From April 1970 to January 1979 the communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas, and then as absolute dictators of Cambodia when they won their guerrilla war in 1974, murdered about 2,000,000 Cambodians and 35,000 Vietnamese. One of the security facilities (prisons) the Khmer Rouge created was Tuol Sleng, an extermination center in which they tortured and murdered some 20,000 people. Only fourteen prisoners may have survived. The Khmer Rouge photographed each new inmate, and these photographs have now become available in an attempt to identify the victims. Here is one of these photographs, that of a young girl whose name and "crime" are unknown, but who almost certainly soon ended up dead. For documentation on the Khmer Rouge years, see Chapter 6 of Saving Lives, Enriching Life, Death By Government, and Statistics of Democide. Source: "The Cambodian Genocide Program Documentation Project". The identification number of this child is shown in the photo. |