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Published: January 31st 2008
Cambodia.
"Killing fields".
The immediate sequitur: the institutionalised killing perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s is one of my earliest memories of international news, and the association is still tremendously strong. Even my mother asked if the country was “safe” when I told her my travel plans for the first weeks of this year.
When I reached Phnom Penh, I caught myself wondering if I actually wanted to go to the Genocide Museum at Tuol Sleng, otherwise known now as S-21, the former secondary school that, overnight, became an interrogation centre for anyone the Khmer Rouge deemed opposed to their regime and goals. Or to some of the "killing fields" outside Phnom Penh where almost 9,000 bodies have already been found, and where countless others, known still to be buried there, are being left in peace. Isn’t this kind of “tourist attraction” somehow taking advantage of the horror, commercialising it? Would it not be pretty upsetting?
And then I stopped, mentally rebuking myself for such a selfish attitude. How could I think of not going when 20,000 men, women and children had disappeared into S-21, or when countless numbers had been forcibly taken to Cheong
Ek, there to die, their bodies shoved unceremoniously into shallow, hurriedly-dug pits? What choice had they had?
Tuol Sleng is located in a perfectly ordinary residential area of Phnom Penh, several blocks down a side street off the multi-laned main road that takes you towards a large intersection at Independence Monument. Outside the former school’s walls are perfectly ordinary cafés, and shops selling perfectly ordinary things for the everyday life of perfectly ordinary people. It still looks like a school, its two three-storey, L-shaped concrete blocks facing each other across a part-grass, part-dust open space. It doesn’t take an impossible leap of imagination to hear the shouts and cries of break-time, or to see the bustle of students jostling each other as they move along the open corridors and up and down the staircases between classrooms.
Yet somehow this place became the centre for the most secret organisation in the Khmer Rouge government, Security Office 21 or simply S-21, the institution responsible for interrogating and exterminating alleged opposition elements. This was a regime that regarded the agricultural way of life as the ideal, forcibly emptying Phnom Penh of its population on 17 April, 1975, a day that had
started with the city’s people actually celebrating the coming to power of the Khmer Rouge after years of war. The intelligentsia were one of the key sectors targeted, and this was increasingly broadly defined. Simply wearing glasses was deemed to be sufficient indication that you were from that hated class. Between May 1976 and 1979, it is estimated that 20,000 people, men, women and children - even babies; age was no bar - came through the gates of Tuol Sleng, and did not emerge again, except to be taken to Cheong Ek for final killing and disposal. Chillingly, one can be reasonably accurate about the numbers involved for, on their arrival at Tuol Sleng, each victim was photographed, seated on a plain wooden chair with a prop to ensure their head was posed in the right position, and with a number pinned to their chest. “Just give me a number, instead of my name. Forget all about me and let me decay….” But we won’t forget them. Huge panels of these photographs now line the walls of the Genocide Museum and the victims’ faces stare out at us. Some seem to be deliberately expressionless or terrorised out of emotion. Some,
particularly the younger children, look desperately keen to please, to be co-operative. Some simply look confused. In one, a young woman holding her baby has a tear rolling down her cheek: the wife of a former official in the regime, she must have been all too well aware of the fate that was awaiting her and her child. Facing some of these panels are others, this time showing photographs of people who worked at Tuol Sleng. Frighteningly, many of the workers are young, barely into their teens, and some are smiling. While the regime would have attracted those with a sadistic bent, there’s no escaping the fact that many of these workers would have been settling for the lesser of two evils: how to co-operate enough to save themselves or their families.
Outside the first set of classrooms are fourteen graves, the graves of the victims whom the Vietnamese found in the building when they liberated Phnom Penh in 1979, victims who were found in situ, still chained to bed-frames. Grainy black-and-white photographs above those same bed-frames now freeze for posterity the way they were found. These were people who had, at one time, been important in the regime
but had then fallen into disfavour. For some bizarre reason, the Tuol Sleng management had given them individual rooms and bed-frames to lie upon (no mattress in sight) in recognition of their former status. As if this would be much comfort if your fingernails have been ripped out. If your arms have been broken on being twisted up behind your back when you were suspended from a piece of the school’s gym equipment. If your body was criss-crossed with bleeding wheals from repeated whippings. Would you really feel any better than those poor sods on the floor of their cells, the roughly-built brick cubicles into which other classrooms had been divided, cubicles that measured barely two metres by eighty centimetres? You, like they, would have been permanently shackled. You, like they, would have had only small containers in which to relieve yourself. You, like they, would have had to ask permission from the guards before doing so, or before moving at all, and would have risked further beatings if you did not.
