The nasty bits

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Our reason for coming to Phnom Penh was to see the S-21 facility and the Cheung Ek killing fields. We started with the former, a school which had been converted into a prison and interrogation facility for Pol Pot’s regime. Some class rooms had been turned into cell blocks with crude brick walls built on top of the tiled floors, some of which still seemed to have blood stains. Other class rooms simply had a single bed in the middle and a picture on the wall showing how the Vietnamese found the room when they liberated thec ity - usually featuring a heavily mutilated body chained to the springs.

Some rooms had been converted back to serve as a teaching facility, with galleries of the victims, all of whom were photographed when they arrived, several cases of skulls and bones, various explanatory information panels and a theatre for screening a short movie. This movie was perhaps the most distrubing of all the things we saw because it featured a chap who had been a prison guard. There was something rather unpleasant about the way he matter-of-factly described how he’d transported prisoners to the klling fields and murdered them. It’s hard to imagine an SS guard from Auschwitz being given the same freedom to speak and tell the audience he was just doing what he was told.
After S-21 we had some lunch before finding a tuk-tuk (never around when you need them, but always around when you don’t) to take us out to the killing fields associated with the facility we had visited. Cheung Ek had been a Chinese cemetary before the Khmer Rouge took it over, the only traces of its former existence being a few scattered headstones between thepits where bodies were thrown. The mass graves had been excavated and the bones placed in a large stupa, thousands of skulls glaring out from the 17 tiers of the structure. The clothes of the victims were placed on a separate shelf. It was noticeable, however, when walking around the site, that there were still rags protruding from the ground around the pits, which were presumably clothes that had not been dug up. There were lots of flowers and trees in the area, but what looked like tree roots were in fact more human bones. It was certainly a rather chilling place despite the hot sun; a reminder that despite learning harsh lessons from relatively recent history (e.g. Nazism) humans are still capable of some pretty despicable things.

We persuaded our tuk-tuk driver to take us back to the National Museum in Phnom Penh, but this turned out to be quite a lot less informative than the place in Siam Rep. It wSammas far too early for dinner so we walked back to our hostel via the Cambodian independence monument, a large tower celebrating the withdrawal of the French in the 1950s. I’m sure Cambodians were rightfully glad to be free of the French, but lurching from an imperial dominion to a communist slaughter house was hardly progressive.

We returned to the river side area for dinner, but Sammy wasn’t feeling too hungry and I lost my appetite after a couple of bites of a burger that McDonalds would have been ashamed of. We picked up some ice cream on the way back to our hostel to make up it.

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