(Photo by Marcin Konsek via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
While Cambodia is widely recognized for the Temple of Angkor Wat, many of its most popular tourist destinations are sites that bear witness to one of the 20th century’s most devastating genocides. Across the country, sites formerly used by the Khmer Rouge regime for mass executions have become popular tourist stops for international visitors.
From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime, under the leadership of Pol Pot, was responsible for the deaths of more than two million Cambodians through execution, forced labour, starvation, and disease. This became known as the Cambodian Genocide. The regime targeted anyone they perceived as a threat in their attempt to reset society to “Year Zero.” This included the persecution of ethic minorities such as ethic Vietnamese and Cham Muslims.
Many victims were first detained in prisons where they were interrogated and tortured into false confessions before being transported to execution sites. There, they were killed and buried in mass graves, often without records or markers. These sites of genocide have been preserved as memorials and museums, physically documenting the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge regime. Ensuring that what happened is neither denied nor forgotten.
However, they also operate within an exploitative tourism economy that turns even the most painful histories into tourist destinations. In the past decade, the number of tourists visiting Cambodia’s sites of genocide and killing fields has more than tripled. As a result, a visit to these sites becomes just a short stop, compressed into a few hours before tourists move on to their next destination. These trends are part of a larger phenomenon known as “dark tourism.”
Cambodia’s Growing Dark Tourism Industry
Dark tourism refers to the attraction of sites related to death and suffering. This includes sites of genocide, places associated with infamous crimes, sites of natural or man-made disasters, and locations of mass trauma. Dark tourism often turns violence into a recreational attraction.
Two sites of the genocide in Cambodia have become popular places for tourists to visit: the Choeung Ek Genocide Centre and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tuol Sleng was a former high school, which turned into a notorious prison known as “S-21,” where 20,000 people were detained and tortured. People detained at Tuol Sleng were transported to Choeung Ek, and later executed and buried in mass graves. At Choeung Ek, tourists can visit the commemorative stupa, which stores thousands of human bones and skulls of victims. Tourists can also walk through buildings where some of the largest massacres took place.
(Photo by Christophe95 via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
These memorials to the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge play an important role in the process of healing from the trauma of the genocide. Survivors often guide tourists throughout the centre, sharing their stories. For many survivors, the centre serves as a space for truth-telling. Survivors at the sites have spoken about the importance of telling their stories and documenting what happened.
Many survivors also mention that the Choeung Ek Genocide Centre and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum are important places for educating young Cambodians and the international community about the Khmer Rouge period. As Youk Chhang, executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-CAM) and a survivor of the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields, mentions, “stories must be documented, that [is] perhaps the only way we will learn.”
Profiting Off Genocide: Cambodia’s Shooting Range Tourism
Although dark tourism can promote education, it can also risk commercializing past violence into entertainment. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodia was left with a large surplus of military-grade equipment, much of which was repurposed or otherwise dispersed in the years that followed. Over time, however, weapons from a violent past eventually found their way into the hands of private individuals and entities, which helped to create a small but growing market around unofficial shooting ranges catered to tourists.
Cambodia has become a popular destination for gun-curious and arms enthusiast tourists who want to fire powerful weapons banned or tightly restricted in their home countries. These shooting ranges have evolved into niche tourist attractions, drawing many tourists every year with the promise of access to high-powered firearms and military-style weapons. Tourists can choose from a huge selection of weapons at these ranges, including assault rifles, handguns, and grenade launchers.
Although the Cambodian government has laws regulating the possession and use of firearms, enforcement of these laws concerning shooting ranges has been inconsistent. Many of these shooting ranges are staffed by former military personnel, including ex-Khmer Rouge officials. A slice of the profits from the shooting ranges also goes back to the Cambodian government and into the army.
Reenacting Violence
It is common for travel agencies to bundle visits to the Choeung Ek and Tuol Sleng with a trip to a shooting range afterwards.
Tourists often share online that they found it too hard to “resist” the “unique thrill,” calling it a “priceless” experience. However, when tourists fire military equipment from the Khmer Rouge era, they actively reenact and replicate the original violence. Tourists place themselves in a network that keeps the cycle of violence alive and reproduces the violence from the past in the present.
