Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh

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The building had once been a high school. It was in the middle of the city, surrounded by dirty streets and spindly palm trees. Inside the entrance, we regarded the three-storey concrete structure. It did look like a school, we both agreed. Even the grassy area in front of it looked like the place where children would have congregated during their breaks. But, of course, when the Khmer Rouge had taken over the country in 1975 (renaming it Kampuchea in the process), schooling had been abolished, and they had used the school field as an area of torture.

Pol Pot, a hard-line communist, had been the leader of the Khmer Rouge. He wanted Kampuchea to be rural and classless, and he sought to do this by banning ownership of anything. He abolished the need for money, outlawed religion, and made everyone wear simple black clothes. In order to stop discussion of his regime, he banned people from leaving their immediate area, and prohibited more than two people meeting at any one time. If a group of three people were caught talking, they were often sent to prison for interrogation and then execution.

S-21 (or Tuol Sleng Prison), the place my wife and I were looking at, became one of the main headquarters of this interrogation and torture.

"This is horrible," Angela whispered as we walked around the room. Stark black and white portrait photos of people brought to Security Prison 21 filled it. Men, women and children lined the displays, their mug shots taken on arrival. Most looked terrified, but some were smiling, as if they had no clue about what was in store for them. One large photo showed a woman holding a baby. The expression on her face was neutral.

"Here she is again," said Angela. The second photo of the woman had been taken from the side, and this time the baby was nowhere to be seen. She still had the same neutral expression as before, except for one important detail. Running down her face was a single tear. Angela looked away. "This is so sad."

We found the interrogation cells. We entered one to find yellow, plastered walls, with light coming in from a single window. Five or six bats hung in the corner of the room. The floor was chequered tiles, reminding us again that this terrible place had been a school. In the centre of the room was a single metal-framed bed. The stains underneath suggested some of the horrors administered there. More obvious was the large black and white photo on the wall. It was chilling to even glance at, horrific to linger upon. In fact, we were both thankful we couldn't really make out what had happened to the man.

In another room, an artist's impressions of the atrocities committed managed to put colour to the horror. One painting showed a terrified man with his feet shackled, his forearms encased in some sort of wooden block. His torturer was in the foreground with a pair of pliers. Blood was pooled on the floor, along with the man's fingernails. Angela gasped when she joined me at the gruesome picture. "What were they supposed to admit to?"

"Nothing," I answered. "They couldn't admit to anything because they hadn't done anything. They were just educated people, doctors, teachers, or those who worked for the previous government. But not just them – their families too."

On an upper level of the prison were the cells. Each individual cell was tiny, not even wide enough to stretch my arms out in, but they still would have housed six or seven people. Rules had to be followed inside the cells, even some impossible ones. For instance, if a person moved in their sleep (without first asking for permission), they would be punished with lashes from an electrical cord.

In total, more than 17,000 people were imprisoned in S-21, and only twelve survived the ordeal. One was a man called Vann Nath, a skilled artist. He survived because his paintings of Pol Pot were so good. The horrific paintings we'd just looked at were Nath's work. Another inmate survived because of his great skill at fixing the prison's sewing machines.

Suitably saddened by what we had seen inside the prison, we caught another tuk-tuk to the Killing Fields, located 15km away. It was where the Khmer Rouge finally murdered the prisoners after their interrogations.

"Hello," the young man said, in remarkably good English. We'd just hired him as our guide. His name was Samnang. "Let's sit for a moment while I tell you about this terrible place."

Samnang led us to some wooden benches offering a bit of shade. The landscape was green and pleasant. We were not in fields as such; it was more a collection of grassy areas surrounded by clumps of trees, bushes and fences. Chickens pecked about in the dirt, and in the distance was the honking of traffic. Our guide began to speak.

"All the prisoners from S-21 were brought here. When they first arrived, they were blindfolded. Guards led them to the fields and killed them straight away. Usually it was with a spade or hatchet because bullets were too expensive. Maybe three hundred people a day were killed like this."

Samnang stared at us. His eyes looked sad. "You may have noticed that Cambodian people don't talk much about this atrocity. But I promise you that we never forget. Every May, Cambodian families bring their children here to see what Pol Pot did. They teach them, so it can never happen again."

Just beyond where Angela and I were sitting was a pagoda filled with skulls: over eight thousand of them, according to Samnang. "This place was like a factory," he told us. "The prisoners were laid out side by side, not allowed to speak, not allowed to move, and then, one by one, their skulls were bashed with a tool. Music blasted from loudspeakers to muffle the wails, and when they were dead, they were thrown into mass graves. I will show you these now. Please come."

