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03 April 2010 I was supposed to leave Phnom Penh Friday night or Saturday morning in order to free up the LanguageCorps' villa for April-term students who were to arrive Saturday night. My ticketary issue ensured that soonest I could fly out would be Sunday morning, so I was left with an extra day to say goodbye to Phnom Penh and/or God's Will.
There is one thing in Phnom Penh which all good tourists do. It's something I had intentionally not done prior to this point. It's something that disgusts me. It's something that makes me ashamed to be a human being. And it's got nothing to do with pedophilia and the sex-tourism industry.
What I had studiously avoided for 30 days was visiting the
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, also known as the S-21 Prison. I earlier referenced this prison in my discussion of the Killing Fields. Some of my peers had earlier skipped out on the last day of classes in order to visit the site before they departed to Thailand or Vietnam. I, however, did not.
No, no, I said.
I don't need to see this stuff. I don't need to know. I have an imagination, and I've already seen the stuff that human beings are made of. It's just going to make me feel even more down on humanity. A long philosophical debate ensued on just what stuff exactly human beings are made of, and why I get so down on them. In the end, they went on to the Genocide Museum, and I went on to class. Really, I just didn't need to see instruments of torture and bloodstains on the floor. But in my last 24 hours in Cambodia, I decided that maybe I really did need to see this stuff. So I spent my Saturday at the Genocide Museum.
I know for a fact that the Positivity Police who have successfully chased me around the world are going to find me and feel the need to comment on my blog. To which I say,
Go Away. This is the second part to my Killing Fields entry and I am functioning in my capacity as a historian and traveller. If you don't like to hear this stuff, go somewhere else. Go visit a pony farm. Or better yet, go to Cambodia and join the Khmer Rouge's remnants who, since their downfall in 1979,
have always treated their crimes with mass-denial.
Ah, but there is one Khmer Rouge remnant who does NOT treat the atrocities with denial. He has openly admitted his crimes and has been key in shedding light on this otherwise very secretive regime. He is in custody now after a photographer tracked him down and turned him in; today, he apparently spends his days praying for forgiveness and trying to come to terms with his past. Namely, he is Comrade Duch, none other than the former director of the very same S-21. (You pronounce his name more closely to "Doik"--not Duke, Duck, Dutch, Douche, or any other English word.)
I was priviledged to see his life work when I visited the Prison/Genocide Museum. The prison used to be a high school called Tuol Sleng. When the Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh in 1975, they converted Tuol Sleng High School into a prison-and-torture facility (which high schools may be anyway, but this was much worse). You didn't get sent to S-21 to be kept off the streets. You got sent there because somebody wanted a confession out of you. They would do whatever it took to get this--it usually involved
lots of beating, starvation, electrocution, and bamboo rods under the nails--and then you were sent to the Killing Fields to be bludgeoned to death.
Once you were implicated and hauled off to S-21, it could be reasonably expected that you would rat out virtually anyone you could still remember the names of. Then they would arrest those people as well as your family, your children, and your friends, who would then be subject to the same thing. Eventually, as the regime began devouring itself, former S-21 staff and torturers wound up as prisoners as well, in addition to former Khmer Rouge officers and their families. Comrade Duch (who was a very ardent supporter of the revolution) was himself implicated on multiple occasions--he erased all references to himself, but he knew it was a matter of time before he and his family, too, were tortured and hauled away to the Killing Fields. The Khmer Rouge fell before this ever happened, which is partly the reason we know about so much of it today.
When Vietnamese forces took over the city as the Khmer Rouge fell, they stumbled across Tuol Sleng, and after unanimously running back outside to throw up
from disgust, they turned the place into a museum. Thus, they became the first in a long line of exploiters of Cambodia's misfortunes, mainly for propagandistic purposes, and so that doofus tourists like me can gawp at the photos of the dead and maimed.
I probably don't need to go into lots detail of my gawping. You can see the photos. There are four buildings at Tuol Sleng Museum, each of which is three stories high. The southern-most building is filled with implements of tourture on all three floors. The middle buildings have been subdivided into makeshift prison cells out of bricks and cement, each about the same size as an outhouse. Upstairs are various photographs of Khmer Rouge history, including English-translation lyrics to their gory national anthem. There are walls and walls of photographs--prison leadership determined that it was a good idea to photograph each prisoner in case of an escape (no one ever did escape, but the photos left behind a stunning--and incriminating--record of humanity). There is a map of Cambodia built out of human skulls. And in the northern-most building there are more photographs and a movie about the Khmer Rouge on the top floor. Certainly
the most brilliant part of the museum is the hallway under the staircase in which people have graffitied their support and affirmation for Cambodia and the victims of S-21.
It will reduce you to tears.
There is also a gift shop. What do they sell? Skulls? Replicas of torture instruments? Actually, they sell traditional Cambodian handicrafts, and books. I bought a couple of books, one of which is a bootleg copy of a biography of Comrade Duch by the photographer who tracked him down (which is how I know most of the stuff I have related). It was such a captivating read: part adventure story, part detective novel, part biography; all moral and ethical ambiguity. May I recommend you take a look at the book for yourself:
here.
Despite what I said about not needing to see the museum, I'm glad I went. It made me less nauseous than I expected; and after I read the book, I even felt somewhat less down on human nature. See, after the Khmer Rouge fell, the director of S-21 eventually resettled along the Thai border and worked to save countless lives as medic's assistant in a refugee camp. After having a
major mid-life crisis, he converted to Christianity and devoted his life to saving souls, and was working in this capacity when he was turned in by his biographer. Duch was eager to reveal his crimes when confronted, and has been key in bringing the crimes of the Khmer Rouge to light for the international community. No amount of anything the man can ever possibly do will ever make this chapter of history okay. Still, in my mind, it looks a little bit like redemption--for the individual, and for humanity.
One last note on redemption: Over the four years of its tenure, S-21 claimed the lives of perhaps 20 000 souls, or a single percentage point of those who died under the Khmer Rouge. Out of those 20 000 prisoners, there were seven surviviors. Seven. Sometimes I have trouble being an artist. I ask why I couldn't have been born with musical ability, a great personality, or whatever it is that my society apparently values more than artistic ability. But I will forevermore remind myself that of those seven survivors of Tuol Sleng, every one of them was an artist. They were saved by these abilities. I will never forget
No Laughing. No Smiling. No Joy. No Making Merry. No Happiness. No Light-hearted Conversation
If you disobey any of these points, you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge. (Take that Positivity Police!) this lesson.
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