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Published: November 23rd 2008
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We took a bus to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia on the Friday. The Sunday was Independence Day and then began 3 days of Water Festival, so we only had the Saturday when anything would be open. We took full advantage, and did the thing every tuk-tuk driver asks you to do constantly, and maybe the biggest 'attraction' in the city - the museum and Killing Fields.
I'd learned a little about the Khmer Rouge regime from reading the upliftingly titled 'First They Killed My Father' in Siem Reap. It was written by a young girl who's family were forced out of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 to go work in a labour camp in the countryside. It was really, really sad but a good book, even Mike is reading it now!
We took a tuk-tuk to the Genocidal Crimes museum. It's not a museum as in lots of labeled exhibitions, rather the building is the museum itself. It was once a school, then turned into a 'prison' under the Khmer Rouge and is now the museum. It really looked like a school too - 2 concrete buildings, 3 storeys high with balcony coridors. We
walked first to the some small classrooms on the ground floor. Inside each was nothing but an iron bedframe, some leg shackles and maybe an empty ammunition case (apparently used for slushing clean the floors). On the wall was an enlarged black and white photograph of how the room was found in 1979 by the Vietnamese. Mercifully, the image quality was poor enough to spare visitors the gory details, but you got the idea. There was a corpse shackled to the bed, in a very bad way, and alot of blood on the floor. I tried not to notice, but there was still corresponding black stains on the floors under the bed frames.
The next set of rooms was probably even worse. These were much bigger classrooms and were filled with noticeboards displaying the mug-shots taken of all the prisoners brought to the prison. They were mostly young men, but there were also many women and children. There was one of a woman holding her baby and at least one of an old lady. Looking at their faces, you could have been looking at photos of the people in the street. They all looked so normal modern. Some had
obviously been beaten. Some were seriously emaciated and some were already dead. Everyone in those pictures was executed (14,000 people went into the prison and 7 came out). I kept having to leave the room to compose myself, it was full on.
After passing through the room of implements of torture found there but not really looking, trying not to let it sink in, we took a rather somber journey to the 'killing fields' out of the city. This was where most of the people from S21 (the prison) were taken, as well as from loads of other prisons. It didn't really look like much at first, just a semi-wooded area with many little hut-type shelters over various murky ponds. Upon reading the signs, we realised these were the excavated mass graves. Unfortunately, not everything had been excavated, and as we were walking around we kept seeing bones sticking up from the ground where the path was getting eroded! Some still had scraps of clothes attached (now and then you could tell it was proper 70s gear). You really had to watch where you put your feet. Here and there were little piles of bones, I guess collected up
from where they were lying around.
Near the entrance of the site was a massive Buddhist Stupa, which contained the 9,000 excavated skulls. Looking at them, you knew you could be looking at one pf the people from the photographs in the museum. It could be the tuk-tuk driver's Dad or the guest house owner's brother...grim doesn't really cover it.
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Bernie Warner
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Hey Becks. What can you say after reading that? Feel very small.