The UNESCO / Jikji Memory of the World Prize 2020 was awarded to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia.
"The mission of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is essential to promote peace and ensure, through its archives, that such terrible crimes are never repeated," declared UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay. "It is for this reason that we have been working together for more than ten years to safeguard and digitize these archives and make them accessible to everybody. The work of this museum is crucial for us to preserve the memory of genocide through time and beyond the life span of its victims and perpetrators."
The museum is located on the site of the "S-21 Security Office", a centre for detention, torture and killing of the system of repression put in place by the "Democratic Kampuchea" regime which ruled the country from 1975 to 1979. Located in the heart of the Cambodian capital, this former school which had been converted into a prison preserves in its archives the evidence of the totalitarian mechanism set up by the Khmer Rouge to terrorize the population and " purify" the state apparatus of its proven or supposed opponents. Those who survived the interrogation, having confessed to their participation in mostly imaginary crimes and plots, were then transferred to the Choeung Ek killing centre. Due to a principle of "guilt by association" entire families could be imprisoned. It was not uncommon for detainees to be unaware of the reasons for their arrest.
More than 18,000 men, women, children, some of them foreign nationals, have been detained and murdered at the S-21 centre, as the regime's records attest. At least 1.5 million Cambodians perished during the Khmer Rouge terror, executions, famine or lack of medical care.
