Cambodian History in Phnom Penh

I don’t know about you, but when I think about ‘travel blogs’, I mainly think about envy inspiring rose-tinted pictures, funny stories and general light-heartedness occasionally mixed with some warnings, advice and tips. We always said when we started this ‘diary’ that we wouldn’t shy away from telling the truth about our experiences because in many ways this platform can obscure reality, creating a disconnect between what is really going on and what you want the people who read your blog to see and more importantly feel. Sometimes, posts need to be serious and space needs to be dedicated to difficult subjects, which in this part of the world relates heavily to war and genocide. It goes without say that some of the details in this post may be difficult to read and we appreciate that not everyone will be comfortable with the disturbing details – if you think this may apply to you, you are more than welcome to stop reading here. However, we believe that part of travelling as responsible tourists is not just taking lots of photos for Facebook. Part of our responsibility is to learn about and understand local history and culture, and in Cambodia, this includes the country’s very violent and very recent past.

It is hard to write an account of what we learnt about the Cambodian genocide without coming across disingenuous and trite – I’m not sure there is any way to express just how moving the spaces we visited were for us personally, and we fully appreciate that our sadness at the accounts we read is absolutely nothing compared to the suffering faced by those who were tortured and killed, those who lived through the regime and those who lost loved ones to its’ brutality. The memorials and sites of atrocities are not easy places to visit, nor are they easy to write about, but, as the plaques and information boards urge, as visitors we come to bear witness to the suffering of the victims, to learn all the details of what happened to them and to preserve their memory as custodians of world history and collective memory. Our education was centred on two of the main sites in Phnom Penh, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and an execution area known as the Killing Fields.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum stands on the site of the notorious Security Prison 21 (S-21), one of an estimated 150 execution centres established across Cambodia by the communist Khmer Rouge regime during their control of Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Housing 1,000 – 1,200 prisoners at anyone time, an estimated 17,000 people passed through Tuol Sleng alone, though some estimates suggest this number could be even higher, at 20,000. [1] As a former high school, the main buildings were converted into cells and interrogation rooms, with torture chambers used to obtain false confessions from innocent people to legitimise their own executions. Victims were repeatedly tortured and coerced into naming family members and close associates, who were in turn arrested, tortured and killed.[1] Very little has been done to ‘clean up’ the site, and part of its power comes from the preservation of that state it was found in after it was discovered by the invading Vietnamese forces in 1979. Outside stand the graves of the last 14 victims of S-21, who’s mutilated bodies were found still chained to the iron beds they were being tortured on before they were beaten to death as the compound was abandoned.

One of the most harrowing aspects of the site is that in many ways, it still looks like a school. The classrooms still look like classrooms, some with chalk boards, some with horrifying implements of torture made out of existing outdoor gymnasium equipment, some with blood stained floors, walls and ceilings and many containing the original shackles and chains used to lock up prisoners. The buildings were enclosed in electrified barbed wire, with some rooms converted into tiny prison cells, and all windows were covered with iron bars and barbed wire to prevent escapes and suicides. [2] Today, exhibitions in the classrooms give information, personal accounts and detailed descriptions and pictures of just how prisoners were arrested and tortured. One particularly moving exhibition shows hundreds of photos recovered from the site, documenting prisoners and staff (who often ended their lives as prisoners themselves). One of the most striking things is how young both victims, and those carrying out the torture were – at one point we were informed almost all staff – known as cadres – in S-21 were approximately 13 to 24 years old. The knowledge that children were expected to carry out unimaginable torture, which included beatings, water boarding, mutilation of appendages and sexual organs, and other barbaric practices designed not to kill but to inflict pain and injury so intense that prisoners had no choice but to sign their own death warrant, was particularly difficult to stomach. The photographs not only showed the documentation of people as they entered the prison, staring intently into the camera holding boards with their newly assigned numbers aimed at dehumanising them, but also horrific pictures of the mutilated bodies of those who died during the course of ‘interrogation’. We spent hours listening to recorded information on a personal device, which was told by a Cambodian native who lived through the regime. We found that whilst the subject matter was difficult, the whole museum was incredibly well put together and so intensely moving because of the way it confronted visitors with the necessary details whilst giving them space to process the information in a personal way.

S-21 and Choeung Ek, aptly nicknamed The Killing Fields, really go hand in hand when visitors come to understand the history of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh. All over the country, prisoners who had their confessions coerced in interrogation camps were then transported to sites of mass execution where they were held and murdered before being buried in mass graves. It is estimated that around 1.7 million people were executed in this way, with the death toll of the entire regime (including those caused by widespread famine) is thought to be between 2 and 3 million. The state sponsored genocide was aimed at anyone thought to have connection to the former government of Cambodia before the communist take over, as well as professionals, intellectuals, ethnic Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese, and Cham peoples and Cambodian Christians and Buddhist monks. In a climate of extreme suspicion and paranoia, even wearing glasses or having ‘soft hands’ could be seen as sign of connection to these groups, and execution did not just stop with the person under suspicion – entire families, including infants, were killed under a policy of leaving no survivors who could one day take revenge. The Killing Fields site today is eerily peaceful, and it’s hard to imagine that this former orchard and Chinese burial site could ever have ever seen such violence. Again the site offers headsets which visitors can use to listen to testimonies and information whilst walking through a guided tour of the area. The details are harrowing – to save money on costly ammunition, most people were bludgeoned to death with makeshift tools, there is evidence of the production and storage of chemicals used to poison prisoners once they were deposited in shallow pits and perhaps most upsettingly is a tree, still standing today, against which soldiers would strike the heads of children and babies before throwing them into graves with their parents. When this tree was discovered by local farmers, it still had blood and chunks of hair, brain and pieces of skull embedded in the bark. To this day, the rainy season shifts the earth of the site, constantly bringing to the surface clothing and bone fragments of victims, to the extent that visitors are asked to watch where they walk. It is moving, sickening and upsetting all in equal measure and for us the whole place highlights the true horror of the systematised destruction of life that was committed against the Cambodian people. Around 25% of the population was killed in just 4 years.

We decided that we didn’t feel it was appropriate to take pictures anywhere in the places we visited, though as mentioned, the photographic evidence was one of the most striking aspects of the memorials themselves. If you want to learn more, we suggest that you do some of your own research (the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum website is a good place to start [2])

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Sources

[1] - http://www.tuolslenggenocidemuseum.com/tuol-sleng-genocide-museum.htm

[2] - http://www.tuolslenggenocidemuseum.com/