The brutal history of South East Asia

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The past few days have been rather harrowing. I have seen more evidence of torture: photographs, implements, paintings, descriptions, personal tales and victims bones than I ever thought was possible. It is impossible to comprehend the incredible evil of a small minority of human beings, even when faced with the full horror and facts of genocide and war in such graphic ways. South East Asia has suffered a traumatic and bloody past. I don't pretend for one moment to understand the complexities and horrors of the past few decades but the brief overview I have had from three very important museums/memorials is enough to make you weep and certainly puts life into perspective.

In Phnom Penh - the capital of Cambodia - we visited the Tuol Sleng Museum and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields for a moving and disturbing insight into the terrifying Khmer Rouge regime. The museum is housed in the buildings of a former school which was transformed from innocent seat of learning into Security Prison 21, a hellhole where 20,000 men, women and children were incarcerated, interrogated, abused and tortured then sent to their death. Only 7 people survived.
You may have heard on the news this week that a high profile trial in Cambodia has just found Comrade Duch guilty of crimes against humanity. Duch was the man in charge of S-21. His 35 year sentence is a pitiful punishment for a man who ordered the brutal torture and murder of thousands of innocent people. His signature is at the bottom of letters advising people be submersed in boiling water. He advocated the use of childrens climbing frames in the school playground to be used for hanging prisoners upside down until they became unconscious. His guards built holding cells no bigger than a toilet cubicle and reinforced torture cells to stop neighbours hearing the screams of victims. They fenced in upper floors with barbed wire to deny prisoners the chance of suicide as an escape from their horrific fate. Whole families were dragged from the countryside to the prison and interrogated until they named further family and friends, who were in turn captured and brought in.
If victims survived the demonic tortures inflicted upon them at the prison then they were driven 15km out of the city to the Killing Fields, another slick machine of the Khmer Rouge regime where truckloads of people were slaughtered and dumped in mass graves. Babies were battered to death against trees in front of their mothers. Bullets were fired, skulls were cracked, bodies were bludgeoned. Approximately 17,000 people were executed at the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, hundreds of thousands more at killing fields scattered all across Cambodia. Only half of the mass graves at Choeung Ek have been excavated. The bones have been gathered in a Buddhist Stupa to commemorate the dead. The bones and skulls of these bodies are piled neatly over 17 storeys. But so many more bodies remain in the ground. Every time it rains more evidence of the extent of the graves here is washed up. Walking around the peaceful gardens we found scraps of cloth, shards of bone, and even a whole jaw complete with teeth protruding from the dirt paths. Even in death the victims of the genocide cannot rest in peace, a great anguish for relatives.

Cambodia these days seems alive and happy. Men joke and play tricks on their friends, women chatter in the market, children play and laugh. But this is a nation that is still waiting for answers and for justice. The leader of the Khmer Rouge, the infamous Pol Pot, died of a heart attack while still a free man. Of his top five cronies, only Duch has come to trial so far. No one will admit responsibility or apologise to a nation that was ravaged for years by their actions and orders. It will be interesting to see how the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia - the Khmer Rouge Trial - will pan out in the next few months and years, for these are surely not cases that will be over quickly.


Crossing over the border to Vietnam, the next dose of tragic history came from the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. Another long list of hideous torture methods was displayed around the walls and replica cells with starved maniquins made me jump. Images of skulls with 6 inch nails embedded in them and accounts from amputees were displayed next to coffin-like cages made from barbed wire designed to imprison many detainees at a time. Once again I felt like I only scratched the surface of a complex period in South East Asia's history. The museum was a collection of excellent photographs and media coverage from the time, including pictures taken by several journalists and army photographers killed on the front line. There was also a moving exhibition about the hundreds of thousands of young people that have grown up with severe disabilities due to the after affects of Agent Orange, a herbicide blanketed across great swathes of the Vietnamese countryside by the US in a bid to flush out the Vietcong during the war.

The history of these nations is obviously incredibly important, but the present state of these countries, the hardworking and happy nature of so much of the population and the need to develop and move forward is also clear. I'm hoping to see more evidence of this in the next couple of weeks in Vietnam and leave the harrowing experiences behind me.

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Photos

and foreigners
including journalists, photographers etc

shackles
some to hold dozens of people together by the feet at one time

Holding cells in S-21
hastily and crudely put together with bricks or wood

cells in S-21
there would have been no glorious sunshine pouring in for the prisoners held here in the 1970s

Barbed wire everywhere
to stop prisoners ending their horrendous time here by suicide rather than torture

Paintings by a survivor of S-21
depicting the sickening tortures inflicted on prisoners there

painting of a holding cell
classrooms were converted to cells holding 40-50 people at a time

Stupa at the Choeung Ek Killing Fields
17 stories of skulls and bones recovered from the thousands of bodies excavated from mass graves here.

One of the excavated mass gravess
next to a tree used to batter babies to death.

The 'magic' tree
so called because a speaker was hung from this tree to drown out the death cries. Local people supposedly didn't know that a huge scale killing factory had been set up next door to them.

The Killing Fields site is covered with mass graves, only a small proportion of which have been excavated
It is also now an incredibly green and peaceful place, hopefully a restful place for those who tragically lie beneath the soil here and for their families who need a place to visit and remember and try to understand.

Clothes and bone fragments
Every time it rains more evidence of the scale of the mass graves is uncovered as clothes, bones, teeth and skulls are washed to the surface.

Clothes and a jaw bone protrude from the path
a graphic reminder of just what happened here only 30 years ago.

Comments

[Ian Hunter]

Electric Wire?
What is this electric wire lashing? That sounds pretty brutal--and to prohibit prisoners from crying out in pain during electric lashes? That sounds pretty bad. What are the prisoners here for?

[Forget 9 to 5]

S-21 prison
Hi Ian, thanks for your comment and questions. I think the electric wire lashing was using live wires to give electric shocks to prisoners during interrogation. The regime was extremely brutal as that list of rules implies, particularly banning prisoners from crying out or waving to family etc. Many of the prisoners were there because they were suspected of plotting against Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Often family members were tortured and killed as well because of association with a suspect. Very young children were killed because the Khmer Rouge feared they would want revenge in later life for their parents' deaths.