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, it's actually quite a small complex, doable in under an hour and with a circuit you can easily follow. My visit started with the most iconic image of this place, the memorial tower/pagoda/stupa that houses several small stories of the victims' bones. Many of the bones display evidence of the injury and abuse by the soldiers and generals, some even classified according to the weapon used on them. The lowest level houses other relics, ranging from the clothes of the Khmer Rouge soldiers and prisoners alike to the devices used to torture and murder the victims. From there, you can follow the circuit through the former orchard to see signboards depicting what each spot was at the time; there was one spot where the prisoners from Tuol Sleng were unloaded from the trucks, another was the former location of the chemical weapons storage room. Finally towards the back, you'll come across the mass graves. The landscape becomes full of huge roughly round holes in the ground. I thought they might have been the result of landmines, but it turns out each one was a mass grave, and human remains had been excavated from them. One display here was that of the little pieces of clothing from the victims that had been found in the graves, and if you look closely at the ground in and around the big holes, you can still see more rags partially buried in the soil. Another display preserves human bones in situ under glass. It's a harrowing and heavy place to walk through, but just over the walls and even just behind the trees, life thrives in the rice fields and free-roaming chickens. Back by the entrance, you'll find a monument to the Cambodian people, much like in the schoolyards in Tuol Sleng. They've gone through such tragedy, and the proof is in the ground you walk over here in the Killing Fields.

I personally don't see any reason to doubt the OUV of this site. Of course, authenticity isn't much of a question as these sites were found as they are in 1979; one need not wonder in awe of how the wooden, brick, and cement prison cells in Tuol Sleng or the mass graves of Choeung Ek have survived to this day. Is it too recent? Well, the Sydney Opera House was finished in 1973, just six years earlier. And the claim that “Cambodia has a very young population, and by 2003, three-quarters of Cambodians were too young to remember the Khmer Rouge era” is definitely one of merit considering everyone we asked during the trip seemed to tell us a different death toll for the genocide. I just think it's a part of world history that cannot and should not be forgotten. And the mass graves and great inventory of remains and evidences found in Choeung Ek definitely contribute greatly to the site's tangible fabric. As for M-13, I had never even heard about it as an accessible tourist spot, so hopefully someone here can figure out a way to visit it as it could offer fresh perspectives to this serial nomination as an earlier prison of the Khmer Rouge. All in all, I believe this would make for a very worthy and important WHS, and I fully recommend a visit to both Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek to any visitor to Cambodia; it shows a very different side of the country from the wondrous Khmer temples that are undoubtedly the highlights of a trip here.