Day 34 Phnom Penh and Choeung Ek (The Killing Fields), Cambodia

Day 34 – His.

This is not going to be a happy story. Today we went to the killing fields.

The killing fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979. Analysis of the 20,000 mass graves around the country guess that there were at least 1.3 million victims. Estimates of the total number of deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.5 million out of a population of around 8 million. As our guide pointed out to us this is a unique attempted genocide in one significant way. It was committed by a people upon themselves.

The best known monument of the Killing Fields is at the village of Choeung Ek, which is the one we visited, and Tuol Sleng (which means "Hill of the Poisonous Trees" or "Strychnine Hill") also known as Prison S-21, which we also went to. S-21 (which was a high school before it became a prison) has a museum commemorating the genocide. The museum preserves the cells, instruments of torture, prisoner art and photographs of the 17,000 who passed into the gates. Incidentally, of those 17,000 only 7 came out alive.

At any one time, the prison held between 1,000–1,500 prisoners. They were repeatedly tortured and coerced into naming family members and close associates, who were in turn arrested, tortured and killed. In the early months of the life of  S-21's, most of the victims were from the previous Lon Nol regime and included soldiers, government officials, as well as academics, doctors, teachers, students, factory workers, monks, engineers and so on. Later, the party leadership's paranoia turned on its own ranks and purges throughout the country saw thousands of party activists and their families brought there and murdered in the most horrendous manner including some of Pol Pot’s high ranking officials as the guy went increasingly crazy. In the museum buildings are display after display of the faces of the people who were imprisoned there. Patti and I once went to the Tate at St Ives. We saw a sculpture there by Gormley. The sculpture was rows upon rows of little figurines. They were only about 15 cm high and had little blobs for heads. But Gormley had punched button eyes into the blobs and arranged them so they were all looking at you as you walked around the sculpture – I think there were around 6,000 of them, expressionless, watching. The rows of Photographs in S-21 were similar. Rows upon rows of eyes watching you as you walked around and in their eyes you could see the sure and certain knowledge these people had of what was before them.

Upon arrival at the prison, prisoners were photographed and required to give detailed autobiographies, beginning with their childhood and ending with their arrest. After that, they were forced to strip to their underwear, and their possessions were confiscated. The prisoners were then taken to their cells. Those taken to the smaller cells were shackled to the walls or the concrete floor. Those who were held in the large mass cells were collectively shackled to long pieces of iron bar. The shackles were fixed to alternating bars; the prisoners slept with their heads in opposite directions. They slept on the floor without mats, mosquito nets, or blankets. They were forbidden to talk to each other. The cells remain and the floors are covered in the stains of blood and piss and vomit that 33 years of scrubbing have been unable to remove. You can still see it as you walk around.

The prisoners were forced to eat human faeces and drink piss and hosed down like pigs in their muck every four days. The terrible living conditions in the prison caused all manner of diseases, lice, rashes, ringworm and other painful and degrading symptoms. Most prisoners at S-21 were held there for two to three months. Within two or three days after they were brought to S-21, all prisoners were taken for interrogation. The torture system at Tuol Sleng was designed to make prisoners confess to whatever crimes they were charged with by their captors. Prisoners were routinely beaten and tortured with electric shocks, searing hot metal instruments and hanging, as well as through the use of various other means. Some prisoners were cut with knives or suffocated with plastic bags. Other methods for generating confessions included pulling out fingernails while pouring alcohol on the wounds, holding prisoners’ heads under water. Women were raped by the interrogators. Although many prisoners died from this kind of abuse, killing them outright was discouraged, since the Khmer Rouge needed their confessions. The so called "Medical Unit" at Tuol Sleng, however, did kill at least 100 prisoners by bleeding them to death.

In their confessions, the prisoners were asked to describe their personal background. Then the prisoners would relate their supposed treasonous activities in chronological order. The third section of the confession text described prisoners’ thwarted conspiracies and supposed treasonous conversations. At the end, the confessions would list a string of traitors who were the prisoners’ friends, colleagues, or acquaintances. Some lists contained over a hundred names. People whose names were in the confession list were often called in for interrogation.

Typical confessions ran into thousands of words in which the prisoner would interweave true events in their lives with imaginary accounts of their espionage activities for the CIA, the KGB, or Vietnam. The confession of one famous prisoner ended with the words "I am not a human being, I'm an animal". Physical torture was combined with sleep deprivation and deliberate neglect of the prisoners. The torture implements on display in the museum have to be seen to be believed. Primitive, medieval and horribly, horribly effective.

In the end, I gave up. I went outside, sat beneath a tree and cried. I couldn’t help it. It was just too much. I think what upset me so much is the idea that the history of the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia is not an accident. I think it lurks inside all of us and what I was looking at was a reflection of ourselves. To be honest I think all ‘decent’ people (of which I number myself) should see this and recognise it could happen anywhere and at anytime. Knowing this just might help prevent it. Though I doubt it. I can think of quite a few horrific attempted genocides the world over and up to the present day. Do we ever learn? And so I sit beneath a tree, thousands of miles from home and cry as the button eyes of 17,000 souls watch me from faded photographs.

