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THE CELL has a metal cot with flat springs and no mattress, an ammunition box that prisoners once used as a toilet, and shackles made out of the rough steel rods used to reinforce concrete. Propped on the bed is a large, black-and-white photograph of the cell's last prisoner, who was found when Vietnamese invaders discovered the torture center.
He was spread-eagled and bloody, shackled to the bed on top of the springs. "In the photo you can see the chicken eating the corpse," says my guide, a slender woman wearing a white blouse and a gold charm bracelet. She turns to point at red handprints on the floor and dried blood spatters on the ceiling.
The Khmer Rouge-a Communist regime whose name means "Red Cambodians"-tortured to death about 20,000 people here in a former school in the late 1970s, forcing them to write detailed yet fictional confessions to political crimes. The torture center's administrators photographed the prisoners and kept a registry of the confessions. Only a handful of people ever left the center alive, since an arrest was all that was needed to establish guilt.
The compound is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, three drab buildings arranged in a U shape. Barbed wire remains on the faqade of one, where guards installed it to prevent prisoners from leaping to merciful death. Some old playground equipment in the central yard, my guide says, served as a place to hang prisoners upside down with their heads in jars of excrement.
Tourists pay $2 to walk through the cells, which once were classrooms. At a stand at the museum's entrance, visitors can buy a soda, a snack, or a book on the Khmer Rouge. The museum needs repairs-- even the glass in the exhibit case of torture instruments is broken.
The equipment once used to photograph prisoners stands in one room. They sat in a metal chair about a foot wide with a small wedge in the middle of the seat, to center them precisely. A rod behind the prisoners' heads kept them all the same distance...