We were shocked by Phnom Penh's chilling Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and how quickly it brought us face to face with Cambodia's tumultuous past. We are a little embarrassed to admit how little we knew about the Khmer Rouge and the terrible crimes they committed between 1975 and 1979 before we came to Cambodia. The four years under the Khmer Rouge and its infamous leader, Pol Pot, according to most estimates, saw around 2 million Khmers (Cambodians) lose their lives to murder, famine, and disease. The short reign of the Khmer Rouge and the pain and suffering that followed their collapse define Cambodia in more ways than one. And getting closer to Cambodia's past in Phnom Penh did give us the framework we needed to really connect with and understand what Cambodia has been through and where the country is today. Our first major introduction to the evils of the Khmer Rouge regime was at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The strengths of this museum are its location and understated seriousness. The museum is housed in the infamous S-21 Prison, where only twelve people survived out of an estimated 17,000 prisoners who passed through its gates between 1975 and 1979. The prison was converted from a high school in 1975, soon after the Khmer Rouge came to power; its main purpose was to torture inmates into giving confessions against themselves and their family and friends. If inmates survived interrogation, they were almost always executed at the Cheung Ek killing fields 16 kilometers outside of Phnom Penh. S-21 took in intellectuals and artists and other citizens the Khmer Rouge considered dangerous to their progress. By the end of their reign the Khmer Rouge had become so gripped by paranoia that their killing machine had been turned on many of their own members.
The prison has been left much as the Vietnamese army found it when they invaded Phnom Penh in 1979. The rusty metal bed frames victims were shackled to remain as a silent, grotesque testament to the horrors that took place here. In these rooms, photographs are displayed of the dead prisoners found by the Vietnamese, still chained to those same bed frames, tortured to death. There are bloodstains on some of the floors and bullet holes in some of the walls. Some rooms had more descriptions, including stories about some of the survivors of S-21, but the museum didn't need much explaining. Living conditions were unfathomably appalling - the ramshackle wooden cells and the rooms where inmates were laid on the ground, harnessed together by metal rods binding their feet so they could not move or roll over with no mosquito nets and no padding between them and the hard floor - conveyed a sense of unprepared, unflinching brutality on the part of the Khmer Rouge. The wooden cells especially sent chills down our spines. Something about the warped, rotting walls brought finality and a gut-wrenching realness to the descriptions of the makeshift cells we had read about.
Much like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records of their atrocities. A photograph was taken and a detailed file kept on every inmate that passed through S-21. Hundreds of these photographs are displayed, without captions, on large boards throughout the museum, eerie images of the innocent lives lost. Words could not have conveyed the horror and suffering caused by the Khmer Rouge as well as these photographs do. The faces stared at us from the past and seemingly reached inside of us and stirred up a complicated range of emotions. We both noticed that an expression or a particular set of eyes or smirk or a frown would catch our gaze, pulling our attention away from the hundreds of other faces. Some expressions showed despair, while others showed anger or grief or sadness or strength or remorse or defiance (or all of the above). The photos were immensely powerful, and looking at them was often difficult, but they are impossible to ignore. They are impossible to keep away from your imagination, as you stand in rooms where people were tortured
and killed in the name of fear and paranoia and ignorance. They force your mind to reach back in time, to find the owners of these expressions and pull them up to the present as a startling reminder of what the human race is capable of, and that we must remain diligent to keep such things from happening again. We left the museum exhausted and drained. Visiting Tuol Sleng was a moving experience, but our emotions while there and afterward were so many and so varied that we felt almost too tired for words. We found respite in a leafy garden restaurant across the street. The host politely asked how we were and when we told him we had just come from the museum, his expression immediately conveyed an understanding of what that meant. He told us to sit down, relax, and said they'd get us water right away. Without us saying anything about our experience to him, he knew how we felt after seeing visiting Tuol Sleng. He knew that the contents of the museum were so horrible and raw that there was only one reaction - complete mental and physical exhaustion.
After lunch, we enjoyed a conversation with our friendly waiter, Sarat, whom we mentioned in our last post. From where we sat, we could still see the barbed wire and imposing facade of Tuol Sleng, the grim memorial to Cambodia's gruesome past. And here, happily conversing with us, was Cambodia's bright future. Sarat could not have been older than 22, not so far removed from the terrible genocide inflicted by the Khmer Rouge and the years of civil war that followed, but his outlook was one of optimism and positivity. This young man seemed to us to be the positive, smiling image of a new Cambodia. To the young people we were privileged to meet in Cambodia, the years of the Khmer Rouge remain an important lesson in their history, but it does not define them.
Although still devastatingly poor and racked by gross corruption, it is amazing to witness the modern bustle of Cambodia and the smiles of the faces of its citizens, knowing what events unfolded just 32 years ago. Cambodia might still have a long way to go, but as far as it has already come, with young, motivated youth like Sarat, to us, Cambodia's future looks bright indeed.
Read more about Cambodia's recent history:
Yale's Cambodia Genocide Project - www.yale.edu/cgp
Khmer Legacies - www.khmerlegacies.org
Tuol Sleng Museum Website - www.tuolslengmuseum.com/History.htm
Tuol Sleng History (brief overview) - www.tuolsleng.com/history.php
Peace Pledge - www.ppu.org.uk/genocide/g_cambodia.html
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