Khmer Red

Most countries have not been without their share of atrocities but Cambodia's amoung the worst. From 1975-1979 Pol Pot's brutal regime stormed Cambodia, imprisoning, killing and forcing the luckier people into 'collective farms' /labour camps. The crimes meriting death applied to almost everyone (scroll down to "Alleged Crimes against humanity" for the blow by blow account) and 2,000,000 out of the countries 7 million population had either starved to death, worked to death of been executed by the time of the Khmer Rouge's fall.

As one of the categories fit for execution was 'former urban dwellers' the people of Cambodia's capital Phnom Pehn bore the brunt of the Rouge's genocide. The entire population of the city was shipped out to the killing fields and, if lucky, shot or imprisoned/executed in one of Pehn's detention camps. Yesterday I visited Toul Sleng, the biggest and most infamous camp in the city. To say the experience was harrowing is to cheapen it.

Once a school, Toul Sleng was converted into a prison camp at the beginning of the regime and soon became the head quarters of 'S-21', the Khmer Rouge secret police. The few large school buildings, neatly placed round two square courtyards were deceptively pretty. Flowers, tall palms and sunshine disguised the horrors within. Though most of the school was split into minature cells, the rooms in the first building remained unconverted and must have been used for the more important inmates. Their status obviously didn't help them end and next to each bed was a black and white photo of it's inhabitant's fate. I shan't go into any details about these pictures but if they had been coloured I wouldn't have been able to look at them. Less important prisoners were housed in the second building which had been completely restructured by the Rouge into hundreds of tiny dank cells. On the walls of some were tallys counting the number of days imprisoned. Mercifully, few of the tallys ran very long....

The buildings on the second courtyard were mainly dedicated to photographs of the hundreds murdered. The killing ended less than 30 years ago and the rows of reasonably modern looking hair cuts really brought home the fact that these were real people. A fact further driven in by the piles of discarded clothes and finally the shelves of mutilated human skulls. Three rooms on, I heard a guide telling the story of the execution of her family and her deportation to the country, next were all the torture devices collected from the facility, then came paintings done by one of Sleng's seven survivors depicting thumb screw torture, inmates being hung with hooks from their flesh, upside down corpses stacked in jars, one with his hips and legs completely removed, teams of blindfolded men being led to their destruction and other scenes too dreadful to remember. Perhaps thankfull this was a bit too much for the lass I'd taken with me and she rushed on ahead meaning I didn't have time to give the captions much attention.

There was a film which I would also have liked to stay longer and watch. Such horrors should be seen, should be remembered. Alas I was dragged away- hell hath no fury than a woman horrified. Should have done movies and theme parks I guess...

This was yesterday. Today I had a massage by the blind, bought a casio watch with disco lights and tomorrow I'm off to marvel at Ankor Wat- all very happy and not at all genocidal. I hope that's cheered you up.