Spent my last day in Cambodia visiting the infamous Killing fields of Choeung Ek and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
I'd deliberately left these two places till the very end even though I'd spent so much time in Phnom Penh over the past two months, partly because I knew it would be a scene difficult to digest, and also because I felt that it would be a good way to end this journey, coming to terms with what this country had been through 30 years ago and how far the locals have come.
The Killing Fields was one of the many mass graves sites during the Khmer Rouge era where thousands were brought from the Tuol Sleng detention centre to be massacred. A stupa containing the skulls of the 8985 corpses found here has been erected near the entrance, a poignant sight for anyone. I've never seen a real human skull before this and the sight of all these skulls and bones stacked on top one another was quite unbearable, especially knowing that these were innocent human beings who did not deserve any of this. These bones were found from the 86 of the 129 mass graves which have been unearthed. As you walk by each dug up grave, it's easy to see that all are far too small to be the burial ground for hundreds of people slaughtered and flung into them. On the muddy paths you can still see remnants of the victims' bones and they serve as a painful reminder that no human being should ever be treated this way.
Tuol Sleng (aka S21) was an even harder one to fathom. Previously a high school, it had been converted into a detention and torture centre for an estimated 17,000 people. The 1 km2 compound contained 4 main buildings which served as torture rooms and cells. Building A was the most disturbing. The rooms contained the torture instruments, iron beds and chains left in place since 1979, and to make it even more unsettling, a photograph of the victim who had been found chained to that very bed in that very same room when the Vietnamese came to liberate the camp. Blood stains can even be seen in some of these rooms. Building C was extremely haunting - barbed wires had been installed on all the corridor balconies to prevent desperate prisoners from committing suicide. Imagine having your freedom so restricted that you couldn't even end your life in a way you had control over. In each room, brick and wooden single cells had been built and it was very dark and eerie. You can almost hear the victims wailing in silence as you walk through the dark and narrow walkways.
Walking through S21 reminded me of Auschwitz - how countless innocent people were detained and tortured, and finally sent for mass execution. These two cannot (and should not) be compared in terms of the atrocities and number of victims claimed as both were no less evil than the other, and any human life taken in this manner is just totally unnecessary. One just wonders how anybody could do this to a fellow human being. These places serve as painful reminders to mankind that such beastly behaviour should never be repeated, but sadly enough it's still going on everyday today in our world.
