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On my third day at the office, after I’d met everyone, had everything explained to me, been shown around the clinic, fixed my laptop and finalised plans to leave for Kampong Thom, it become apparent that there was really nothing for me to do. San took pity on me and told me to take the morning off to go and see S-21, the genocide museum. I was driven there in the official TPO massive white Toyota Landcruiser that it seems is obligatory for all NGOs. You see them cruising the streets of PP looming tall above the traffic, printed with charity logos, surrounded by people riding four to a motorbike.
S-21, for those who don’t know, is the former high school where the Khmer Rouge imprisoned and tortured around 20,000 people. It has been left essentially as it was found. Chains, rows of tiny brick cells, torture devices. Bare iron beds in empty rooms, with gruesome photos on the wall serving as the only explanation. One whole building is given over to pictures of the victims. Thousands of black and white mugshots stare out from the walls. The KR methodically documented and photographed everybody who passed through here. They also
kept the confessions people were forced to write under torture, admitting to being enemy spies, implicating their friends and family.
The next day I visited the Killing Fields, the burial site where prisoners from S-21 were taken to be executed. This is just one of many thousands of mass graves around the country. There is no museum here, nothing to see aside from the mounds and depressions in the earth to denote where the graves lie. There is something unbelievably chilling about the poorly translated signs, simply stated facts without any drama or elaboration.
Mass grave of 116 people without heads.
Tree used to beat babies to death
Near the entrance to the site there is a huge glass tower many stories high, filled with cracked skulls. I don’t know why they did this, or what I would have wanted done had it been me or my family. To me it seems like a country’s cry for attention, a way of demanding acknowledgement, of trying to make it impossible to forget or ignore.
Both S-21 and the Killing Fields are raw and graphic and brutally honest. I don't know how to explain my reaction to
visiting these places. I left feeling confused. It's so far removed from anything I have ever experienced; it's completely beyond my sphere of understanding.
I asked San if he’d ever been to S-21. He said yes, once, but he couldn’t stay for very long. I know there’s no way I’d be able to visit if I was Cambodian. It’s all too recent. The Khmer Rouge didn’t disappear after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979. As a guerrilla group, they still had control over some parts of the country up until 10 years ago. There are few people even today who haven’t been affected in some way. It doesn’t take much to uncover it. Just this morning Dr S casually mentioned that he didn’t start med school till his 20s because he lost 4 years under the Khmer Rouge. Every moto driver, every waiter, it only takes an innocent conversation to uncover some massive trauma.
Moto Driver - Where are you from?
Jenny - England, near Manchester
Moto Driver - OH MANCHESTER UNITED FOOTBALL BLAH BLAH BLAH
Jenny - How about you, are you from Phnom Penh?
Moto - No, I moved here after my parents were killed…
The
tragedy is always just below the surface here, quite literally in the case of the killing fields, where rags and crumbling bones still protrude from the earth.
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