An Irishwoman's Diary

Human soul after human soul stares mournfully out from photographs mounted on wooden boards in Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, one of Cambodia's darkest historical spots.

The subjects were probably half-dead when the pictures were taken, having shut themselves off from the inevitability that their arrival at this grim place would mean. Extermination was now their destiny and they knew it, just as the evil hand behind the camera must have appreciated the role he was playing in the slow torture of a whole people.

Torture was Tuol Sleng's raison d'être, although the cheery frangipani blossoms that still line its courtyard in a leafy part of Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, must have offered some concealment for the evil that lurked within. A former French lycée (secondary school), this was the place chosen by the Khmer Rouge dictatorship in 1975 as its city-based torture chamber.

The Cambodian capital was empty at the time because of the Khmer Rouge's policy of driving the entire population out to work in the fields, and education had been banned, so there was an element of convenience in the selection. There was also the construction of the building, which was already divided into a series of small rooms that could act as well-proportioned torture chambers for the estimated 20,000 victims that would pass through its doors on the way to death.

When the Vietnamese army entered the prison in 1979 after defeating the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh, soldiers found just seven prisoners alive in Tuol Sleng. They also found a number of recent corpses, and the disturbing catalogue of pictures that forms the basis of any visit to the prison today.

There was little discrimination in deciding who would die here, once it was established that you were an enemy of Angkar, the shadowy organisation that was behind the Khmer Rouge. Thus, the photographs on display include not only men but also women, children and even babies in their mothers' arms. They were each assigned a number - the only thing that would differentiate them from the thousands of other prisoners clad in the black pyjamas forced on every member of the Cambodian population by the dictator Pol Pot.

It is thought that Tuol Sleng housed up to 1,500 prisoners at any one time as part of the Khmer Rouge's efforts to cleanse itself of the impure vestiges of a previous civilisation. This project extended to surreal extremes, with a high school education or Government job just as likely to mark you out as an enemy as evidence of armed opposition to the regime. Something as simple as wearing glasses, and thus looking smart in a rural soldier's eyes, might have been enough to put a Cambodian in danger in 1975.

Some insight into this perversion comes in the Tuol Sleng courtyard, where the "rules" of the prison, named S-21 by the Khmer Rouge, are on prominent display in Khmer, French and English. The translations will have helped when it came to the foreigners whose lives were ended here.

The rules included delights such as number six, "When getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all", and number seven: "Do nothing. Sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do nothing you must do it right away without protesting." Prisoners are told to avoid being foolish because they are "a chap who dares to thwart the revolution".

The wicked irony of these vicious rules becomes all the more apparent when one comes across a set of the school's original rules painted on a wall in the stinking upstairs of Tuol Sleng. Here, they are written in French only and limit themselves to such innocent matters as being quiet in class and refraining from running in the building.

This upstairs room was too large for the Khmer Rouge's bloody needs and so was divided into rows and rows of cells by the construction of crude brick walls. And just for added security, wire was added to the windows to prevent inmates jumping to a speedy death.

It is at once easy and impossible to imagine the torment that must have been suffered by each and every one of the victims who passed through these cells, none of which is larger than the average office desk.

Stepping inside one of these boxes is eerie in a sense that only death can conjure. The oppressive heat of pre-monsoon Cambodia disappears in an instant as the windowless

brick box closes in.

Thirty years on from the Khmer Rouge's first entry into Phnom Penh, blood continues to stain the floor, just as it does in the larger downstairs chambers where the tools of torture remain on display. The iron bed-frames to which prisoners were shackled are here, as are the hideous implements of torture such as leg braces.There are photographs here too, this time of twisted bodies and unrecognisable faces from which the soul has long since departed.

The most chilling pictures are back in the main rooms, however, where among the rows and rows of shut-down faces and bodies clad in black, there are two of men dressed in Western clothes - 1970s shirts to be precise, complete with psychedelic patterns and massive collars. These two look just as frightened as the rest but their attire makes them stand out and somehow brings the horror closer to home.

Above all, the shirts tell us that these pictures were not taken all that long ago - that these atrocities occurred within the lifetime of many if not most of the readers of this newspaper.