Photograph exhibit documents terror
By ERIN LaRUFFA
News Writer
Holding a sleeping infant in her arms, the woman stared straight into the camera, with an almost resigned look on her face.
The woman and the baby were executed soon after the picture was taken.
The woman and her baby were two of the 14,200 people the Khmer Rouge regime forcibly brought to S-21, a high school turned secret extermination site.
Seven of the 14,200 survived.
Blows to the head killed the rest of the prisoners, whose bodies are now lying in mass graves that the prisoners dug themselves. Prior to execution, they were tortured until they confessed to their alleged crimes — usually espionage.
Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge regime, which violently ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The regime's goal was to create an agrarian utopia.
Conservative estimates place the death toll from starvation, malnutrition or disease at over 1 million — about 7 percent of Cambodia's population. Additionally, 200,000 people are believed to have been executed. Other estimates place the overall death toll at 30 percent of the country's population.
Before the regime killed someone at S-21, located in the city of Phnom Penh, the soldiers photographed the prisoner as proof that he or she had been arrested.
American photographers Chris Riley and Doug Niven discovered the negatives to those pictures in the 1990s when visiting The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, formerly the S-21 prison. After the Vietnamese gained control of Cambodia in 1979, they converted S-21 into a museum to memorialize the victims.
Thanks to Riley and Niven, photos of 100 S-21 victims are currently traveling to museums in the U.S. The exhibit entitled "Facing Death: Portraits from Cambodia's Killing Fields," is on display at the Snite Museum through Feb. 29.
"Everyone here died," said Gina Costa, director of marketing at the Snite, as she looked at the faces hanging on the wall. "It's pretty grim."
There is also a continuously-running video in the gallery describing the discovery of the negatives as well as the history of the camp. Quotes about the camp hang on the wall opposite the photos.
"I am lying here waiting to die ..." begins one quote from a prisoner.
Because photographs were separated from other records, the identities of the victims are unknown. Each prisoner was assigned a number before execution; but numbers were reassigned each day, further complicating identification of victims.
One person who visited the exhibit in Boston recognized a relative in a photo.
People of all ages — from infants in their parents' arms to the elderly — are shown in the portraits.
"They pulled in whole families so there wouldn't be anyone left for vendetta revenge," said Steve Moriarty, curator of photography at The Snite. On special days, only women and children were executed.
Many of the victims did not know what was happening when they were photographed. Some were even smiling in the pictures, while others showed signs of severe beatings.
"Most of them were faithful members of the regime," Moriarty said. "The party turned on them and accused them of being traitors."
Moriarty said he hopes the exhibit will help raise awareness among Americans of the genocide that occurred in Cambodia.
"Most of the students don't know the story," he said. "This is something they haven't learned in school. It's too bad."
As part of the exhibit, Cambodian monks held a prayer service at the museum last week in honor of the people who died at the hands of Pol Pot's regime.
All News Stories for Wednesday, February 9, 2000
