A touch of evil

Tuesday, 23/10/2012 – 131 A.D.

[Note - possibly some difficult and disturbing reading in this post, so if you're having a bad day then you might want to save this one for another time.]

This morning we woke up feeling fine, Tim’s night terrors having dropped to a manageable two occurrences, down from an uncountable number the previous night. Breakfast was hearty, the sun was out, the sky was blue…how best to spend this fine morning in Phnom Penh? At the Genocide Museum, of course.

It was a fair walk down to the south of the city again (not quite as far as the Chinese embassy), but we fancied stretching our legs to help the digestion of that spicy sausage the Diamond Geezers serve up for brekky. After about 15 minutes walking, after the seven-and-a-half-minute-sweats had started, we arrived at the Independence Monument, which I assume relates to Cambodia going it alone from the French in the 1950s. Without any pedestrian crossings in sight, getting from one side to the other was akin to an assault course. I felt like the main character in the classic Frogger computer game!

The streets of Pnhom Penny are all numbered – odds running north to south, evens running west to east and increasing in number the further you get from the river. This is quite helpful for globetrotters like us. However, house numbering is totally up the wall and you often get more than one building with the same number along a street, which was probably why our tuk-tuk driver had so much trouble finding our hotel when we arrived. Halfway along Street 113 was Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. There was no mistaking it, the barbed wire around the periphery being a dead giveaway.

History lesson time again, I’m afraid! This building was originally a high school, but when the Khmer Rouge seized power they turned it into a supposedly secret prison known as S-21. From 1975 to 1979 estimates reckon that 20,000 were brought here to be detained, tortured and either killed within its walls, or sent out to the killings fields outside of the city. Only seven people survived the place. The building shown above is A block, identical on the outside to B, C and D block. Nowadays B and D have been converted into exhibits, but C has been left exactly as it was found with hastily-constructed 0.8 x 2 metre cells, some with walls made from wood, others from rough brickwork. If prisoners somehow did get free of their shackles, each level had extra barbed wire rigged up to stop them trying to jump and commit suicide.

It's quite surreal because the forecourt in the middle of the site wouldn't look out of place in a hotel of reasonable quality. As you walk through the cells, notices on the wall ask you not to speak, but you don't feel the need to, even if you had something really important to say. It naturally doesn't stop the tour guides saying their bits, and we were able to hang around a few groups and earwig some info for free. 

Bet you've never seen me so stony-faced, have you? What was that? A million times already in this blog? Well I've always found it difficult to smile for photos. Anyway, we continued to make our way around Tuol Sleng. I won't go into detail on some of the torture methods that were used, but throughout the whole thing I found myself repeating one word over and over: "why?" The darker side of human nature, I guess. I mean, I know this kind of thing happened at Auschwitz, but this went on in even more recent memory. Were no lessons learned? One thing that struck me was that in every piece of literature on the walls relating to the liberation of Phnom Penh, and subsequently Tuol Sleng in 1979, not once was it acknowledged that the Vietnamese effectively made it happen. Instead vague references were made to something like the United Liberation People's Front of Kampuchea, which you won't read about in wikipedia. Guess they're a bit embarrassed to have been set free by their neighbours. It's strange the things you think about in such a place. If I do go out for a boozy sesh in this city I'd best not bring these topics up. Keep it light, stick with football.

Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge were meticulous record keepers, filling out plenty of paperwork for everyone they brought into S-21 and taking photos of all prisoners. It was interesting to see how the style of photo they took of the inmates changed each year - in 1975 they didn't even have numbers, but 1978 they had so much info hanging below their chins that the set-up almost resembled an LAPD mugshot. And sticking with the visual theme, because the records were intact when the prison was liberated, the subsequent government decided to put all of the (mostly) anonymous prisoner's photos on display for visitors to see. It would be difficult viewing if it were just the one room, but the display goes on and on and on...

Grim, grim and more grim. I'd read the write up of the place beforehand, but by the end of our time here I was having to call upon all of my English stiff upper lipness to prevent it from wobbling, and I think Our Kid was the same. And, as harrowing as it was, it was a thoroughly worthwhile exhibit and one of the best museums I've been to on this trip (and if you're a regular reader then you'll know that I've visited hundreds of `em). As I exited through the gates (didn't see a gift shop), I was left with one thing that I'd read several times - the current government's wish to keep the place open so that another Khmer Rouge situation could never occur again in the future. Jeez, if it did then I think I'd be voluntarily conscripted into the opposition forces!

But then it was time for lunch, an occasion that always brings a smile to my lips...