Tuol Sleng and The Killing Fields

There is a restaurant in the tourist section of Phnom Penh along the river that screens nightly documentaries, one of which tells of the quick and brutal history of the Khmer Rouge. We had read that the show was a worthwhile primer for anyone planning on visiting Tuol Sleng and The Killing Fields. We detoured off into Cambodia from our Vietnam vacation specifically for this purpose, so we went. We sat outside in the hot night and waited for the start time by drinking beers (me) and a milkshake (Sami). White people of all shapes and sizes sat scrunched together in wicker chairs and played cards or read Lonely Planet guides as street solicitors peddled photocopied bestsellers and the latest travel trinkets made in China. One man with no limbs was wheeled an arms length away from we diners. He moaned an agonizing groan while his partner collected donations.

I had a decent buzz going and was delighted to find that beer was allowed inside the theater. I ordered another and we preceded around to the side of the building where we were led through a large, black painted wooden door and up a steep incline of stairs. Velvet curtains bordered the screen which flashed a multi-colored and bouncing Apex logo transmitted from the cheap DVD player on the floor. There were only a dozen or so soft and dirty chairs which soon were filled with people I never bothered to make eye contact with.

Inside the theater

View of the screen

The documentary dealt principally with the so called "King Father of Cambodia" Norodom Sihanouk. As Prime Minister, Sihanouk allowed the North Vietnamese to store military supplies in eastern Cambodia during the Vietnam War. In 1970 a pro-US government called the Khmer Republic overthrew Sihanouk. In the years that followed, Sihanouk supported the Khmer Rouge. Because many Cambodians still revered Sihanouk, they joined the Khmer Rouge. Most felt that they were supporting their leader and the country they loved rather than a change to Communism. When the Khmer Rouge overtook the Khmer Republic, they quickly stripped him of the notion that he would have any power in the new regime.

One aspect of the documentary that I will always remember is Sihanouk's hatred of the US and in particular President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He claims that the US's bombing of NVA supply bases in Cambodia led to anti-American sentiment which made it easy for Cambodians to align with the Khmer Rouge. What he fails to mention is that he permitted the NVA to use Cambodia as part of their war strategy.

Of course, it is never easy to remain neutral and Cambodia surely received funding from China and North Vietnam in exchange for use of land. If Sihanouk had sided with the US and South Vietnamese, there is no guarantee that the chain of events that followed would have been bloodless.

The events and ideas that brought the Khmer Rouge into power need to be remembered and studied. I am certainly no expert and still have a lot of research to do on the subject. The pain and suffering as a result of their brutality is much easier to comprehend. Our first taste of it came by visiting Tuol Sleng, a former high school turned torture prison.

Tuol Sleng looks like it hasn't been touched in 35 years. It sits inside a wall topped with barbed wire. There are three main three-story buildings, all a dirty cement yellow. We were not allowed to enter the building closest to the entrance, so we headed to the smaller far sided building. It contained larger rooms that were used as torture chambers. The Khmer Rouge executed all of the educated people in a quest to create the perfect agrarian socialist society. Anyone even rumored to be engaged in capitalistic practices was tortured and forced to give up names. Captors were eventually killed whether they gave names or not.

Tuol Sleng

Barbed wire over the entrace

The graves in the background honor the last prisoners to die at Tuol Sleng. Their bodies were found when the prison was finally uncovered.

Each torture room had one picture on the wall that showed the devices in practice.

The torture cells were left mostly bare save for a metal bed frame and ankle chain locked to one of the four posts. Pools of decades old rusted blood lay like terrible islands on the checkered floor. Each torture room also had a singular picture documenting the atrocities as the occurred.

Outside there was a piece of metal frame that the Khmer Rouge used as a gallows. The interrogators would bind the prisoners hands behind their backs and attach them to a rope that they would sling over the gallows and raise, tearing the shoulders and chest as they were stretched. They would do this until the prisoners lost consciousness after which they would dunk their heads in filthy water mixed with fertilizer to revive the prisoners for another round of torture.

Gallows

The ground floor of the main building held crudely designed prison cells made from slathered on grout and cinder blocks. Prisoners were chained by their ankles in these cells that were no bigger than a bathtub.

Maybe the most powerful feature of the prison turned museum is the mosaic of photographs that cover an entire floor of the main building. Prisoners had their pictures taken the first day they were brought in and the looks on their faces are haunting. Most had no idea that they were being taken to their deaths.

On the top floor there was information regarding the current status of former Khmer leaders. Most of them are awaiting a trial while others like Pol Pot are dead. There was also an interesting exhibit on former Khmer Rouge soldiers. It is important to remember that many of the soldiers who carried out these acts of genocide were just kids. Joining the Khmer Rouge was really their only option over forced labor and eventual death and all were separated from their parents as older people were seen as carrying the virus of capitalism.

The prisoners of Tuol Sleng were killed and buried in mass graves known colloquially as The Killing Fields. I was surprised at how close The Killing Fields are to the city of Phnom Penh. It was a beautiful mid-morning when we toured The Killing Fields.  Geese roamed the grassy areas and hundreds of yellow butterflies fluttered drunkily among the shallow hills that were once the scene of so much horror. The pleasant weather did little to detract from the remnants of sadness that lay about. There is a glass tower of bones in the center of the field. The bottom contains the piles of clothes confiscated after the site was found. The next few layers contains skulls, many with obvious mortal wounds. Then next contains leg bones then forearms and so forth up and up an up.

We learned terrible things about the methods used, how chemicals were dumped over the bodies in the pits to mask the odor of death and finish off any of the half-living. There was also a tree used for the sole purpose of killing babies. When the hard monsoon rains come and dump over the pits, bits of bone become resurfaced. As we were walking back we easily spotted a tooth lying all too naturally in the grass.

Teeth and parts of bones can still be found in The Killing Fields

 While I was at The Killing Fields I couldn't bring myself to imagine the piles of bodies heaped and mangled, sprawled and buried in a human landfill. How can it be that something so terrible can happen in my parents' lifetimes and then again in mine in Rwanda and during the Bosnian War? How does a human life mean so little?

Just a few of the former mass graves at The Killing Fields