(Photo by Gary Todd via Wikimedia Commons/CC0 1.0 DEED)
When tourists visit sites of genocide in Cambodia and later visit shooting ranges, it becomes difficult to tell whether or not tourists truly engaged with Cambodia’s traumatic history or simply were drawn to the thrill of being close to sites of suffering.
Pierre-Andre Romano, general manager of the tour agency EXO Cambodia, told TTG Asia: “This is definitely not tourism. It’s voyeurism. You can go and learn about the Khmer Rouge, then pretend to be one? That isn’t right.”
Tourists as Spectators of Suffering
Although some tourists may visit sites of genocide in Cambodia to become better informed and educated about the history of the places they visit, and increasingly seek to understand Cambodian history beyond traditional tourism, the commodification of places and peoples is an inherent part of the modern tourism industry.
Tourism has always been associated with a detached view and passive consumption. Tourists often engage with unfamiliar places in ways that prioritize entertainment over engagement. This dynamic can easily become exploitative when it turns traumatic histories and lived experiences into attractions for entertainment.
In the case of dark tourism in Cambodia, the memory of those lost in the genocide becomes something experienced through exploitative tourism. Ultimately, the dead are disrespected, rather than remembered, when experienced through tourist consumption.
Reports of vandalism and disrespectful behaviour at Choeung Ek and Tuol Sleng illustrate these dangers. At Choeung Ek, tourists have been found collecting bones of victims. At Tuol Sleng, tourists take inappropriate selfies in front of blood-splattered torture tools. In 2016, Pokémon Go players stormed Tuol Sleng to chase virtual characters, ignoring the site’s significance.
Even though tourists are brought into closer proximity to the violence, they will always remain at a comfortable distance from the realities of the genocide. In doing so, they become passive spectators, or even worse, destructive consumers.
The Unfinished Past: The Ongoing Fight for Memory and Justice
For many Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge regime is not distant history; it still lives on. The state repression remains an unresolved issue in terms of memory, acknowledgement, and justice for those affected.
Key perpetrators of the genocide died before they could face justice, including Pol Pot, who died in 1998. Many senior Khmer Rouge officials have also escaped justice, as the current Prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen, was himself a former Khmer Rouge commander. Hun Sen declared that prosecuting officials “could cause unrest.”
Government-installed judges and court personnel have obstructed and blocked trials of senior Khmer Rouge commanders and officials. Current government officials have also been implicated, but never charged, for Khmer Rouge crimes.
(Photo by Tum Malis via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
As Professor and survivor Sophal Ear mentions, “Cambodia’s school curriculum still struggles to teach this period adequately. For many young people, it’s something their parents don’t talk about, and the state prefers to frame selectively.”
More than 40 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, many survivors and families still grapple with the loss and trauma of the genocide. Survivors report experiencing disturbing memories of the Khmer Rouge period and suffering from recurring nightmares. For survivors like Sokchea, the horrors of the regime remain deeply painful and unforgettable: “I cannot forget the faces of those who were taken to the fields and never returned.”
Who Benefits Most from the Remembrance of the Genocide?
For many Cambodians, especially survivors and their families, the preservation of sites like Choeung Ek and Tuol Sleng has been essential for documenting the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. In this sense, the landscape itself has become an archive of violence, holding physical and emotional traces of what occurred.
As these sites of genocide also become increasingly geared toward tourist consumption, there is a tendency for the stories presented to become simplified and sanitized, so they are easier to digest. However, in this process, the sites provide less reflection of the full horror of the genocide. The voices of survivors risk being pushed aside.
DC-CAM executive director Youk Chhang has warned against this trend, emphasizing that, “it’s our memory, it should be preserved the way it is; historically and with respect to our culture, rather than try to create something to attract tourists that’s leading to commercializing the memory, which is something that you do not want to do.”
When the remembrance of the genocide is shaped to appeal to tourists, it risks losing its grounding in the lived experiences of Cambodians. Yet even within this process of commodification, these sites are not emptied of meaning for survivors and their families. In this way, they endure as contested spaces, subject to exploitation but still powerful sites of memory, and resist complete appropriation by the tourism industry.
Edited by Lubaba Mahmud
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