Added to the World Heritage record are two prisons: Tuol Sleng and M-13, in addition to the execution web site Choeung Ek.
Three infamous places utilized by Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime as torture and execution websites to perpetrate the genocide of Year Zero 5 many years in the past have been added to UNESCO’s World Heritage record.
Two prisons and an execution web site have been inscribed on the record by the United Nations cultural company on Friday in the course of the forty seventh Session of the World Heritage Committee in Paris.
It coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the rise to energy by the communist Khmer Rouge, which brought about the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians via hunger, torture and mass executions throughout a four-year reign of violence from 1975 to 1979 earlier than it was delivered to an finish by an invasion from neighbouring Vietnam.
UNESCO’s World Heritage record lists websites thought of essential to humanity and contains the Nice Wall of China, the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, the Taj Mahal in India and Cambodia’s Angkor archaeological advanced.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet issued a message on Friday directing individuals to beat drums concurrently throughout the nation on Sunday morning to mark the UNESCO itemizing.
🔴 BREAKING!
New inscription on the @UNESCO #WorldHeritage Record: Cambodian Memorial Websites: From centres of repression to locations of peace and reflection, #Cambodia 🇰🇭.
➡️ https://t.co/seTyyVu3sT #47WHC pic.twitter.com/SPl7zlxeFh
— UNESCO 🏛️ #Schooling #Sciences #Tradition 🇺🇳 (@UNESCO) July 11, 2025
“Might this inscription function an enduring reminder that peace should at all times be defended,” Hun Manet mentioned in a video message aired by state-run tv TVK. “From the darkest chapters of historical past, we are able to draw power to construct a greater future for humanity.”
Two websites added to the record are within the capital, Phnom Penh – the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Choeung Ek Genocide Centre.
Tuol Sleng is a former highschool that was transformed right into a infamous jail often called S-21, the place an estimated 15,000 individuals have been imprisoned and tortured.
Right this moment, the positioning is an area for commemoration and training, housing the black-and-white mugshots of its many victims and the preserved gear utilized by Khmer Rouge tormentors.
The UNESCO inscription was Cambodia’s first nomination for a contemporary and non-classical archaeological web site and is among the many first on the earth to be submitted as a web site related to current battle, Cambodia’s Ministry of Tradition and High quality Arts mentioned in a press release on Friday.
‘The Killing Fields’
Choeung Ek – a former Chinese language cemetery – was a infamous “killing discipline” the place S-21 prisoners have been executed nightly. The story of the atrocities dedicated there’s the main target of the 1984 movie “The Killing Fields”, primarily based on the experiences of New York Instances photojournalist Dith Pran and correspondent Sydney Schanberg.
Greater than 6,000 our bodies have been exhumed from at the very least 100 mass graves on the floor within the early Nineteen Eighties, in response to Cambodian authorities paperwork filed with UNESCO.
Yearly, tons of maintain remembrance prayers in entrance of the positioning’s memorial displaying victims’ skulls, and watch college students stage dramatic re-enactments of the Khmer Rouge’s bloody crimes.
One other jail web site, often called M-13 and situated in a rural space in central Kampong Chhnang province, was one of the essential prisons of the early Khmer Rouge, the place its cadres “invented and examined numerous strategies of interrogation, torture and killing” however is as we speak solely a patch of derelict land.
A particular tribunal sponsored by the UN, costing $337m and dealing over 16 years, solely convicted three key Khmer Rouge figures, together with S-21 chief torturer Kaing Guek Eav, earlier than ceasing operations in 2022.
Pol Pot, chief of the Khmer Rouge regime, died in 1998 earlier than he might be delivered to trial.