No-one ever escaped from Tuol Sleng. A fortunate few successfully threw themselves off the upper levels of the building… until even that option was ruled out, barbed
wire put in to the gap between balcony and roof. But one or two former inmates did survive, discovered in the building by the Vietnamese. One of these survivors went on to paint scenes of life at Tuol Sleng (if you can call it “life”), paintings which now hang on the walls of some of the erstwhile classrooms. No great works of art, they are deeply shocking in their simplicity, their no-holds-barred representation of S-21’s methods of torture. A man has his head held under water. A woman is having her nipples ripped off with pliers. Another man is being hauled up on the school’s gym equipment by his hands which are roped behind him so that his arms are wrenched agonisingly upwards.
The horror that this too-ordinary school in its too-ordinary neighbourhood has seen somehow still hangs like an invisible fog. The minute you enter the gates, you feel it, and you fall silent. You don’t need to stop and read the information boards to be overwhelmed by the impact of this place. On an upper floor, there is an exhibition entitled “Stilled Lives”. Around the walls of this huge room hang stories, stories, in their own words,
of some of the people whose lives were ripped apart by the Khmer Rouge. Whether they were victims or perpetrators, all suffered to a greater or even greater extent in the end. Each story ends with an italicised note, listing the number of family members missing or known to have been killed by the regime. Your guide has gone by now; you are left to look round the room on your own. No-one says a word.
And the horror isn’t limited to Tuol Sleng or Cheong Ek, or any of the hundreds of other torture and killing sites that litter the Cambodian countryside. Our Cheong Ek guide was one of those who first found the bodies at that location, and the stench of that day in 1980 lives with him still. He’s an angry man. Who can blame him? I don’t know his own story, what happened to him in the years between 1975 and 1979, but I don’t need to. His description of the various awful sites we were looking at - here the “magic tree” on which a loudspeaker was hung to project loud music to drown out the victims’ screams; here the palm tree with fronds
so serrated it was used as an executioner’s knife to save expensive bullets; over there, the solid hardwood against which children and babies were thrown; in this pit only headless bodies were found; in that pit, only women and children - each description was punctuated by his agonised refrain, “No reason kill people”.
Walking round Cheong Ek by ourselves later, we realised we didn’t need a guide. Fragments of clothing, half-buried, still litter the path. Horrifyingly, bones are coming to the surface with the wear of feet on the paths between the shallow pit-graves. David inadvertently kicked a pebble… and then realised it wasn’t. A human molar was at his feet. 8,985 bodies have been unearthed at Cheong Ek, their skulls, roughly categorised by age and sex, now piled on shelves inside the commemorative stupa that dominates the site these days. Who knows how many more bodies are still lying in this place? But they’ll be left in peace now; no further excavation is anticipated.
Everyone in Cambodia has a story to tell, if they can or want to do so. Latest estimates suggest that two million people died under Pol Pot’s regime; the number may be fifty
per cent higher still. And this in a country whose population was barely ten million before he came to power. When we were leaving for Siem Reap the next day, our taxi driver, my own age, told us that he was put into an children’s home in 1975 - his parents had had no choice. It was part of Pol Pot’s “education” programme. He doesn’t know what happened to all of his brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, parents. Some are still alive, but many more did not see the liberation.
Agonising, distressing, harrowing, heart-rending... visiting these sites triggers almost indescribable emotions in everyone. More than occasionally, I heard a horrified gasp when our blank-faced guide was taking us through Tuol Sleng, or when our angry companion was describing something at Cheong Ek. It took me a moment to realise that this had come from me. I wasn’t even conscious of making the sound. Yet I know I’m lucky. I’m alive.
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