Friday 21st March
Cambodia obviously has a very troubled recent history, and there are several sights in and around Phnom Penh that provide visitors with an insight into what happened under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. We decided that it would be best to take all of this in in one go as we had heard that it was a fairly intense experience from people who had been there before.
We had some breakfast in a restaurant near the hotel but I could barely stomach the bacon and eggs after seeing a rat run across the floor and then try and climb up onto a nearby table. We made a quick exit, never to return, but fully aware that the town was most likely crawling with the things.
The first place that we chose to visit was the 'Killing Fields' of Choeung Ek, one of the major areas used in the genoicide of ordinary Cambodian people by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1978. It took us about half an hour in a tuk-tuk to drive the 20kms from the centre of Phnom Penh to a site that is situated beside a primary school (the eeriness of the place is accentuated by the sound of kids playing in the background). There isn't a great deal to the place; a large tower (or buddhist stupa) contains the skulls of 8,000 of the 17,000 people who were killed at Choeung Ek. Mass graves, since emptied, scatter the small grounds, with bits of clothing protruding from the earth.
At this stage, we were a bit confused as to why all this had happened, especially by the fact that it had been Cambodians who were responsible for torturing and then killing so many fellow Cambodians. We hoped that the Tuol Sleng Museum would help shed some light on why this genocide had taken place. This building – a former secondary school - is situated in the centre of Phnom Penh, and it served as the imprisonment and torture centre used by Pol Pot's security forces, and was known as Security Prison 21 (S-21).
As we arrived on our tuk-tuk, we were met by some heavily mutilated men: some with no legs, a man with no forearms, and one poor fellow whose face looked like it had been badly burnt, and his disfiguration was very shocking. There are many people like these men about town, begging for money to get by because they are incapable of doing anything for themselves, and each of them with their own horrific story to tell.
The first rooms that we came to on entering the museum were former classrooms that were used to house 'VIP' inmates, perhaps high ranking ex-government officials who were seen as enemies of the Khmer Rouge regime, and who were tortured to death, tied to the iron beds that remain as the solitary items in the rooms. Pictures of dead prisoners, mutilated and covered in blood, hang on the walls.
There were several rooms which had rows of the mugshots of men, women and children, taken by Khmer Rouge officials when they were detained at S-21 for supposedly opposing the revolution. From here, they were taken to Choeung Ek and killed, if they hadn't have been tortured to death before it got to that stage. The simple images of these people, with their faces of absolute fear frozen in time, was very upsetting. I can see thousands and thousands of skulls and bones of dead people and not truly connect with the full horror of the event, but when you see the image of an individual person, still alive and not knowing what their fate was, it becomes very real. All of this happened thirty years ago, so the people in the photos look very similar to the Cambodians you could see outside on the streets of Phnom Penh of 2008. The people in this country lived through a nightmare, and I don't think it's not an exaggeration to use that word after learning more about what happened here.
The rest of the museum includes the cells in which people were detained (brick or wooden cells crudely built in former classrooms), and an exhibition giving firsthand accounts of the stories of people who had lost their lives – civilians, government officials, police and party members – at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. It was a very sobering experience, but we were still unable to get a proper grasp as to why it happened or how such a crime could be committed by people.
We were glad to have seen these reminders of Cambodia's (recent) past, but we were also happy to have the rest of the day free to spend it just chilling out. We had a lazy lunch and moved on for some drinks in a bar near the hotel. After a snooze and a shower, we went to watch a brief documentary explaining the absurd rationale behind the deaths of over a million people in a three year period. Basically, Pol Pot was deranged, thinking that he could introduce an agrarian utopia where everyone worked in the fields to sustain the entire country; money was abolished and schools emptied; and any 'enemies' – children, government ministers, etc. - of the revolution were gotten rid of by largely uneducated party members. When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1978, the Khmer Rouge took to the hills and the whole country collapsed: people downed tools and left the fields in search of their families and friends with the result that the rice harvest failed and hundreds of thousands of people died in the ensuing famine.
We moved on after and had a really enjoyable dinner of hamburgers and ice cream at the 'Garden Cafe Centre', an old colonial-style diner, decorated with art-deco posters, ceiling fans and wicker chairs. We were the only ones in the place and we had a good natter over a few hours. We mosied on back to the hotel, stopped off for a quick drink and a game of pool, before heading back to the rooms for a while.
It had been a busy but interesting day. I had learned a lot and got a better perspective on things, not least the fact that we in 'the west' sometimes don't have a clue about how difficult the lives of other people have been.
