Our first full day in PP, and the first morning in almost a week where we haven’t had to set the alarm to get up for something specific. Ironic then that we both wake up fairly early (around 06.00) and struggle to get back to sleep, then are awoken at 08.00 by hammering nearby – turns out there’s a building site next door – so much for the oasis! Breakfast is excellent, then we’re off out to book a Khmer cookery course, which is only a couple of blocks away – we sign up for tomorrow. Our afternoon is already planned so by 10.30 we’ve got some time to kill so we head to the Royal Palace. Well, that’s the plan anyway, as it turns out it’s closed until 14.00 so we’d better think again! We walk down the riverside, and welcome the wind that comes with it – temperatures are well above 30 degrees already. We’re constantly accosted by tuk tuk drivers who seem amazed that we want to walk anywhere! We decide to head to central market, a busy place characterised by a beautiful art deco dome. We’ve miscalculated and it’s slightly further than expected and by the time we arrive we’re both dripping – temperatures are definitely rising, so we head into the shade. The market itself is a brick-built building with an amazing central dome and entrances along the cardinal directions, surrounded by a large ‘proper’ market (the central area is reserved for jewellery and electronics stalls). We’re just browsing for now and start to wander, but soon realise the place is a maze – there are probably double the number of stalls we originally envisaged due to the narrow passages between them. We wander to a food area and see, for the first time, a sight that Linda is definitely not happy with – deep fried spiders! These are big things too – imagine your quintessential tarantula and that’s basically what you’re looking at – fried and piled high! We move on... Our hotel room has got a beautiful silk runner on the bed and Linda has decided she wants something similar for our table, so we start hunting. There’s no shortage of takers, though unfortunately the language barrier and lack of available merchandise is something of a hindrance. We do find one place though that has cushion covers in a colour that Linda likes and the haggling starts from there! We also find some runners that are almost right, so we sort out a price that’s mutually agreeable for those too, and end up with what we reckon is a good deal. Still, buying homewares in Cambodia didn’t seem high on my list at the start of the trip! Job done though, we head for some lunch before the afternoon’s ‘entertainment’.
Here’s where things get altogether more serious. This afternoon we head out to the killing fields outside Phnom Penh (Choeung Ek) and we also visit Tuol Sleng, or S21 – security office 21 – the Phnom Penh genocide museum of the Khmer Rouge. This will not be a history lesson, most of you will be aware of this and if you are not then I recommend you jump elsewhere on the web and find out ASAP – the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge are well documented and are as bad (if not worse) than many or all of the other genocides that have been committed around the globe over the last 70 years or so. As we head out to Choeung Ek, we’re treated to a video that suggests but doesn’t deliver in terms of what happened. The killing fields themselves definitely do and then some. We arrive in time to see a 15 minute video outlining the history of the site. The video itself is very badly made, it must date from the late 90s, but the content is extremely disturbing and highlights the area of Choeung Ek and what it was like back then. We move on to see the place. It’s very emotional, the stuppa (or shrine to the dead) has many hundreds of human skulls and other bones excavated from the site, plus piles of clothes that were removed from the mass graves. We walk round the fields. There are indentations in the soil. These are the mass graves. Tens of thousands of people were murdered here, and – unlike nazi Germany – each one was done by hand, one person literally killing another, usually with a basic tool – club, axe, whatever. It’s heartbreaking. There’s a tree where many of the deaths took place, and where the KR would literally take children and swing them round by the legs hitting their heads against the tree until they were dead (quote from the KR: “why leave the children alive, they might come back to you later for revenge.”) We try to reconcile it but we can’t – it’s impossible, there’s such a gulf between what we consider acceptable and what happened – it almost hurts just thinking about it. A number of the mass graves remain in situ – why disturb them. However, a function of this is that when it rains heavily (and it does, they have a whole season for it in Cambodia) more things start to surface – bones, clothes, that sort of thing. Disturbingly, as we move through the fields, Linda sees something she thinks is a bone. It is, it’s a skull, still filled with soil, teeth visible (I’m shaking my head in disbelief as I write this). We head back. This is just part one, the genocide museum will not be any better or easier.
Tuol Sleng is a former school in Phnom Penh that was converted to the primary PP interrogation centre, or security office 21 – S21 as it was known. There are four three-storey buildings onsite that housed prisoners and were used for torture from 1975-1979 during the reign on the Khmer Rouge. To say it’s stark and grim is something of an understatement – most of the rooms in the buildings remain as they were when they were discovered by the Vietnamese when they took PP in 1979. Building A was used for interrogation (read: torture) and the evidence is still there, it hasn’t been moved since. You see a steel-framed bed, and above it on the wall is a photograph of a corpse still attached to it (there were 14 bodies found in S21, the last of the KR’s victims). Most of the photos and pictures here do not pull any punches – what’s the point in beating round the bush when the subject matter is this serious? Building B housed prisoners, and the rooms were hastily converted – via bricks and wood – to house 6’x4’ cells. The contents, minimal though they are, still remain – and this includes blood pools. It being Cambodia, this is not a museum – you can go anywhere and see anything, it’s a place to see exactly what happened. It’s refreshing but nauseous. A constant theme throughout buildings B-D (for they all had the same basic function) is photographs of all the internees at S21, and there are a very large number of them – some 20,000 people passed through the gates of which only 7 survived (though most of the rest were taken to Choeung Ek to be killed). Viewing the pictures is uncomfortable viewing – it’s all in the eyes – fear, defiance, ignorance and who knows what else. So many of them are so young – well, most are very young, but to see pictures of small children with ‘prisoner’ numbers round their necks is very very disturbing and heartbreaking. There are no smiles. We see the torture instruments and techniques used. All barbaric, though we learn where the CIA might have discovered waterboarding. We finish with a photo expo with former members of the Khmer Rouge trying to justify what they did (many are still alive). Again, this is hard to reconcile.
It’s been a tough afternoon. I’m thinking back to famous psychology experiments I’ve read about (e.g. the Stanford Prison Experiment) that have determined that given power, people will basically do anything and given appropriate guidance from an authority figure the same is also true. What is it about us that causes ordinarily normal and sane human beings to do utterly and unquestionably unspeakable things, acts that they know are absolutely wrong (e.g. killing children) and yet are able to go through with such acts and – I assume – justify it to themselves. Maybe it’s the herd mentality, I don’t know, but it’s really scary and history has shown us that we’re not learning from our mistakes – even in the last 40 years we’ve had Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Sudan – what’s next, and when will we learn? I’m not sure we should even use the word civilization any more...