 For the first year of S-21’s existence, corpses were buried near the prison. However, by the end of 1976, they ran out of burial spaces, the prisoner and their family were therefore taken to the Choeung Ek extermination centre, fifteen kilometres from Phnom Penh. There, they were killed by being battered with iron bars, pickaxes, machetes and many other makeshift weapons owing to the scarcity, and subsequent price of ammunition. Children were smashed against a tree that stands there, the killing tree, it is covered in ribbons and beads from a thousand visitors and the mothers were killed beside them. The husband’s had their heads sawn off with palm branches. After the prisoners were executed, the soldiers who had accompanied them from S-21 buried them in graves that held as few as 6 and as many as 450 bodies in pits 7 meters deep.

The memorial park has been built around the mass graves of many thousands of victims. The utmost respect is given to the victims of the massacres through signs and tribute sections throughout the park. Many dozens of mass graves are visible above ground, many which have not been excavated as of yet. Bones and clothing surface after heavy rainfalls due to the large number of bodies still buried in shallow mass graves and we walked around it trying not to step on the risen bones that poked through the earth.

In the middle of the field is a Buddhist monument where they have piled 8,000 skulls. You must remove your shoes to pay your respects and signs all around ask you not to laugh or speak – though nobody feels like doing that. Patti couldn’t face going into the monument and she sat beneath a tree trying to come to terms with what she saw. We came away having learnt something.

 
Day 34 – Hers.

It was in a contemplative mood that we returned to Phnom Penh.  Our guide for the day (He was called ‘Lucky’ because he had been born after 1979 and did not see what the rest of his family had experienced.) answered questions and tried to get us to understand the feelings of the Cambodian people today.  The seven survivors received compensation of $25 a year.  The international trial of one of the only five people charged with war crimes cost $78 million and only finished this past February. Nevertheless, the people want to look forward – not to forget what happened – but to rebuild their country, their families and their pride. 

We were greeted at the hotel by the inevitable tuk tuk drivers, cheerfully offering to drive us to the Russian market (‘Just 5 dolla’) but we needed some time to ourselves just to think – so we decided to walk to the market.

On the way, we selected one road and decided to go into the first restaurant we saw on that road that had no Western customers.  We were at first disappointed to find that the restaurant that fit the rules of our game was, in fact, ‘Lucky Burger’.  There are no McDonalds or Burger Kings in Phnom Penh (though they do have KFC – Our guide Lucky says that here that stands for Kentucky fried crickets - and Dairy Queen) – and the guidebook had mentioned that the Lucky Burger restaurants were worth a try – so we followed the rules and went in.  We ordered burger meals and sat amongst the locals, munching fries and sipping diet coke.  It turned out to be quite cool – and the restaurant staff seemed really pleased we were there; they smiled a lot and practised their English.

When we got to the Russian Market, we were sorry we had already eaten.  About one third of the market is given over to little cafes, lined with locals, eating all sorts of things that looked really interesting – including crickets.  We would have gone back for dinner – except the market closes at half past 5.  The Russian Market got its name in the 1980s because it was where all the Russians shopped.  It has a really good mix of local produce, meats, fish, household goods and tourist tat.  There is one section for motorbike tyres and one section for beautiful jewellery.  The aisles are much wider than the indoor market in Hanoi – giving the stallholders a bit more room to live their lives (bathe the baby, have a nap, etc. etc.).

We wanted to make sure we had time to see the National Museum, so we had a tuk tuk ride from the market back to the palace.  We photographed the magnificent facade of the palace and then walked back to the museum where they have an excellent collection of pre-Ankhor and more modern sculpture and artifacts – mostly religious.  You could buy sticks of fragrant hyacinths to give as offerings to the Buddha in several of the rooms, stroll in the magnificent garden and see a film about the German-Cambodian archaeological project that is trying to discover and preserve the rich heritage of Cambodia.  I, of course, again began to wish I were an archaeologist.  It happens every time....

A Buddhist monk spoke to us on the way into the museum – ‘Are you going to the museum?’ he asked, smiling. ‘Enjoy it.’  We saw him again later, in the museum – ‘We see each other again,’ he said.  Yesterday, I would have been very intimidated by such an encounter with a holy person – since then, we have learned that ALL Cambodian men become monks for a short time before beginning work (usually about 2 years) – so our friendly monk was probably just a teenager fulfilling his duty before becoming a tour guide, practising his English when he could.

Being a tour guide in Cambodia is seen as a good job.  Limny tells us proudly of how he supports his mother and always pays when the family goes out to dinner because he earns the most.  Lucky is using his salary to fund a university degree in English Literature.  He really wants to travel.  Everyone we have spoken to has a story to tell – about picking up the pieces after decades of strife.  They still have a long way to go but they seem to be a delightful people and it is hard not to root for them.