Remembering and silencing complexity in post-genocide memorialisation: Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Timothy Williams

doi:10.1177/17506980211037288

Abstract

In genocide, complex political actors can take on changing roles of perpetrator, victim or hero at different points in time. In post-genocide societies, political actors seek to shape memory of the violent past to forward their own interests, often undermining this complexity and painting a more black-and-white picture that ties in with Transitional Justice practitioners’ dichotomous assumptions about perpetrators and victims. This article looks at how complexity is remembered and silenced in a post-genocide memorial space that included many complex political actors during its tenure as a security centre: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia. Here, the audio guide and permanent and temporary exhibitions (as well as changes to these) allow for a co-existence of competing memories, demonising the Khmer Rouge regime for its immense cruelty and simultaneously constructing victimhood for former Khmer Rouge cadres. This could serve as a starting point for discussing complexity, but instead silences in the exhibitions and audio guide create an ambivalence in attributing these roles that masks this complexity.

Highlights

Individuals can take on a wide range of roles during violence, including perpetrating, bystanding, rescuing or even becoming victims (Fujii, 2009; Luft, 2015; Williams, 2018a)
I have shown how various facets of the government’s political interest in remembering the violent past are represented at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (TSGM), allowing both for a generalised demonisation of the Khmer Rouge in the sense of broad culpability for the violent past and universal victimhood for anyone but the highest leaders. These two mnemonic role attributions serve important political purposes independently of each other, meaning that the government has no interest in remembering the past in complex terms
The two mnemonic role attributions are rendered compatible through the silence that hides that the majority of people imprisoned at S-21 were Khmer Rouge cadres themselves

Summary

Introduction

Individuals can take on a wide range of roles during violence, including perpetrating, bystanding, rescuing or even becoming victims (Fujii, 2009; Luft, 2015; Williams, 2018a). There are many references to ‘evidence’ throughout the audio guide7 and this is a key theme for staff members at TSGM.8 Victims of the Khmer Rouge amongst the broader population perceive the memorial museum as an important piece of evidence for the existence of the Khmer Rouge regime9 and the space was framed as evidence for the People’s Revolutionary Tribunal in 1979 (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, 2019: 54), as well as in recent years for the hybrid tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC).

Results

Conclusion