Cambodia: Phnom Penh II

As mentioned before, part of our stay in Cambodia involved visiting the genocide museum at Toul Seng, and the Killing Fields just outside of Phnom Penh. Both of these places are a painful but necessary reminder of the atrocities that occured under the Khmer Rouge's regime.

Even though it has been weeks since these visits (I'm writing this a little late) I am still unsure of how to write about them. I guess it's best to start with the facts.

The Khmer Rouge, a self-procalimed communist regime that took power in the late 60's after a bloody civil war not helped by blanket bombings by the Americans to flush out the Vietcong, used what had been a high school in Phnom Penh as "Security Prison 21" also called Toul Seng. The words Toul Seng roughly translate to "Poison Hill" or "Hill of the Poisoned/Guilty" and this detention centre was used to detain and torture any suspected subversive citizens. In all between 10,000 and 20,000 prisoners were detained and tortured here, only 7 survived. The average life-span of prisoners once they were detained was between 3 and 6 months, after this they were driven a few miles out of town and killed at what are now called the Killing Fields. The prisoners were usually told to kneel in groups in front of a pre-dug ditch used as a mass grave, and then they were either bludgeoned to death or had their throats slit. This avoided wasting bullets. Their bodies were then doused with DDT to kill those still alive and to avoid the stench of their corpses from alerting the locals. Despite this horrific death it must have been a relief to some extent as their lives at Toul Seng were pretty gruelling. Each prisoner was either locked in a tiny dark individual cell or, more commonly, shackled by their ankles to a metal rod/pole with 4 prisoners attached to each metre of the pole. Unless taken out for torture, or a wash once in a while, the prisoners had to lie there neither moving nor speaking without a guard's permission. I will spare you the details of the tortures, needless to say they were atrocious. The vast majority of the prisoners posed no threat to the Khmer Rouge but this intensively paranoid and controlling government chose to see signs of subterfuge in the simplest of acts such as chatting to one's friends or even writing letters. Many one-time guards of the prisons eventually became prisoners. Even children weren't spared the horrors of Toul Seng.

Given the past of Toul Seng and the Killing Fields you will no doubt understand how chilling and moving visiting them was. Toul Seng looks like your ordinary high school except for the barbed wired. Then you walk inside the classrooms to see hundreds of mug shots of its prisoner - men, women and children, or tiny cells, or instruments of torture. It is a quiet place these days - the signs that discourage visitors from laughing or smiling are not needed as most people seem numb from imagining what happened here. The Killing fields too are peaceful now: just a field of ditches where the mass graves were dug up, and a stupa built in the middle of them to commemorate those who died here. Upon entering the stupa you are confronted, literally centimetres in front of you, and not behind glass, with the 8000 skulls found here. Skulls of real men, women and children who were ruthlessly killed. The thought of these skulls still disgusts me and moves me in equal measures.

When I try to think of one word that describes what happened at these places, all i can come up with is unimagineable. I can't imagine living in constant fear. I can't imagine the pain of being tortured. I can't imagine being so scared of the consequences of refusal that I would obey orders to torture and kill another human being. I can't imagine that anyone could be so twisted as to give those orders. I can't imagine what it is to kneel blindfolded in front of a mass grave, hearing people around me being beaten to death and waiting my turn.

But these things did happen, they happened within the last 30 odd years, and perhaps the saddest thing of all is that similar acts of violence still occur in places today.