There’s two things everyone knows about Cambodia; one involves temples and the other involves torture and worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Today, a Sunday, we were going to see the second one. In the morning we kept ourselves to ourselves and twiddled around the hotel, once again fighting the backlog of days and days of travelling to be written about, and pictures to go with. Just after midday we walked back down Sihanouk Boulevard to the Lucky Supermarket and bought some bits and pieces like pineapple and dragonfruit for lunch, and some pastries as well, and met in the lobby at 1.30pm to get in the tour bus. This afternoon’s activities were included in the tour so we had a guide as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He introduced himself as Mr Heng (which isn’t pronounced the way it looks) but said that it meant Lucky and if we couldn’t remember how to say ‘Aing’ then we could call him Mr. Lucky instead. Just like Nak he started by telling his little bit of the story of the Khmer Rouge years and where he fit in; it seems most of his family is now dead so Mr Lucky sounds about right.<\/p>\n
It’s not very far to drive to the Tuol Sleng Museum; it was actually located more or less in the middle of city blocks, which leads you to wonder how they got away with some of what went on. But they were the government, weren’t they? Tuol Sleng, the pamphlet explains, used to be a primary school, and between 1975 and 1979 there lots of kids hanging around the place but they had guns and served as guards. All of the prisons and torture centres the Khmer Rouge set up were numbered and this one was S21. There were something like 373 similar centres around Cambodia, and 169 Killing Fields.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Speaking of numbers…in April 1975 Pol Pot took over. In 1979 the Vietnamese invaded after Cambodia started launching attacks into Vietnam, and the Khmer Rouge fled the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In between, something like 1.7 million people were killed, although many of these died of starvation or overwork. Or starvation followed by overwork, followed by a bit more starvation just to finish the job.<\/p>\n
So it’s good to see that directly next to the entry gate, on the left, there is a framed display case with pictures of the people who were in charge of S21, and of Pol Pot (Brother Number One) and his compadres Nuon Chea (Brother Number Two and Second-in-Command) and Ieng Sary (Brother Number Three, and Foreign Minister). Those people will be tried for war crimes sometime this year or next; and they are in jail now, except for Pol Pot who ‘died’ in Thailand in 1997. Khieu Sampan, the nominal head of state at the time, also has his picture in the glass case, and is on the list to be prosecuted for war crimes just as soon as he can be. The man that actually ran S21 from day to day \u2013 Kang Kak Ieu (aka ‘Comrade Duch’) \u2013 used to be a maths teacher, and he is also dead now. The Khmer Rouge was actually a name added on externally; the republic declared at the time, from ’75 to ’79, referred to itself as Democratic Kampuchea. Kampuchea is what Cambodia used to be called; Cambodia is actually just a corruption of the name ‘Kampuchea’, while the people who live there have been called ‘Khmer’ since the hills were made. \u00a0<\/p>\n
I’m not sure whether Democratic Kampuchea appointed a Health Minister at that time, or if so, what that person did.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But as for the centre itself… it actually was a high school before the past happened, but they won’t be using it for that now. All of the classrooms were converted into smaller rooms so that they could be used as cells; there are four main buildings, each four or five stories high, done in faded yellow paint. We only visited three of them. In Building A the individual cells are left as they were, with single iron beds that have leg and arm clamps, and a box for prisoners to go toilet in. Sometimes, if they hadn’t been fed enough, prisoners would resort to something I’d rather not repeat here.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When the Vietnamese arrived in 1979 they found zero surviving prisoners and several dead ones. The dead ones were discovered by a Vietnamese soldier, who took a picture of each of these people, and these pictures are displayed on the wall of the cell where each person was found. In the courtyard of Tuol Sleng are simple white tombs for each of these people.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The windows of the cells have iron bars in them but at the time they had barbed wire as well. Heng explained in great and meticulous detail, though not with any relish whatsoever, the processes by which inmates were tortured, the somewhat contradictory rules of the camp, which make Guantanamo look like a picnic with tea and biscuits, and also about the various means of killing those who they simply could not be bothered to torture or work to death any further. Very few were actually shot; they were beaten to death with iron bars or other agricultural implements, or had their throats slit with the sharp edge of a palm branch. It didn’t really matter what so long as they ‘saved bullets, and so long as they pulled out the weed by the root, or in other words, killed the whole family of anyone who had been arrested.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The rules of S21 were these:\u00a0<\/p>\n
1. You must answer accordingly to my questions. Don’t turn them away.\u00a0<\/p>\n
2. Do not try to hide the facts by making pretexts of this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
3. Do not be a fool for you are a chap who dares to thwart the revolution.<\/p>\n
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.\u00a0<\/p>\n
5. Do not tell me either about your immoralities or the revolution.\u00a0<\/p>\n
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n
7. Do nothing. Sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
8. Do not make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.\u00a0<\/p>\n
9. If you do not follow all the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire.<\/p>\n
