The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, is a museum located in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. It deals with the Cambodian genocide, committed between 1975 and 1979 in the Democratic Kampuchea of ​​the Khmer Rouge.

The museum is a former prison, S-21, the most famous of the some 196 prisons that the Khmer Rouge dictatorship had scattered throughout Cambodia during the 1970s. It was run by Kang Kek Ieu, aka "Douch", and it depended directly from the highest leaders of the regime. About 18,000 people were detained there.

Although often described as a torture center, S-21 was primarily a detention center because not all detainees were tortured. However, any prisoner sent to Tuol Sleng is indeed an obligated culprit, whose confession of crimes if need be imagined, before its practically inescapable execution.

Tuol Sleng can be translated as "vomit mound", revealing the place. It was the name of the primary school adjacent to the high school where part of the prison was installed and whose name, Tuol Svay Prey, had a radically different meaning: "mound wild mango trees" 2. The territory of the prison, however, extended well beyond the current perimeter of the museum and covered the entire neighborhood, integrating a hospital, cultivated fields, adjacent houses converted into torture rooms or dormitories for guards. and the interrogators.

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