Before I began my Cambodian trip with ICOMOS in 2022, I had one free day to explore Phnom Penh. Among the many sites I visited, the infamous Killing Field and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum left the deepest impression. Learning about the victims of the Khmer Rouge was profoundly depressing, yet I was somewhat reassured to know that, through international pressure, this dark history has been preserved under UNESCO’s Memory of the World program. What struck me, however, was the Cambodian government’s current push to inscribe these memorial sites as World Heritage. On one hand, the recognition would affirm the global significance of this tragedy. On the other, I worry it risks being used as political propaganda.

“The genocide will happen again if there is no peace” is a message I heard often in Cambodia. It echoes the “Thanks Peace” slogan of Hun Sen, the former prime minister—and once a Khmer Rouge member himself—who has long used the trauma of genocide to instill fear and consolidate power. That only a handful of Khmer Rouge leaders were prosecuted, while many others became Hun Sen’s allies, makes the situation even more complex. According to my guide, Cambodian schoolbooks devote only two sentences to the genocide, and many older people prefer silence as the memories are too painful. This raises the question: what meaning would a World Heritage listing hold for ordinary Cambodians?

From a heritage perspective, however, the sites do carry outstanding value. The Cambodian Genocide was one of …

Visited February 2024

It seems that it is going to be the next Cambodian nomination for WH status… It is already seen in Phnom Penh’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum where a poster with WH logo welcomes you and lots of other tourists and pilgrims – most Cambodian citizens treat the visit to the site as a kind of pilgrimage to the so important place for their recent history. And I understand them and feel for them the same way I understand other national genocide sites, prisons and camps, but this kind of nominations and inscription don’t make me believe in the outstanding universal values that UNESCO list should promote. We have already the sites “to remember and never happen again” that are inscribed on the list.

It's not often that a major city, especially a national capital, has genocide memorials as its most famous and important tourist attraction, but for all Phnom Penh has to offer, this is exactly the case. I flew into Phnom Penh to start my tour of Cambodia in January 2023, and Choeung Ek and Tuol Sleng were definitely the top priorities of my first day there. The Cambodian capital is unfortunately deficient in public transport, so I had the hotel call us a taxi which took us around the city for the whole day. This was quite fortunate as our driver was very knowledgeable about the different sites in the city, and he informed us that the two main genocide memorials had long lunch breaks; if you want to see them consecutively, make sure to leave early in the morning, or otherwise, you would have to fill up the 3-4 hours around noon with other things as we did (we checked out Wat Phnom, Wat Ounalom, and the Royal Palace, and even had lunch in between the two sites). Els already covers Tuol Sleng well in her review, so I'll mostly focus on Choeung Ek, the Killing Fields and the very first site I visited in the wonderful nation of the Khmer.

Choeung Ek is the farthest major Phnom Penh site from the city center; with the morning rush hour traffic, it took nearly an hour to get there from downtown. Despite the sprawling image conjured up by its name, …

A few weeks ago, Cambodia has added 3 of its genocide memorials to the Tentative List as a serial proposal. The sites commemorate the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime, which was overthrown in 1979. The proposal still has the cumbersome working title “Former M-13 prison/ Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (former S-21)/ Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre (former Execution Site of S-21)”.

I visited the former S-21 prison, now known as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, in 2007. It is located in street 113 in the heart of Phnom Penh. In 2007 it saw some 50 visitors a day, but probably this has risen over the years due to the increase in global tourism - it is one of the few obvious “things to do” in the Cambodian capital. It is also a well-known place on the Dark Tourism circuit. Unfortunately I lost most of the photos of my visit, but I do still have my diary notes and the leaflet that was handed out upon entering the site.

The prison was located in an old school building. Between 1975 and 1978, some 12,000 prisoners were detained and tortured here. When further questioning was of no use, the prisoner was taken to the out-of-town Killing Fields (such as Choeung Ek, the third location of this serial tentative site). There he or she ended up in a mass grave.

The museum still resembles a school building, with classrooms, long corridors and a playground. The classrooms were divided into cells …