Suicide prevention

One of the upper floors of a Toul Sleng prison bldg. Toul Sleng used to be a large high school complex. During the Khmer Rouge period, 1975-1979 it was converted into a prison in which the urban class, intelligentsia, and former regime members were kept for interrogations and ultimately death. The barbed wire in the picture here was constructed for the purpose of preventing prisoners from escaping the prison via suicide. The primary strategy of the Khmer Rouge was to take Cambodia back to "Year Zero" which means all technology, education, modernity were destroyed in the name of starting all over again. In the end, arguably the Khmer Rouge succeeded. while no census could define how many truly died but it is suspected to have been in the millions. In the immediate aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime.. only 7 Cambodians in the country possessed law degrees. The medical profession and pretty much all educational institutions were utterly destroyed. In some ways it speaks a great deal for the Khmer people and their ability to revive since the society has made immense strides in almost all areas since the 1980s. Particularly in light of the fact that while the Khmer Rouge were ousted by the Vietnamese army in 1979, they continued to fight an intense war against the Vietnamese and the Cambodian "government" into the late 1990s.