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Published: April 30th 2010
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We arrived in Phnom Penh mid-afternoon, to find the city in full swing; hundreds of scooters buzzing everywhere, generally ignoring the road rules, as seems to be the custom in Asia. The streets were awash with people going about their daily lives. It generally felt slightly more chaotic and real than the laid back tourist centre of Siem Reap.
Eventually we checked into a cheap guesthouse, where we received a grimy little room that had Wi-Fi and air con, which was a blessing in roasting Phnom Penh. Here I settled down to some in-depth reading; ‘The Pol Pot Regime’ and ‘Voices from S-21,’ both factual accounts of the auto-genocide which took place under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, as although Tom had specialised in the subject for his dissertation, I knew very little about Cambodian history and wanted to have a little knowledge before visiting the S-21 prison and the Killing Fields the following day.
I learnt in brief, that Pol Pot took over political power in Cambodia in 1975 through a coup. He had been highly educated in France where he became deeply interested in the notions of communism. Upon returning to Cambodia, he wished to create a true agrarian society, with everybody returning to work the land. Cambodian currency was abolished; any educated people or people who were involved in the former government were seen as a threat to the regime and were usually imprisoned and murdered. Everybody was forced to work the land, mostly growing rice, much of which was traded with China in return for arms. People slowly began to suffer from malnutrition, due to the heavy labour and poor rations that they received under the communal eating orders. Many people became gravely ill, and hospitals were vastly unequipped to deal with patients as former medications were scarce, and nearly all doctors had been imprisoned due to their educated status. With a basic understanding of this history we prepared to visit Tuel Sleong and Choeng Ek the next day two historical sites, which people most associate with the Khmer Rouge.
The next morning we set off into the hustle and bustle of Phnom Penh on the back of two motorbikes nervously experiencing the lack of road rules first hand. Bikes would ride on the pavements beeping and swerving through pedestrians; they would happily run red lights and drive on the wrong side of the road on the equivalent to our motorways, all of this to get a fraction of a head start on the million other bikes spluttering along Phnom Penh’s roads.
We finally arrived at Tuel Sleong, also known as the S21 prison. This was a secondary school which had been converted into a maximum security prison by the Pol Pot regime. Here thousands of people were brought to be tortured (sometimes for months on end) and executed, including children. Very few prisoners were released, even when occasionally deemed innocent, due to fears of compromising the security of the prison. The prison originally held political prisoners and educated persons who were thought a threat to the new regime. Slowly, as the regime’s paranoia increased as did the intake into the prison, with hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life ending up inside, including some important members of the Khmer Rouge themselves.
When first entering the compound, there is a ground floor dedicated to the mug shots taken of thousands of the prisoners that once passed through. The pictures were extremely emotional, and personalised these people, you could see the myriad of emotions in their eyes, many scared, confused and some bravely defiant. There were pictures of men and women of all ages, children, teenagers, and women with babies, all of which had to suffer disgracefully in this place. In some ways it felt disrespectful to look at these photo’s and never be able to truly understand or appreciate what each person personally went through.
Around the prison we saw tiny wooden cubicles and metal cubicles that prisoners were chained into, the balconies were barbed wired up to the roof to prevent prisoners from jumping to their deaths on the way to ‘interrogation’ (torture.) We saw the equipment and numerous methods that were used to torture these people until the interrogators had received a satisfactory and detailed ‘confession.’ Many people ended up confessing that they were planted by the CIA (many confusing the letters as they probably didn’t know what the CIA was, just that it was viewed as bad by the Khmer Rouge) or that Vietnam had told them to become a spy. After countless torture sessions and unsatisfactory confessions, when a satisfactory one was recorded the prisoner would be sent to their deaths at the killing fields.
On the top floor of the museum were testaments by people who had worked in the prison, explaining how easily humans can be brainwashed to commit unimaginable acts, particularly when they feel that their lives are threatened; obedience becomes the only option and people slowly become numb to the pain of others.
It is difficult to find the words to describe the horrors that had been committed at S21, and equally difficult to describe the emotional response and rational response that the visit elicited from us as tourists, except to say that it makes you determined to pay more attention to international politics and stand up to such crimes to try and prevent them happening again.
After trying to understand what had happened at S21, we visited Choeng Ek, The Killing Fields. Here 16 mass graves have been excavated so far, where they have found thousands of bodies slaughtered just 35 years ago by the Khmer Rouge. Choeng Ek was a very haunting place, here our guide explained to us that prisoners would be forced to dig their own graves before being beaten to death with blunt tools in order to save bullets. Hundreds of people from S21 were transported here each day, where they would be transferred to holding cells to await their executions that would be carried out under the cover of darkness. Women would often be raped before being murdered, babies were killed in front of their parents by bashing them against trees to prevent revenge in later life, and the people that weren’t murdered by the senseless clubbings would either be smothered to death in the mass graves or the guards would use chemicals to destroy them.
It was highly distressing to walk around these terrible graves, where pieces of bone and cloth still lie, and was nearly impossible to understand that this inhumanity had actually happened and that nothing had been done to stop it. Perhaps even more disturbing is that, the regime has never been brought to justice, it is only now 35 years on, that the trial of the remaining Khmer Rouge is beginning, far too late for most Cambodians. Pol Pot escaped any form of justice when he died in 1998, it is a similar story for many of the leaders from this terribly misled and bloody regime.
In the centre of Choeng Ek a giant glass stupa has been erected as a memorial to all of those that lost their lives in the Killing Fields. The glass walls reveal 17 levels of broken bones and skulls, a reminder to all of what happened there and a reminder of why it should never happen again. In the end we only took one photo of this memorial stupa, as it felt disrespectful and invasive to try to capture the scenes of so much horror, when a photograph could never capture the true horror that these people suffered.
The whole experience was deeply moving and will stay with me forever; many people have argued that visiting such historically tragic scenes is morbid and voyeuristic. I personally felt that the Khmer Rouge auto-genocide has strong parallels to Nazi Germany and yet even though it was so recent, it was something that I knew nothing about. I think that it is only by seeing, feeling and trying to understand such atrocities, that we realise that such things can’t be ignored just because they are not affecting ourselves and only then can we prevent them from happening again.
Despite the atrocities that the Cambodian people have suffered and the poverty and injustice that many still live with, they have seemed to us to be some of the friendliest and happiest people that we have met upon our trip so far, which bears great testament to the resilience of the Khmer people.
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Margaret
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A fascinating and very moving account - I still, many years later, remember the profound impact the film "The Killing Fields" had on me when I saw it. Everyone filed out of the cinema in Theatr Clwyd in total silence, so I can only imagine what it's like to actually be there. M xx