Survivors of the Khmer Rouge hit out at Pokemon Go players on Wednesday after they flocked to one of the regime’s notorious prisons – now a museum to Cambodia’s brutal genocide – to catch digital monsters.
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But the game – which encourages users to hit the pavements in search of the virtual creatures – has sparked anger after players appeared at Tuol Sleng prison, where up to 15,000 people were sent to their deaths during the Khmer Rouge’s 1975-79 rule.
“I do not support having Pokémon Go allowed here because this genocide museum is a place for Cambodian people to remember the suffering and harm experienced under the Khmer Rouge regime”, he said. Photographs of numerous torture victims of Tuol Sleng in Penh are on display in the prison cells where they were murdered.
“It is a place of suffering”.
The game “Pokemon Go” has caused distress in Cambodia, where some smartphone-wielding players have been chasing its virtual characters at a genocide museum that was a torture center in the 1970s. The museum is “not a shopping mall nor a playground to catch Pokemon”. The prison documents the story of the Cambodia genocide, with the name Tuol Sleng translating to “Hill of the Poisonous Trees”. Since the warnings were put up, there have been no reports of tourists playing the game there, he said. But on Wednesday afternoon, players were still searching for Pokemon outside the prison. The National Freeway Bureau is now urging Niantic to take highways and rest stops off their Pokemon Go maps.
Playing the game at a memorial site was not appropriate, said one visitor to the converted school marking the communist regime’s four-year reign of terror that killed at least 1.8 million people.
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Players are reported to have been searching out characters at the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland, Arlington National Cemetery and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the United States and Japan’s Hiroshima Peace Memorial park.
