Did not confess. Torture him!
Hit him in the face.
We must apply pressure, absolutely.
Beat them all to death.
Smash them to pieces.
— Kaing Guek Eav (aka “Comrade Duch”), Directions to Torturers at S-21 (44)1
“Cambodia’s Genocide Museum Becomes Battleground for Pokémon Go Players”
—August 9, 2016, headline in Southeast Asia Globe S-21 [Tuol Sleng Prison] “is not a game.” It is a crime against humanity and it is everyone’s responsibility to prevent such atrocities from re-occurring to harm our children.
— Youk Chhang, Documentation Center of Cambodia (Southeast Asia Globe)
B
ased on the highly successful Pokémon series, Niantic’s Pokémon Go—developed for iOS, Android, and Apple Watch devices—was released in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States in July 2016; one month later, Pokémon Go increased its global reach when it became downloadable to smartphone users in Central America, South America, Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. Consistent with the rest of the franchise, players of Poké-mon Go located, captured, and trained cartoon creatures imbued with spe-cial powers (e.g., pyrokinesis, hydrokinesis, electrokinesis, or venomous capacity).2 Given the game’s zoological registers and fantastical dimensions, it is not surprising that “adaptive enhancement,” “evolution,” and setting figure keenly in the Pokémon gaming universe; specifically, as a means of
“leveling up,” organisms augment existing abilities or mature into more powerful versions of their previous form. Once “trained,” players strategic-ally use their assembled menagerie to battle other Pokémon (in designated
“gyms” or assigned “arenas”).
Accessing the search logics of an exotic safari, the cultivating dimen-sions of animal husbandry, and the spectacular registers of a gladiatorial battle, Pokémon Go is a free-for-all, free-to-play, location-based, real-time augmented game that preternaturally places virtual lifeforms in everyday environs. Accordingly, Pokémon Go utilizes a smartphone’s data usage and GPS mobile capabilities; these resources enable players to “find” their imag-inary targets in publicly accessible spaces such as local businesses, national parks, built monuments, museums, churches, and governmental centers. As is the case with other “free” mobile games, Pokémon Go profits from extra data charges and in-app purchases (for instance, players can increase the likelihood of capturing more animals by buying additional pokéballs or en-hance their ludic experience by unlocking various bonus perks, both at cost).
Credited with reinvigorating franchise interest and increasing foot traffic to various sites, Pokémon Go from the outset enjoyed considerable success: one week after its summer 2016 release, the app was downloaded twenty-one million times, making it the most popular mobile game in the United States (Makuch). Such widespread usage was matched by Pokémon Go’s astonish-ing profitability: one month after its initial release, Pokémon Go earned $200 million and set a “speed” record as the fastest game to achieve fifty million downloads outside the United States. More recently, as of March 2018, Poké-mon Go had 752 million downloads, and its revenues totaled $1.2 billion (Venture Beat).
Notwithstanding its status as a global phenomenon, despite its sizeable commercial success, and in the face of its “all ages” appeal, Pokémon Go was—soon after its 2016 release—at the center of several controversies in-volving commemorative sites, memorials, and museums. Because the app exploited open-access locales, Pokémon Go players could (and did) pursue their digital conquests in somber places such as Arlington National Ceme-tery (the final resting place of U.S. war dead), the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (previously a notorious World War II–era Nazi concentration camp, wherein 1.3 million individuals were detained and 1.1. million people perished), and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. As public sites, each was troublingly demarcated by the Pokémon Go’s producers as “pokéstops,”
places in which players could cybernetically connect with one another and capture additional Pokémon. Incongruously, these Janus-faced places—ori-ginally aimed at engendering justice-oriented remembrance within a rights-recognizable present—were involuntarily transformed into multipurpose sites wherein tourists-turned-players could vicariously experience past state-dictated abuses while furthering their gameplay progress in real time.3
In response, Arlington National Cemetery employed social media, sol-emnly tweeting, “We do not consider playing ‘Pokemon Go’ to be appropri-ate decorum on the grounds of ANC. We ask all visitors to refrain from such activity” (O’Brien). Following suit, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum issued a public statement condemning the game and its players, grimly stressing that it “was not appropriate in . . . [a] memorial to the victims of Nazism” (“Auschwitz Museum”). Finally, Pawel Sawicki, the official spokes-person for the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, asked that Niantic re-move the site from its list of viable Pokémon Go platforms, forcefully reminding the game’s producers that it was “disrespectful to the memory of victims of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp on many levels and it is absolutely inappropriate” (“Auschwitz Museum”). To ameliorate these institutional disputes, Niantic created a website so that users and others could report “sensitive locations”; upon notification, such sites were systematically and swiftly removed. At high-profile memorial lo-cations like the abovementioned Arlington National Cemetery, the Aus-chwitz-Birkenau State Museum, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, signs were posted at entry points and ticketing counters prohibiting visitors from playing Pokémon Go on site.
