I've been searching for the proper words to convey the Kingdom of Cambodia, its present and its past as Democratic Kampuchea, and mostly just failing at finding any that seem to successfully capture what I have witnessed here.
Our second or third day in Phnom Penh, we visited Tuol Sleng, formerly known as S-21, a Khmer Rouge prison. They estimate that up to 20,000 people came through Tuol Sleng between 1975 and 1979 and that no more than 14 are lived past the end of the KR's rule. (The lowest estimate of prisoners is the 12,000-some they have records for, and is the number being used in the international tribunal I will tell about later. The lowest estimate of those who survived: 7. Everyone else was killed.) Tuol Sleng is now a "genocide museum" and a crumbling one at that.
14 S-21 inmates, political prisoners, were killed as the KR left the facility just ahead of the Vietnamese army. When the Vietnamese arrived they found these 14 people dead in their cells in the A building of the prison. While these rooms have been cleaned, they have all of the items in them - bed, manacles, sometimes a broom or bed pan, that were there when the prison was vacated. Each of these 14 rooms also has a photo of the individual killed in the room - a photo of their corpse as it was found, and - if they could find it - a photo of the individual from when they entered Tuol Sleng or from before the KR takeover. They are now buried in the courtyard.
The second building - B - was filled with communal cells, similar to those we saw at the Hanoi Hilton. In these cells, prisoners are all shackled or manacled (or sometimes both) to the same pole in the middle of the room. They share sleeping space, bathroom space, dining space. Guards usually keep them from talking. Along with showing one or two of these communal cell rooms, this building also held huge displays of the photos taken of each prisoner when they entered S-21, and showed the chair they sat on for these pictures. It reminded me of the chair you sit in at the eye doctor's... except it held your neck in the correct place, rather than your forehead, and looked like a torture device. They also had paintings of the most common torture techniques used by the KR, and had some of the implements in various corners of the rooms. In one room there was also a display of skulls, bones and clothing recovered from the S-21 Killing Fields - Choung Ek, which I will again, tell more about later.
Building C had the individual cells. One sign told about living conditions in these cells. Prisoners were not able to talk to each other, leave their cells, have exercise or yard time, may or may not have been able to relieve themselves in a pail, and showers consisted of a guard spraying down the cell with a hose once a week. The sign continued that the purpose of this "shower" was not to allow the prisoner to bathe, but rather to clean the cell, which tended to stink too much if this procedure was not performed. Some of the individual cells were made of brick, some of wood. Tuol Sleng at one point had been a high school, so these walls separating cells had been added later by the KR. As a result, some prisoners had no light or ventilation in their cells, except for the small amount able to filter in from the six inches or so left between the walls and the ceiling. The floor above the cells had two museum exhibits. One told the history of the Khmer Rouge, from Pre-Takeover to the body counts as of 2005. The second had some stories of how various KR underlings went from leading a village or small group or a province to being held in Tuol Sleng. These stories were all told by surviving relatives and the "biographies" they were forced to write as part of their confessions and torture in the prison. They had such high ideals; thought they were fighting for something good and noble. I can only imagine the horror and disappointment they must have felt.
The last building - D - had three floors. The top floor was a viewing room for a documentary about S-21. To be honest, I was too busy trying to not pass out from heat and stuffiness to remember much of the movie. The bottom floor had a photo exhibit put together by the museum and a Dutch (? - Western European anyway) journalist who visited Cambodia during the KR - one of the few Westerners allowed into the country after the takeover. He said he put together this exhibit as a way to show what he and his colleagues had seen, what they had wanted to see, and what he now believed about what they were shown. This group of journalists became western members of the Khmer Rouge's "propaganda machine" after this visit. The one interviewed for this project said they were all Marxists and members of the local Socialist party. They went into the visit with the idea that the KR represented a more perfect Maoist revolution. And that was what they saw. Everything that should have raised questions - where are the "new people", how much of this is staged, why are so many children working in factories, etc. - became a short-term imperfection that the KR planned to correct once the economy rebounded. The exhibit was bookended with comments from the journalist, which expressed his deep sorrow and disillusionment that have entered his life as a result of this visit and the truth of the KR. I didn't visit the second floor. I had had enough prison.
The next week we all took a day or two to visit the International Tribunal that is currently prosecuting or conducting pre-trial chambers for five of the former KR leaders. The first two days (the two I went to) were the beginning of the trial for the man who ran the S-21 prison - Duch. Being at the tribunal was fascinating. There was so much procedural hoopla that went on.
... I'm going to need to finish this another day. The hotel here in Siem Reap (where Angkor Wat is located!! Stoked!) seems to be wanting to shut down the internet and lobby for the night.
To be continued...
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