We followed Samnang along a dirt path. The narrow trail was littered with fragments of clothing belonging to the victims. The first grave we came to was little more than the size of a garden pond. It was a rough patch of ground with weeds poking out from the soil. A sign read: Please don't walk through the mass grave.

Samnang said, "When the Khmer Rouge buried people, they did not do it according to religion or creed. No, bodies were dumped on top of each other without thought. Then they were covered in dirt. But as the bodies decomposed, they filled with gas. This caused some of them to rise to the surface. That is how the graves were eventually found. This single grave here held maybe fifty bodies."

"And this tree trunk," said the guide, leading us to a gnarled tree that would've looked good in any British garden, "was where guards killed babies. They smashed their tiny bodies against the trunk like pieces of rubbish. And then they threw them in here." Samnang pointed to another mass grave in front of us. "This one was full of women and children." Both Angela and I were silent, imagining the horror of it all. "The women were all naked; most of them had been raped by the guards before being killed."

To say the place was harrowing would be an understatement. It was a place of nightmares. And as we followed Samnang past another mass grave, he explained a little more about the Khmer Rouge.

"Pol Pot was pure evil," he said, matter-of-factly. "He wanted to get rid of anyone with an education so he could start from year zero. In his mind, farmers would take over the land, providing everything the country needed. Intellectuals were a barrier to his plan, so they had to be re-educated. This of course meant being killed. For the guards of the Khmer Rouge, they were not killing innocent people, they were only re-educating them."

I looked at Angela. Her facial expression was the same as mine: uncomprehending horror.

"Children were easy to manipulate," he told us. "So the Khmer Rouge used them as guards in S-21. The children knew no difference, only what they were told to believe. So you can't really blame them. In fact, the Khmer Rouge kidnapped a lot of young children. They took them to indoctrination camps."

I thought of the photo exhibition we saw back in the prison. Young guards barely into their teens. Many of them had tortured their own citizens, maybe even people they knew.

"They were told not to show any emotion, any sympathy. They were not allowed to laugh or cry. They were like robots, obeying only the regime. But sometimes even the guards were not safe. Look."

We arrived at another mass grave, this one surrounded by a wooden fence. It had a sign that read: Mass graves of victims without heads.

"These were Pol Pot's soldiers and guards," Samnang explained. "Their heads were cut off to make sure they were really dead. But it wasn't just the soldiers who were killed. Their wives and children were slaughtered too. He didn't want any memory of the men to remain."

I asked why the Khmer Rouge would want to kill their own guards.

"Many reasons," Samnang answered. "But it all boiled down to one thing: they thought they were traitors."

We passed a palm tree that had some of its branches cut short. Samnang stopped next to it. "Feel this branch here," he said. Both Angela and I did so, feeling the rough, serrated edge.

"It was where guards cut prisoners' throats. The edge was sharp enough to do this."

The pagoda was full of human skulls, pile upon pile of them, shelf upon shelf. Some had bullet holes, but most were simply caved in. We walked past the displays in silence, shocked and incredibly saddened by the sight of them all. The Killing Fields had been in operation for three years, until Vietnam invaded Kampuchea in 1979, and the Khmer Rouge regime crumbled. But during those three terrible years, due to a mixture of executions, starvation and poor medical care, between one and three million people died. That was a quarter of the population.

Angela and I arrived back at our hotel, suitably humbled. And to think that Pol Pot had only died in 1998 (from malaria), without having to face any charges of mass genocide against his own people. Unbelievable.

If you have enjoyed reading this, then perhaps you will like the book this excerpt came from. It's called Temples, Tuk-tuks and Fried Fish Lips by Jason Smart. It chronicles my travels through 10 Asian countries.

Avialble HERE: UK Amazon

Or Here: US Amazon

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Comments

[Keep Smiling]

A sensitive telling...
...of an horrific tale.

[Cessna152]

Thanks. The only other place I can really compare it to is the Genocide Museum in Kigali. That was pretty depressing.

[Dancing Dave]

WHY?
We didn't visit the Genocide museum or Klling Fields in our recent visit to Cambodia. Your blog confirms why. A beautiful peaceful people subjected to unspeakable evil...Lest we Forget.

[D MJ Binkley]

Phnom Penh
Nice photo