As the opening epigraphs from Southeast Asia Globe and Youk Chhang (director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia) make clear, these de-bates over the collision of the ludic and the commemorative were not limited to the United States or Europe; nor, as this chapter maintains, are the stakes involving what is “sacred” and “profane” simply a matter of dominant mores, socially acceptable behavior, or individualized judgment.4 Indeed, soon after Pokémon Go’s Southeast Asian release, Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the nearby Cheoung Ek Center for Genocide Crimes were available to players as pokéstops. To add insult to injury, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was the problematic setting of two virtual “gyms,” fixed locations meant to facilitate—via game-circumscribed rule—Pokémon Go battles between different players. One of these gyms was stationed in a place gruesomely known as “The Gallows,” named after a device used by the Khmer Rouge to hang and torture prisoners detained at Tuol Sleng Prison, upon which the same-named museum was established (Millar and Connor).
Survivors of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge past (like Chhang and former Tuol Sleng Prison inmate Chum Mey) alongside human rights activists and aca-demics predictably decried the game’s inclusion of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which presently functions as the nation’s primary site of genocide commemoration and contains one of the most significant atrocity archives about the Democratic Kampuchean era.5
While Pokémon Go’s opportunistic use of such contemplative sites—as commentators, critics, and curators repeatedly note—hits a decidedly in-appropriate chord, and whereas the ensuing denunciations by and large
make common sense within a prima facie human rights domain, the polem-ics concerning the ludic and the commemorative inadvertently yet evoca-tively lay bare a peculiar parallel between memorializing large-scale loss and touristic encounter. As now-recognizable settings of mass violence and human catastrophe, places like the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum have become “must-see” stops for those en-gaged in what Malcolm Foley and J. John Lennon provocatively characterize as “dark tourism”; such destinations are marked by “the presentation and consumption (by visitors) of real and commodified death and disaster sites”
(198). Though understood within the field of cultural geography as a sub-genre of mainstream tourism, “dark tourism” (aka “macabre tourism,”
“heritage tourism,” “thanatourism,” “doom tourism,” “morbid tourism,” or
“atrocity tourism”) is, as will soon be clear, increasingly popular and exceed-ingly profitable (Stone and Sharpley).
