cambodia :: day two :: keep smiling
cambodia’s political history is confusing as hell. it twists and turns like the murky mekong river, which cuts a mysterious path right through the heart of the country. cambodia goes through regimes, its leaders go through shifts of allegiance, like rural khmers go through kramas.
this much is clear, however. cambodia was home to the most murderous revolution of the 20th century. between 1975 and 1979, nearly 20 percent of the population was killed, either by execution, starvation, malnutrition or lack of medical care. these were the most lethal years of the khmer rouge’s bloody reign. led by the hitler-esque pol pot, the “revolutionists” eliminated nearly 2 million cambodians in a radical social experiment aimed at restructuring the country into a maoist, peasant-driven collective.
a trip to phnom penh’s tuol sleng genocide museum is about as fun as you might figure. but it is something you must force yourself to do when visiting cambodia. this is a hellish piece of history that should not be forgotten.
before 1975, tuol sleng was known as tuol svay prey high school. it was a small campus, with a grass courtyard between the buildings. students would rest and exercise there between classes. but when the khmer rouge seized control of phnom penh in april 1975, studying stopped and terror took over.
the school was code-named security office 21, or s-21. classrooms became prison cells and torture chambers.
nearly 20,000 “prisoners” — farmers and intellectuals, infants and the elderly — entered s-21 between 1975 and 1979. only seven people are known to have come out alive. most were transported to the nearby killing fields of choeung ek (stop no. 2 on my morning tour) and executed en masse.
s-21 has been left largely untouched. aside from the barbed wire, it appears eerily normal. the sun shines gracefully through open windows. singing birds happily fly from room to room. seems like the place could be preparing for classes to resume after summer break.
but the images inside show how a scene so serene can quickly become surreal. even more perplexing than the khmer rouge’s deeds is the detail they spent documenting them. hundreds and hundreds of mugshots are on display at the museum. each inmate was tagged and photographed, part of s-21’s meticulous cataloging system. some prisoners stare blankly past the camera. some sport the marks of recent beatings. some force strange smiles. some women hold babies in their arms.
inmates had their photos taken again after they were dead, or when they were close to dead. those photos are on display, too.
the number of children pictured is shocking. many were actually soldiers of the khmer rouge revolution, recruited when they were between the ages of 10-15. but as paranoia spread throughout the leadership of pol pot’s “clique” — as signs refer to it at the museum — the group began to cannibalize itself. young soldiers were gunned down by their successors.
s-21 was businesslike in its madness. there were interoffice newsletters for employees — also shown at the museum — and long lists of rules for its prisoners. examples: “do not be a fool for you are a chap who dares to thwart the revolution” and “if you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes of five shocks of electric discharge.”
and then there are the torture rooms themselves, some still outfitted with the automobile batteries used for the “electric discharge.” when vietnamese forces liberated phnom penh in 1979, they discovered the rotting corpses of 14 prisoners who were tortured to death during the last days if s-21. those cells still look the way they did in 1979, metal bed frames, iron bars and all. need proof? there are big grainy photos on the walls, showing the scene from 24 years ago … before the rotting corpses were taken away.
some rooms still have blood stains. this is a recent pain. people still remember. scars are evident. families have been ripped apart. people deal with the nightmares, and for some, the guilt. there is a movie played at the museum. near the end, a former s-21 guard recounts some of the methods of torture utilized at s-21 (they were as ingenious as they were brutal), and he does so in a disturbingly detached manner. he chuckles as he says things like, “i only hit five people. i did not cut any throats.”
ban, my moto driver for the day, was a child living in the countryside during the darkest days of the khmer rouge. at 7 years old, he toiled in the rice fields, just like the adults. “i worked hard all day,” he said. “and still i didn’t have enough to eat.” ban has children of his own now, boys ages 8 and 4, and that’s why he can no longer afford to study english.
he spends 12 hours a day, seven days a week, trucking people around on the back of his motorbike. he would get $5 for five hours with me, and that means he’s having a good day. ban was proud that his children attended school. students pay 300 riel a day (around 15 cents) so their teacher can earn a salary.
a good moto driver in cambodia is like a river guide. the country is notorious for having some of the worst roads in the world. often there is more pothole than pavement. sometimes there is no pavement at all. so drivers need to know how to navigate, avoiding pitfalls and potholes that would require the purchase of new tires. this often involves swerving from one side of the road to the other. the shape of the road dictates the route.
on the way to the killing fields, roads go from dirty to dirt to dusty. i learned quickly that it is impossible to keep clean in cambodia. (luckily, laundry services are ridiculously cheap.) often, ban and i pulled our shirts up to cover nose and mouth. i closed my eyes. i’m assuming ban didn’t do the same.
when i would open my eyes, i spotted petrol being sold in pepsi bottles, people curled up in hammocks, men fishing with their hands in a brown creek, uniformed schoolchildren walking or bicycling home. i saw two kids on one bicycle — one steered while the other pedaled. i saw as many as four people on one motorbike. and if i made eye contact with anyone, i always got a big smile in return. cambodians always smile Ö and yet they have so many reasons not to.
the killing fields of choeung ek are surrounded by working farms. cattle often wander right on through. it’s a pastoral setting and it’s all rather peaceful. until, that is, you see the large ditches marked as mass graves and the giant stupa full of skulls. some 17,000 men, women and children were executed and buried here. the skulls of 8,000 victims fill a tall glass temple that was built in 1988.
it was a sobering day, to say the least. so i was somewhat surprised when ban asked me the magic question on the ride home: “do you like to shoot guns?” evidently, if i wanted to, i could go shoot an ak-47 at a place in the city. just $20 per magazine. i declined, but didn’t stay exactly legal with my afternoon pursuits. i headed over to the russian market for some bootleg books (starting price for a “new” lonely planet cambodia is $4). there is also a huge selection of name-brand merchandise, thanks to “leakage” from cambodia’s many sweatshops. grab yourself a gap button-down for $2.
on the way home from the market, i saw an elephant walking down main street. then i saw two monkeys rooting through garbage on the side of the road. i thought to myself: 10 days in cambodia is never going to be enough.
11.24.2003, 10:52 PM · Cambodia
2 Comments
Cambodia is a country I have wanted to go to since I studied it in Politics at school. My teacher’s face as she talked about her visits there were so obviously filled with so many opposing feeling for the country. The amazement at the temples at angkor to the sheer horror at what happened during pol pot’s reign. It is definitely a country I shall visit.
Hey, I somehow stumbled upon your journal. I spent much of my childhood in Shanghai, now I live in good old Greenville, South Carolina. Your stories are very fascinating. =] I spent the past summer teaching kids English in Shanghai. Even with my upbringing, I still experienced some cultural shock. I sure will keep on reading your stories.