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Published: December 2nd 2006
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So after the delights of the Angkor Temples it was time to head into Phnom Penh and check out Cambodia's more dark and recent history. Although most of our time in the capital consisted of shopping (more of that later to end on a cheery note), the biggest impression left there was undoubtedly our visit to the genocide museum of Tuol Sleng. During the brief period of 1975 to 1978, while the Khmer Rouge was the country's government, this former high school known as S-21 was used as a prison/torture site. If you don't want me to ruin your day then you may need to cover your ears or skip to the bottom of this blog, a visit here, though worthwhile, made us feel both sick and utterly depressed.
The centre was one of many such places run by the former Pol Pot regime. The intention of the regime itself was to create an agricultural peasant based maoist society. In practice this meant that KR forces basically forced city dwellers to move out (e.g. the population of Phnom Penh in 2 weeks dropped from 2m to 50,000) and work on the fields as slaves in co-operatives harvesting rice. The national
road network was ripped up and those suspected of being intellectuals or even middle class were rounded up and taken to places like Tuol Sleng for 'questioning'. In 1979 this brutal regime came to an abrupt end with the invasion of Vietnamese forces. The KR fled to the jungle and for the next decade the occupying Vietnamese tried to keep order whilst a bloody civil war raged in the jungles and streets between moderate Cambodians and the KR. In the early 1990s the UN took over from Vietnam, the war began to run its course, in April 1998 the KR's leader Pol Pot died fighting and by the end of that year fighting ceased entirely. Some KR leaders have been arrested but even now the trials have yet to begin and so no one as yet has been found guilty of war crimes. Eight years after the fighting, the war has still left its mark. There are still millions of unexploded landmines in the countryside, particularly near the Thai and Vietnam border areas and with the current price of scrap metal so high, many people unfortunately risk life and limb to retrieve them.
Back to the prison - according
to our leaflet guide, child guards aged between 10 and 15 years old largely ran Tuol Sleng. Survivors remember them as being exceptionally cruel and disrespectful towards the prisoners and their elders. There was no hospital services inside the prison and the medical personnel were untrained and mostly children. The victims were taken from all parts of the country and from all walks of life. Moreover, whole families of the prisoners, from the bottom on up, including newly born babies, were taken there en masse to be exterminated. At Tuol Sleng around 10,500 people and 2,000 children were killed by the KR regime between 1975 to 1978 and held between 1,200 and 1,500 prisoners at any one time with imprisonment ranging from 2 to 7 months. The prisoners were required to abide by all the regulations. To do anything, even to alter their positions while trying to sleep, the inmates had first to ask permission from the prison guards. Anyone breaching these rules was severely beaten. Bathing was communal and irregular, sometimes once a fortnight. Unhygienic living conditions caused the prisoners to become infected with diseases and this was not helped because there was no medicine for treatment.
You
didn't need much imagination to guess what it was like because the evidence of cruelty and torture was everywhere. In keeping with other brutal regimes such as the Nazis, the KR meticulously documented every prisoner - providing arrival and departure photographs and in some cases photos of people in mid torture. Many of these were displayed for us on notice boards at the school's ground floor - the most shocking thing for me was the quantity of faces and that most looked easily below the age of 20 (some were only toddlers) or well over the hill. The 5 or so larger classrooms used for torturing political prisoners each contained a bare metal bed with a iron bar shackle and some implement of torture. In each there was also a large photograph on the wall of this same room with all the same stuff but with the remains of some twisted corpse either chained up on the bed or curled up on the floor. Added to this it looked to me that some of the floors had not been washed since the place was liberated as the white and black tiles were caked in blotches of red.
...The whole
experience was so depressing and graphic that when we came out we had no desire to make the journey out to the 'Killing Fields', a site of mass graves, some not properly dug or finished off, which filled us with dread. Instead we went on a big walk through the city, past the Royal Palace and back to our guest house next to the eastern shores of Boeng Kak Lake (we took a place which had four solid walls, a clean bed, and a fantastic view of the lake particularly at sunset. As the area was a serious backpacker ghetto there was accommodation to suit all tastes and budgets. Before we chose, we first looked around one where the polluted lake was happily flowing in the corridors, another I turned down because of the wafer thin walls, the dirty 1970s plastic decor and an unhealthy object floating in the toilet - some of the places were so bad it was funny!).
Other than Tuol Sleng and the hastle of moto drivers, Phnom-Penh was a pleasant experience. It felt good to be in a big city again where unlike Laos, had normal shops selling cheap western style clothes. But the
place to go to for clothes is the Russian Market; home of all the stuff made in local garment factories and sold off cheap, oh so very cheap. Half of it is quite obviously not exactly what it says on the tin (Gap, H&M, Victoria's Secrets etc.) but at $1 a pop you can't really argue - and it is not as bad as it sounds, apparently Cambodia's garment factories have the fewest child workers in SE Asia and are monitored by UN to make sure working conditions are up to standard, why it's practically a charitable act to buy the clothes. Well perhaps not but we certainly got to experience eating for a cause, now that feels good. We stumbled across the Veiyo Tonle Restaurant while walking along the waterfront at Sisowath Quay just about 1/2 mile north of the Royal Palace. The staff are volunteers, and all the money made goes help 25 orphans they have 'adopted' (there is no system of welfare state/social security in Cambodia). So in the spirit of things we tucked into two delicious courses each and kept the wine flowing - a satisfied stomach and mind ha ha!
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