10. If you disobey any of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric wire.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Seems a bit complex, given that all they wanted to achieve was a confession of some type so that they had the ‘right’ to execute basically everyone educated enough to count past the number 10.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Building B they ‘stored’ the female prisoners, but in wooden cells about 1m x 2m, which were fabricated inside the concrete building. In there it’s like a maze, where the goal is to understand how such a thing could have happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Building C is more like an exhibition room; when each prisoner arrived, just before confessing all of their crimes against the revolution, every prisoner had their photo taken, and many of the pictures are now set up inside glass cases. The people in the pictures don’t look dead but they all are. Most of them look puzzled, tired, or horrified, while some of them look like they are under 15 years old. In the same building are paintings by two of the four living survivors of S21; Vann Nath and Chum Mey. These guys were lucky enough to be commissioned to paint portraits of Pol Pot and others within the government. They were ‘essential workers.’ The third survivor was a mechanic, the fourth was a woman who I think they just didn’t get around to executing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We toured around with Mr Heng for about an hour, and then had a 15-minute break before the drive out to Choeung Ek (The Killing Fields). We sat pretty much mute and stunned. Nak spotted us waiting and came over to see if anyone had anything to say.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘How do you feel about this now?’ he asked me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘I think it’s safely the most awful thing I’ll ever see,’ I can remember saying. ‘I don’t think anyone will ever understand why it happened’ \u2013 although Heng told us several times during the tour that it was just because the Khmer Rouge wanted to create an equalitarian society with no rich and no poor \u2013 ‘but I feel like I can actually believe that it did happen.’\u00a0<\/p>\n
And then we got on the bus.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On the way out to the Killing Fields you go past some very basic and poverty-stricken accommodation, and also past the local sewerage works, where they grow vast acres of water vegetables in the open ponds to feed to pigs. We passed a large tent done up in yellow and pink, from which came loud and festive music; this, Nak explained, is what a Cambodian wedding looks like. Some people in the old days, he says, would have three days of wedding celebrations, which is a lot of pink and yellow.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nothing really distinguishes from the surrounding countryside the fact that you are nearing the Killing Fields (or one of them, to be precise.) Until you get close there is no grave sense of foreboding and no vast collections of shadows darkening the sky. Pull up at the front gate and you can see the high stone memorial stupa, which has four sides, is about 25m high, and in the middle contains several glass shelves of human skulls. Heng made mention in the S21 museum of the fact that you can tell a male skull from a female one by the bumps over the eyebrows. Men have these and women do not; but the more noticeable feature of the skulls is how many cracks or holes of some kind in them. And in the very bottom shelf of the stupa are piles of clothes which were removed from inmates before they were done away with.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The other feature of the Choeung Ek museum worth noting is the mass graves, but today these are just flat wide holes in the ground. It’s difficult to imagine them full of corpses, and difficult to imagine being the person who first found the skeletons all stuffed in together.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Heng must have noticed everyone looking a bit flat-faced and pale \u2013 in fact that probably happens at this time on every tour \u2013 because he interrupted to tell a story about how to get an ant to crawl out of your ear. In the countryside, where such things seem to be a problem regularly, the ant will not usually just crawl out of it’s own accord. So what you do is lick your finger and rub the saliva in your bellybutton, then hold your finger there for five minutes and the ant will crawl out. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Some random dude decided that he would join our tour and listen in for a while, but he missed what kind of insect it was, and this the point of the story. Which was unfortunate for him.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After that there are some plaques telling you about the purpose of the Khmer Rouge regime, and details of foreigners who were trapped in Cambodia and were arrested and done away with, as well as some historical details like the layout of buildings and the process by which the mass graves were found and the memorial built. By far the worst part was the Killing Tree, against which some prisoners were swung feet first. Or, alternately, the sharp edge of a palm branch was used to slit the throat. I never knew it, but on closer examination the edge of the branch is serrated and the teeth are large and rigid.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And then we got back in the bus, and went back to now, where things are not quite so bad. We got back to the hotel by about 6pm, and split up for dinner. We went to a little Korean Restaurant next door to the hotel, where they recognised us as tourists (despite my fiendish disguise) and asked whether we were in ‘this hotel’ (gesturing right) or ‘that one’ (gesturing left). The two Korean men in the restaurant very funny; one tall, one short, both with those Kim Jong Il sunshades (inside at night) and both friendly. And both surprised at my interest in Kim Chi, a Korean traditional food which consists of various vegetables preserved by heavy salting, ginger-ing, spicing, or all of the above. It’s then served cold with raw onion and a sauce which tastes like concentrated boiled-down soy sauce. It’s like salt paste. But rich. It’s hideous, but goes quite well with raw white onion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘Make you very strong’, said the Korean man, pointing to his arm muscle.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I giggled.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After dinner we went for a little walk back down Sihanouk Boulevarde to have a look at the Independence Monument lit up at night, which was very much worth the walk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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