To that end, as the 1.4 million visitors who annually travel to Auschwitz-Birkenau highlight, genocide tourism is—in the twenty-first century—a thriving global business (“Attendance Record”). From Vietnam’s War Rem-nants Museum to Thailand’s Death Railway, from Rwanda’s Kigali Genocide Museum to Taiwan’s National Human Rights Museum, and from London’s Imperial War Museums to New York City’s 9/11 Memorial and Museum, twentieth-century histories of state-authorized violence and twenty-first-century accounts of large-scale loss have been fervently curated, ardently commemorated, and vigorously cultivated in the purposeful and unintend-ed service of atrocity tourism.6 With regard to Cambodia, “dark tourism”
and religious tourism have emerged as particularly significant industries: on top of the estimated seven hundred thousand tourists who visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Choeung Ek Center for Genocide Crimes in Phnom Penh each year, approximately two million make their way to Angkor Wat, a multitemple UNESCO World Heritage Site in Siem Reap.7
In addition to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Choeung Ek Center for Genocide Crimes, atrocity tourism figures prominently in the post–Khmer Rouge, postconflict remaking of Cambodia; legislative and ad-ministrative plans remain underway to rehabilitate key sites in Anlong Veng (a district in Oddar Meanchey Province), situated near the Thai border. To wit, Anlong Veng was, until the late 1990s, a Khmer Rouge stronghold and postregime home to Pol Pot (Saloth Sar, “Brother Number One”), Ta Mok (the regime’s highest-ranking general), Son Sen (who oversaw Democratic Kampuchea’s secret police—the Santebal—and was Tuol Sleng Prison’s first warden), and Khieu Samphan (former Khmer Rouge head of state). Cur-rently, tourists traveling to the northern Cambodian district can visit Pol Pot’s grave (which is remarkably unadorned and nondescript), Ta Mok’s mausoleum, and the foundational remnants of Pol Pot’s bunker/house; as final destinations, the “intrepid” atrocity tourist can make a relatively easy
trek to Ta Mok’s mountain and town domiciles. In 2000, the Cambodian government (under Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier) included Anlong Veng on its list of planned sites for “historical tourism”
connected to the Khmer Rouge; the commitment was reiterated in 2006 (at the start of the hybrid UN/Khmer Rouge Tribunal, known officially as the
“Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia” or by the acronym
“ECCC”). In 2010—the year in which the UN/Khmer Rouge Tribunal issued its first guilty verdict against former Tuol Sleng Prison head warden Kaing Guek Eav—the Cambodian government issued a development contract that contained provisions to rehabilitate roads and restore relevant Khmer Rouge structures (e.g., homes of leading figures, meeting places, and cemeteries;
Little and Muong).
Situated against Cambodia’s macabre historical backdrop and set within an ever-growing atrocity tourist landscape, debates concerning the “appro-priateness” of Pokémon Go prompt an expanded reconsideration of the pos-sibilities—and even more important, the limitations—of “atrocity tourism”
in the ethical recollection of human rights violations and the remembrance of those lost. While it is easy to dismiss such digital play along the lines of
“crassness,” the didactic mission of sites dedicated to commemorating mass loss—predicated on remembrance, guided by a “never again” impulse, and circumscribed by teleologies of rights progress—often conflict with the spec-tacularization of violence that serves as primary draw and appeal for out-of-town and out-of-country visitors. Thus, on the one hand, Pokémon Go’s ludic logics as sightseeing game analogously cohere with the dramatic presenta-tion of “unimaginable” histories of mass loss and genocide. Accordingly, the Manichean representation of such histories—situated along an axis of clear-ly delineated perpetrators and victims—uncanniclear-ly replicates the binaried relationship between player and platform. On the other hand, the inability of Pokémon Go players to appropriately commemorate through solemn wit-nessing and quiet contemplation lays bare a troubling “memory failure” con-sistent with an affective disconnect between tourist and victim.
Such disconnects presage the remaining focus of this chapter, which considers a site that, in its overt focus on perpetrators, eschews victim com-memoration in favor of criminal prosecution: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
As this chapter makes clear, the politics that brought the Tuol Sleng Geno-cide Museum into being were less about remembering those lost and more indicative of contemporaneous state-driven agendas. Accordingly, while the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is ostensibly intended to commemorate those detained, the museum is—as a close reading of specific exhibits accentu-ates—paradoxically focused on “memorializing the actions of the Khmer Rouge” (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum). Concomitantly, those who visit the museum (expressly foreign tourists) become capitalist consumers of Demo-cratic Kampuchean atrocities, a point substantiated by the site’s emphasis on
perpetrators, the availability of survivor-guided tours, and the ubiquity of on-site souvenir stands. Through tactical juxtaposition and comparative re-framing, what becomes apparent is the extent to which the critique of con-sumptive practices vis-à-vis Pokémon Go strategically disremembers the commercial dimensions of contemporary atrocity tourism. As the conclu-sion of this chapter brings to light, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and its companion site, the Choeung Ek Center for Genocide Crimes, operate as vexed memorials to a genocide that has—due to a paucity of Khmer Rouge defendants and in the absence of victim reparation—yet to be juridically or affectively reconciled.