I wasn’t prepared for Cambodia. I didn’t know that one man with his insane Maoist ideals had succeeded in murdering close to two million people in just four years. I was never taught about it at school. Never once had it come up in conversation over the pub table. I don’t ever remember seeing anything about it on the History Channel. And it definitely wasn’t a “did you know?” on the back of any Chappie’s paper.How could this possibly have happened? How could I have lived my entire life unaware of the torturous cruelty inflicted on so many innocent people mere years before I was born?
I just wasn’t prepared for Cambodia.
I’m sure many of you reading this are probably shocked by my ignorance and clearly not in need of a history lesson from an intellectual dwarf like me. If that is the case I won’t be at all offended if you wish to skip the next few paragraphs. But if you too have been kept in the dark about Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge and one of the bloodiest revolutions the world has ever seen, please read on.
In short.
After a fair bout of civil unrest Cambodia fell into the grubby hands of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in 1975. Literally days later money was abolished and cities abandoned as hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were relocated to the countryside and put to work on farms. The idea was to transform Cambodia into a peasant-dominated, agrarian cooperative.
During the next four years anyone with any form of education, anyone who could speak a foreign language, in fact anyone who wore glasses and looked just a little intellectual was tortured to death or systematically executed. Their children were brutally flung against trees, splattering their brains, in order to prevent future “revenge attacks”. And hundreds of thousands more people died of mistreatment, malnutrition and disease on the farms they were forced to work so hard on.
Help finally came when the Vietnamese over-threw the Khmer Rouge in ‘78, but it didn’t end there. Financed by China and Thailand with indirect support from the US (yes, that’s the US of A) the Khmer Rouge managed to maintain a guerrilla war in Phnom Penh throughout the 80s. In fact, “the UN allowed the Khmer Rouge to occupy the Cambodian seat at the UN General Assembly until 1991, meaning the murderers represented their victims for 12 years.”
Pol Pot, the educated man who killed everyone with an education, died in jail on 15 April 1998 denying the people of Cambodia both truth and justice forever.
History lesson over.
Phnom Penh is home to Tuol Sleng Museum (aka S-21 Prison) and The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek where some of the most heinous of the Khmer Rouge crimes were executed. And as macabre as it sounds, it’s these two places that had brought us to Cambodia’s once deserted capital.
Visiting places like this is always kind of a weird one for me. I want to go, but I don’t. I know what to expect, but I’m always shocked by what I see. It’s never how I imagined it would be, and I’m too scared to imagine how it really was. It’s daunting, but it has to be done.
We arrived at Security Prison – 21 as the rest of Phnom Penh was waking. It was quite. From the outside it looked like the high school it once was. 3 long, white-walled, double-story buildings set out in a U shape with classrooms leading off balconied corridors.
It was only once we entered the gates that we notice the barbed wire that sealed off the balconies, erected to prevent prisoners taking their own lives. And slowly the realisation that we were standing in the largest centre of detention and torture in the country began to set in.
As you walk from classroom to classroom you’re introduced to face, after face, after face, after face of the people who suffered so tremendously in this hell hole. Some of their hollow skulls stare back at you from inside glass cabinets. Looking at them all, rows and rows, and rows of them you think they would never have fitted so many people in here. No ways. It’s just not big enough. But then you learn that they were averaging 100 murders a day.
Enter another room and torture devices become the display. And another and you’re confronted with oil paintings depicting the Khmer Rouge using the devices to what is obviously great affect. The Khmer Rouge requested one of the prisoners to paint these scenes of brutality after discovering he was an artist. Doing so saved his life.
When the Khmer Rouge fell, they fled fast leaving a dozen people for dead in their torture chambers. It’s these chambers that make up the third and final building we visited. The 12 people were buried in the school grounds, but the rooms have been left as they were found with the inclusion of a black and white picture taken of each body that now sits above the rusty metal bed it was chained to.
Next stop, the Killing Fields.
When the barbarians at S-21 were killing too many people a day to fit into the mass graves dug in the old school grounds, an order went out to open the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Prisoners of the detention centre were sent here, blind folded, made to kneel on the hard earth and then bludgeoned to death. Sometimes there were so many people sent that there wasn’t enough time to kill everyone in one day, so they’d make the remaining few stand in a line an wait their turn in a holding cell.
There are 129 mass graves here, some of which haven’t even been excavated. It’s estimated that approximately 17,000 men, women and children were executed here between 1975 and 1978.
Walking around here is an incredibly sobering experience. There’s a sign on a tree labelling it as the tree they smashed babies heads against. It’s hard to read. It’s worse to imagine.
You look up and see the music speakers the killers fitted to the tree tops to drown out the last words of the people they were killing. You look down and see bones, teeth and clothing poking out from beneath your feet. You’re walking on dead people.
A stupa erected as a memorial to those that lost their lives here stands tall above the mass graves. Encased inside are almost 9000 human skulls excavated here. One, on top of the other, on top of the other...
There’s nothing that I can say that’ll make you truly understand how harrowing visiting places like this actually is. To see what people are capable of. To see how dark and sinister a human being can become. It’s scary. It’s really is scary.
More pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/43679192@N07/sets/72157624974824168/
That was a really beautiful post xx
ReplyDelete