Unholy ground - Genocide museum crumbling for lack of money

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Tuol Sleng prison was Cambodia's most unholy ground, a place where thousands were tortured while awaiting execution at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime.

As Cambodians await justice for the few surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, those responsible for maintaining Tuol Sleng as a genocide museum are desperate for funds to keep the memorial from crumbling. It's not even on the government's list of historic sites needing conservation funds.

'A dead end'

Chey Sopheara, the museum's director, said up to $400,000 is needed for major renovation of its four decrepit buildings that are under major threat from rain and termites.

"The buildings are corroding daily, and if no repairs are made, they could sink in or collapse," he said.

The Culture Ministry's director-general, Sim Sarak, agreed the museum needs to be repaired, but said the government cannot afford it. The ministry's entire budget this year is just $2.85 million, which is 0.4 percent of the overall $687 million budget.

Cambodia should look overseas for help, Sim Sarak said. Relying on the government budget "is just a dead end," he said.

There were only seven survivors from the estimated 14,000 prisoners who passed through the gates of this Asian Auschwitz during the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge. Age and illness have winnowed the survivors' numbers to only two, and when they are gone, the museum's importance as evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities will only increase.

Ruling ruthlessly from 1975 to 1979, the ultra-leftist group led by Pol Pot tried to remake Cambodia into an agrarian utopia using radical policies that led to the deaths of at least 1.7 million Cambodians from disease, starvation, overwork and execution.

Built in 1963, Tuol Sleng was a school until the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975. They turned it into a prison called S-21, where "enemies" -- most of them Khmer Rouge loyalists fallen afoul of a paranoid ruling style -- were interrogated and tortured into composing spurious confessions.

The killing fields

The victims -- men, women and children -- were then taken out of town to be executed and tossed into mass graves that came to be known as the "killing fields."

The museum has been a major tourist attraction for both locals and foreigners, who usually wrap up their tour with a look at a particularly dramatic exhibit: a map of Cambodia made from human skulls.

"I felt sorrow for those children Pol Pot made to suffer," said Put Pisey, a 13-year-old schoolgirl visiting the museum with four classmates during a class break. "What Pol Pot did was even more vicious than wild animals."