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Published: January 30th 2009
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S-21
View from one of the former school blocks I won't beat around the bush we were told some fairly scary things about the state of Cambodia, how the food was terrible and how dirty it was but it was the first country this trip that we ran out of time in before we had seen all we wanted to see and we thought the country was great.
We arrived in Phnom Penh to be confronted with a fairly hefty line for the visas on arrival, it took around 30mins or so to process everybody so that still beats Nepal by a clear 2 hours and we had a fairly amusing talk to an older American couple who were convinced that they could get away with paying for a 7 day visa even though they were staying for 8 days. It would have been funny to see what happened when they got to the airport a week later with the same attitude.
The short time we were scheduled to be in Cambodia meant that we were only able to see the highlights in Phnom Penh itself and the temples of Angkor Wat at Siem Reap.
First the truly sick
Many people will know of the Killing
Picture of children in leg irons
One of the survivors painted this Fields, but maybe not how recent it was, in 1975 and the 4 years that followed millions of people were executed and starved in an attempted genocide by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. It is a mind boggling that humans can perpetrate such degradation of humankind. That normal people can be turned to such perverted monsters.
We visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide museum which is the site of school that was turned into the S-21 prison were people of all ages were imprisoned and tortured (including waterboarding which has been used by the Americans in Guantanamo Bay) prior to being executed in the Killing Fields. Around 17000 people were placed in S-21 and only 12 people walked away.
One of those was the artist that painted pictures of life and torture in the prison that bring the stark reality of what it was like to fore and burn it into your brain. I have been sparing in the photos that i have put here because most of them are pretty extreme and distressing.
If you arrive at the right time of day you can also see an excellent video that lasts for about an hour i
think, it features many first hand accounts and describes the true wretchedness of the situations many of them found themselves in.
When prisoners first arrived they were confronted with the following 10 rules
1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey
Photos of the executed
Photos taken from the S-21 files of the people that were held there. any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.
Each person entering the prison was documented including a photo and put in one of the cell blocks, they were made to confess their crimes and tortured to extract information if necessary. Most prisoners were kept there for a short time before being killed, a short time after the prison opened they ran out of nearby burial space and prisoners were taken to Choeung Ek the actual site of the Killing Fields. They were often made to dig their own graves and killed by bludgeoning or getting their throats cut to save on bullets.
What is quite amazing is how preserved the museum is, The escaping Khmer Rouge had evacuated just hours before the liberating Vietnamese arrived in Phnom Penh and when they found the school they left everything exactly as it was.
After we leave the prison we took a rickshaw the 15 km to Choeung Ek to see the memorial stupa and walk around the killing fields. It's a lot harder to envisage what happened here in the fields as they are only a few signs left of
Choeung Ek Stupa
The stupa is filled with the skulls, bones and clothes of the people found there the mass graves, but the killing tree is still there and a few glass cases show where bones were dug up.
The stupa is filled with the skulls of the exhumed bodies along with a number of other bones and some of the clothes discovered at the site. It is overwhelming that a building that size is so full. We were told that a number of years ago it was possible to see bones sticking up out of the ground if it rained too hard. I have to say that I didn't examine the ground too hard to see if i could see any.
All it in all it was a very sobering day and I still cannot comprehend how the world sat back and allowed it to happen, if it wasn't for the Khmer attacks on Vietnam escalating then it might well have continued a lot longer than it did. Although I am probably being extremely naive about the kind of atrocities that are still going on around the world as i write this.
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