Tuol Sleng has gone from a school to a torture chamber to an historical museum, but Wednesday afternoon, it looked more like a construction site.
Laborers were seen passing a pile of bricks and other materials on the way to Building D, where men were spackling over holes left by the Khmer Rouge’s tools of torture and painting the walls a pristine white. New western-style toilets with attractive blue-and-white tile were at the base of the stairs, across from a sign pointing to a still-unfinished movie room.
“This restoration is changing the feelings I have always had regarding the Tuol Sleng past,” said Vann Nath, an artist who survived incarceration in the prison and whose paintings depicting Khmer Rouge torture scenes hang in the museum. “We should have left it alone and kept it as it was before.”
Even the workmen doing the restoration had reservations.
“It is no longer a prison museum, it is more like a library or a school,” said Chum Sam Ath. He said he is working for the pay but doesn’t like what he is doing.
“When we make this nicer, I am afraid the young people will find it harder to believe what happened during the Pol Pot regime.”
Sopheara Chey, director of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, was a student in the school that Tuol Sleng was before the Khmer Rouge converted it to a prison and interrogation center. He returned there to work on its preservation as a historical site in 1979, becoming director in 1986.
The changes under way, he said, were a compromise between necessary safety and historic preservation measures and the museum’s limited budget.
“I had an idea to build a new building for exhibitions of photos and instruments of torture, and keep Buildings A, B, C and D as they were, but we didn’t have the funds,” Sopheara Chey said.
“Back in Khmer Rouge times it smelled bad and had high grass,” he recalled. “Now we have a garden and a pathway. We can’t make it like a prison again.”
Most of Buildings B and D have been converted into exhibition spaces, while Buildings A and C are being renovated only to preserve the structures and guarantee the safety of visitors, taking care to stay true to the original style, Sopheara Chey added.
“Year before last, there was a big flood, and water got in everywhere. The floor collapsed and water got in from underneath,” he said. “We put in new tile, but in the same style.”
Roofs have been repaired to prevent further water damage. So have deteriorating door and window frames. The outside walls have been repainted, but Sopheara Chey said he thinks that within a few years the rain will age the buildings to look like they once did.
Even the walls separating small cells have been rebuilt due to fear that they would collapse, but they remain true to the plain bricks-and-mortar style of the original.
“If something bad happened to tourists, we would have to take responsibility, so we take care of it,” Sopheara Chey said.
The museum’s administration also has plans to improve the preservation of Tuol Sleng’s historic documents.
“The important thing for me is the photos. We want to scan all of the negatives into a database. We don’t want to use the negatives every time [we print a photo], because we’ll destroy them,” he said.
The restoration efforts have drawn criticism from others concerned with the preservation of Cambodia’s past.
“I think that [the museum’s administrators] have good intent but a lack of expertise,” said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia.
Youk Chhang said he had appealed to Prime Minister Hun Sen for permission to oversee the renovations to prevent the destruction of important historical evidence, but received no response.
Sopheara Chey said he hadn’t heard about the offer.
Tuol Sleng has been through many transformations, and even now it fulfills a variety of roles. It is at once a memorial to Cambodia’s dead, a historical site, an archive and a tourist attraction.
Leda Veloso, a Canadian tourist walking through the white-walled galleries of
Building D, said she was unimpressed by the renovations. “You have to keep it true to what it is,” she said.
