SCHOOL LESSONS IN WAR: CHILDREN AT TUOL SLENG & THE RISE OF INTERNATIONAL PROTECTIONS FOR CHILDREN IN WAR

I. Introduction The year 1979 was the International Year of the Child. 2 It was also the year when Ho Van Tay, a Vietnamese combat reporter, followed the stench of corpses through Phnom Penh to Tuol Sleng torture and execution center. 3 Ho discovered a grisly scene, documented by the photographs he took when he entered the compound. 4 His pictures portray a children's school in a nation's capitol city, teeming not with books, desks, and school children, but with dead bodies and torture devices. What Mr. Ho's camera could not capture that day was the unfolding of the last three years of history at the school. Tuol Sleng held at least 14,000 people during the Khmer Rouge regime - only twelve survived. 5 The perversity of this tragedy is further twisted when one learns of the large number of children who were forced to guard the victims at Tuol Sleng, and the role of former school teachers and administrators in the supervision and administration of the torture and execution center. 6 The year the outside world discovered Tuol Sleng - considered by many to be one of the most brutal and inhumane operations of the late 20th Century - was not only the International Year of the Child. It was also the year that the United Nations finally garnered enough support to begin drafting the first major binding treaty on children's rights: the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which quickly became the most widely-ratified human rights ...