ language in its non-metaphorical part, in what it does to both the detainees’ and the interrogators’ bodies. I will analyze what the Khmer Rouge understood by the word ‘politics’, a term that often comes up in the notebook. Lastly, I will discuss how such an artefact allows us to study the nature and specificities of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal thinking and practices.

• Revealing Documentation of S21: Understanding the crime history through digitalized records Pheaktra Song Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

  With more than 700,000 pages, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum archives hold the extensive documents that are connected to crimes committed during Democratic Kampuchea. These records offer a thorough look about daily routines, work, and management of the prisoners at S-21. But although records were found in 1979, they were just digitized and digitalized in a project from 2017 to 2022. They are now being used to understand the whole picture of S-21 documentation and show how this institution of death has been a systematic tool for speeding up the hunt for the “enemies” of the regime and intensifying the crime. This research will select three types of records: lists, confessions, and staff diaries in order to explore through the daily administration of prisoners the endless process of killing in S-21. The lists produced by S-21 staff included documents that allowed the Khmer Rouge to count the number of incarcerated people, the number of sick detainees, the number of those who were interrogated or even those to be exterminated and this on a daily basis or through monthly, or even yearly records. The variety of these documents reveals the sophistication of the administration designed at S-21. The confessions, known to have been obtained under torture, constitute an important part of the archives. After the fall of the Democratic Kampuchea they were used to identify victims. They allowed researchers to retrace the dissensions within the revolutionary movement and the history of the Communist Party of Kampuchea but here, they will be studied to analyze nature of the Khmer Rouge bureaucracy.

• Reading the textiles and clothing from Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum: Care, Survival and Materiality of the S-21 Prisoners’ Lives Magali An Berthon University of Copenhagen

  At the Khmer Rouge prison S-21, victims were meticulously photographed by the Khmer Rouge guards upon incarceration. In a dehumanisation process, their forced confessions were taken, as well as their clothes. These items were then circulated informally between prison guards and prisoners. Thousands of garments, textiles, and fragments were abandoned in the confines of the prison when the site was abandoned at the fall of the regime in April 1979. With the support of the US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation, a vast conservation campaign was conducted from 2018 to 2021, so approximately 3,000 pieces of clothing could be sorted, photographed, and stored in a climate-controlled environment. The museum now owns an invaluable “textile archive”, as US textile conservator Julia Brennan who led the conservation scheme calls it, that is available for further research to shed light on the prisoners’ identities, and more broadly, life under the Khmer Rouge. While most of the clothing remains is military gear, a small selection of items showcases distinctive features, such as extensive mending, signs of repairs, and patches, telling an intimate story of scarcity, manual skills, and survival. What can these objects reveal in their materiality to inform the lives of the prisoners and guards of the prison? To do so, this paper will also draw from a week-long workshop organised with the in-house textile conservation team at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in November 2022, in which participants have engaged with textile research methodologies to contribute to building further knowledge on the textile objects in the collection.

• Developing ownership Barbara Thimm Jewish Museum Hohenems

  Research capacity within the staff of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum has not been a priority of the management in former times. This has changed. While digitizing the archives and applying to be listed in the UNESCO World Heritage, the team has worked on the history of the museum in order to publish about S-21, in a way that Cambodian students will keep interest in reading the book. Cambodian and international researchers supported these projects. As an advisor of the museum from 2017-2023 financed by the German Civil Peace Service program (GIZ), I had the chance to accompany some of these processes. My presentation will cover examples of milestone projects at the museum – the development of the “40 years anniversary” exhibition and of a publication on this exhibition (2019), the Khmer and English publication entitled S-21: No Way Out (2023) which describes what happened to the prisoners – and the challenges involved: building up research capacity with non-professionals, publishing in Khmer, navigating in a highly politicized context. The group in charge of research, conception and writing on theses topics had then to deal with questions like “The government is using a different total number of victims of the Khmer Rouge period, what shall we write?”, “Are we writing from the point of view(s) of the victims or from the perpetrator(s)? perspective”, “For which language are we developing the layout?”, etc. My presentation will focus on the decision-making processes and discuss the challenges of how to support ownership in a strongly hierarchical system of a state-run museum under the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, accompanied by international advisors and influenced by foreign money and donors.

Abstract