One of the places every visitor to Cambodia sees is Tuol Sleng (or S-21), the genocide museum in Phnom Penh, which is the site of the secret prison where thousands were tortured by the Khmer Rouge before being marched out to the infamous ‘killing fields’. I have visited the place twice - most recently on my twenty-fourth birthday (not the most celebratory choice, to be sure).

The feeling you have as you leave Tuol Sleng is much like the feeling you have leaving the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC. But whereas the holocaust museum is shiny and imposing and was designed specifically to make you feel a certain way (which it does very effectively), Tuol Sleng is crude and dirty and has been left almost exactly the way it was when the Khmer Rouge fled in 1979. Plus, there is no mistaking that before it was a secret torture prison, it was a school, which makes the feeling you’re left with, whatever that feeling is, even stronger.

As you pass from classroom to classroom, you see photos on the walls of beaten bodies lying on beds. The beds, the instruments of torture, and the plain tile floor - visible in the photos - are all still there. Another part of the museum has hundreds of black and white mug shots taken by guards to document their prisoners. If you want to know how they tortured and killed the estimated 17,000+ people who passed through the prison (with only eight known survivors), there are plenty of harrowing details out there.

The mastermind behind it all, the former chief of the secret police with the Khmer Rouge, is Comrade Duch. He is the first and only Khmer Rouge leader to admit to any atrocities and this week he has been testifying before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. CNN.com is covering the story here.

What is particularly interesting about this story, if you ask me, is that Duch became an evangelical Christian in the 90s and was actually ‘discovered’ by a foreign journalist, found working under a different name as a humanitarian and lay pastor near the Thai border. You can read his story at Wikipedia.

If you think of it, and you’re the praying type, say a prayer for the long-suffering people of Cambodia and for Duch. Pray that somehow justice and mercy would shine through. Pray for healing. And for hope.