Ex-Khmer Rouge photographer plans to set up museum in Anlong Veng

PHNOM PENH, Jan. 25 Kyodo

A surviving Khmer Rouge photographer said Thursday he plans to set up a museum in the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng near the Thai border with Cambodia.

Nhem En, a leader of the photographic team for Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge name for Cambodia, said the museum will feature photographs of all former Khmer Rouge leaders, taken inside and outside Cambodia.

He said a preliminary estimate for the museum is that it will cost about $100,000, a budget to be met by contributions.

Nhem En, 47, said he took photos of some 5,000 victims, half the total photographs taken in Tuol Sleng genocide torture center in central Phnom Penh, between 1976 and 1979.

Tuol Sleng is now a genocide museum attracting hundreds of foreign visitors daily. It was originally built as a high school in the early 1960s.

After Khmer Rouge forces captured the capital in April 1975, they forced most of its population to the countryside and turned the schoolhouse into the headquarters of the regime's internal security police, known by the code name S-21.

It is believed as many as 16,000 people spent their final days at Tuol Sleng -- including whole families -- almost all of whom were meticulously photographed and many of whom were tortured and forced to ''confess'' to treasonous activities before being marched out to the Choeung Ek ''killing fields'' 15 kilometers southwest of the capital to be executed.

Only seven detainees are known to have come out alive.

Appearing in front of reporters, Nhem En asked for forgiveness and reconciliation.

''I was only one screw of the machine. I did nothing wrong except taking photos at the superior's order,'' he claimed.

He said he was sent to China in 1976 to get seven months of training as a photographer.

Nhem En is now the vice governor of the Anlong Veng district in Udor Mean Cheay Province.

He said he has kept more than 1,000 photographs taken since the Khmer Rouge came to power up to 1995, after which he defected along with other Khmer Rouge members to the government.

Recalling Nhem En and his colleagues' photographs, U.S. Ambassador Joseph Mussomeli said he was impressed and got the mood inside Tuol Sleng prison.

''Those photos fill the empty rooms of Tuol Sleng prison with an even deeper emptiness. They overwhelm every visitor. The eyes of each victim stare back at us, haunt us, cry out to us after all these decades of silence. No one who visits Tuol Sleng ever forgets those photographs,'' Mussomeli said.

''Whatever accusations and insinuations are made about the photographer of these photos, the photos themselves are irrefutable testimony to the terror of the Khmer Rouge regime,'' he added.

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