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Published: September 14th 2008
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What we witnessed today, we will never forget. Today was the day we saw evidence of the unbelievable actions of the Khmer Rouge against their own people.
We awoke this morning to a rather overcast humid day. Due to the time difference, most of us were up early, so a few of the girls headed out for a bit of a walk. We walked up to the crazy roundabout which is the Independence Monument and then back to the hotel. Although with the way the bikes and cars tear around the streets, it’s a wonder we made it back in time, given you take your life in your hands every time you cross the road!
The Tabitha Foundation picked us up at 9.15am and we headed to their central office and workshop to meet Jan Ritskes, founder of the Foundation.
Jan is a tough-talking Canadian who has been working in Cambodia since 1992. She took us through the history of Cambodia, and shared with us some horrific stories of her staff. In the two hours we were with her, our group of 18 barely spoke. Jan shared with us the appalling, unexplainable actions of the 1970’s, when whole
families we executed on the street simply for being educated or wearing glasses.
She also went through the ‘rules’ of what we can and can’t do whilst we are our building houses in the villages. Some of these include: no picking up children, no leaving anything behind, no soft drink and no sharing food with the villages as it makes them very sick. She also told us about the toilets and that the Cambodians do not ‘notice’ people going - even if they do it out in the open. The girls in our group are lucky to have a hole and a screen to go behind.
After shopping up a storm of hand made items from Tabitha workers, we headed out into the rain and jumped back on the bus and drove south across town to Toul Sleng, also known as Security 21 (S-21).
Toul Sleng used to be a school until it was taken over by a secretive group of the Khmer Rouge regime - S-21 in the mid-1970’s. The whole area is only 600m x 400m but at its peak could hold 1,500 prisoners.
I say 'prisoner' in the loosest possible sense of the
term. The people who imprisoned, tortured and executed at S-21 were there simply for being teachers, engineers, professors, ministers or diplomats. If you were not a farmer, willing to head out to the country and work for the KR growing rice for export, you were an enemy of the regime and you and your whole family, from new born babies to grandparents were executed. Prisoners were inhumanely tortured until they gave up the names of all their families, friends and work colleagues.
Depending on their ‘level’, the prisoners were either kept in tiny single person cells (barely big enough to lay down straight), built inside old class rooms of either wood or brick, Others were shackled together in larger rooms. They could not speak, go to the bathroom or change position without asking permission first. Many prisoners died of disease and illness.
According to the records held at S-21, prisoners were only kept for 2 - 4 months. Higher political prisoners could be held up to 6 months. There are varying reports of how many prisoners came through S-21, from 17,000 to 40,000 people. How could only 3 people have survived out of this huge number?
Upon
arrival at the entry to S-21, they ask you to be silent to respect the spirits of the victims who died here. They did not really need to say this. Our group, or normally loud talkative people, became silent as soon as we walked through the gates. We all moved totally noiselessly through the buildings, reading, looking, reflecting on what was documented. I think this will be the feeling that comes over me every time I think about what I saw at S-21. The silence, the echoing, and mostly the eyes of the victims looking out at me from hundreds of unidentified photographs. I still cannot understand how human beings, just 30 short years ago, could inflict this kind of horrendous genocide on their own people. There were photo’s of children, no more than 18 months old, and mothers clutching babies, their eyes begging spare them.
From the rules of what prisoners had to and could not do, to the way in which they were tortured, and held, we saw the faces and short lives of thousands of Cambodians.
There is an area at S-21 where they buried the bodies of the executed, many of who dug their
own graves. Once these graves were full, buses came and took those (who did not die from being tortured) out of town to be killed in mass graves. These became known as the Killing Fields.
Upon silently walking back to the bus, we drove out to the Killing Fields. The drive was no more than 20 minutes, but felt like a lifetime. Knowing how horrifying I found S-21, I knew we would experience the same at the Fields.
I was surprised to see, built on the small road leading up to the walled entry of the Fields, new expensive housing. It felt disrespectful to live and build such houses overlooking the site of the mass graves.
Our guide took us around the site, explaining the Bone Temple and then how the graves were found and exhumed. In one grave there were the bodies of 166 women and children, mostly naked. Another grave had over 400 bodies and according to our guide, many were buried alive, after just been beaten unconscious.
To save the expensive bullets, victims were not shot by their murderers but horrifically beaten to death with farm tools or bamboo branches.
As it
had been raining a lot before we were there, the rain had washed away a large top layer of soil, and clothing of the victims had been exposed. I could not stop thinking I was still walking on bodies or parts of bodies.
In the middle of the site, a Temple has been recently built (in the last 10 years) to house some of the bones and sculls of the exhumed bodies. Although you are able to go inside and look, I preffered to just walk around the base, on my own, thinking and apologising to these poor innocent people who had died so ruthlessly at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot.
The journey back to the hotel was again mostly silent.
What we saw and read about today, will not only help us as a group understand why we are here in Cambodia, but I also hope that we will all go back to our lives and talk about what we have seen and why it is important that the whole world knows about what happened here and help the Cambodian people recover from loosing up to 3 million of its people under
the dictatorship of Pol Pot.
Kel x
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Bridget
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Treasure every moment
You gave me goose bumps - I can only imagine just how REAL it all is for you all. It must be exhilarating and harrowing all at the same time.