Tuol Sleng, killing fields, cyclo tour & eating spiders

The morning tour takes us to a genocide museum in Tuol Sleng (=poisonous hill). The area was once Angkar area’s premier and feared security institution designed for interrogation and extermination, and later opened to a public in 1980. During the Pol Pot Regime this former high school was turned to a Documentation Centre of Cambodia Security Office 21 (aka S-21). The Security Office and its branches were under the authority of the Central Committee and the KR Minister of Defence, Comrade Son Sen alias Khieu, appointed Comrade Duch to head the S-21 system. In the photo below Duch is in the second row, the two pictures from the left. He is still alive and currently awaiting trial (believe or not – after 30 years he still hasn’t been convicted).

The prison area was 600×400 meters, surrounded with walls and electric barbwire. All the classrooms were transformed to cells 0.8 x 2m each and the houses around the prison were used for administration, torture and interrogation. Because the prison records were burned and/or destroyed before the Vietnamese liberated the prison on the 7. January 1979, the identities of most of the prisoners are unknown. The last prisoners were quickly shot to the cells before the red khmeres left the scene. However, about 3000 surviving photos of the prisoners were found later. It is being estimated that during the years 1975-78 the prison held more than ten thousand adult prisoners and two thousand children.

Only seven S-21 prisoners escaped alive, and those seven only survived, because of their useful special skills, a photo below. Three of them are still alive and one of them had visited the prison just a week ago and the tour guide had been able to attend the event to hear his stories.

The prison held more than thousand prisoners at any time, held there up to four months before the execution. No one was let free once they got to the prison, so technically there was no point to interrogate, but that didn’t stop the interrogators from torturing. Prisoners were locked in the small cells, shackled with chains fixed to the walls or concrete walls. They had no personal belongings, and when they were brought to the prison they were stripped from their outer clothing to prevent people from committing suicides, so in case one did not have any underwear, they were completely naked.

Years ago I visited Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland and this place has similar eerie heavy feel to it. It is just old buildings with empty rooms and collections of victims’ photos and a grim history, but it feels it contains more. It is hard to imagine what it has been like when in operation, the hundreds of people inside it, but it still manages to leave a hollow feeling and loads of unanswered questions.

After the genocide museum we are taken to the killing fields, located about half an hour away. From S-21 no prisoner escaped alive. The killing fields are where the prisoners were taken after few months of pointless interrogation. They were kept blindfolded during the whole imprisonment and never saw the guards. Truckloads of people were brought to the fields, each truck bringing around 20-30 people. The grave had been already dug open for them. To prevent the prisoners from hearing the sounds of the dying people, a loudspeaker was attached to a tree producing noise to cover everything. One by one the prisoners were taken to the edge of the grave, where they were hit in the back on the head. In the grave their throats were slit to make sure they were definitely dead. No guns or bullets were used. Every morning a new grave was dug and by evening the grave was full of bodies ready to be covered.

In 1980 about 9000 skulls were dug up from this specific killing field. And this field is only one out of 343 similar ones in the country. The bones were left to the grave but the skulls were removed and are now piled inside the glass walled memorial (built in 1988) in the centre of the field. UN removed the nine European skulls from the memorial in 1993 and they were returned to Europe. I am told that there are another 43 mass graves in the area that have not been opened. My photos from killing fields are foggy, because it was boiling and I think I managed to get sunscreen to the lense. It was so emptional that I only realised it long afterwards.

When walking the path I am walking on pieces of bones and pieces of rotten clothing sticking through the mud. There is even a separate mass grave for children. I hear that small children that couldn’t talk, and therefore couldn’t reveal any information, were killed immediately and not taken to prison at all. All the children in the mass grave were found naked.

During my travels I have talked to loads of non-Cambodian people who say that Cambodians are loving their misery and are filled with unconstructive self pity and wonder why the Cambodians just don’t get over it and do something. I think they just don’t get it at all. Cambodia lost one third of its people in just four years time. This all happened less than 30 years ago, which means everyone aged 30 in the country has witnessed the genocide. It is not an easy thing to get over a killing spree in this grim, systematic and huge scale, where the enemy is made of the familiar, not the unknown foreigners. One of our guides lost his father and all his five brothers. Losses of that scale create anger that lasts through the lifetime. And what adds the anger even more, the responsible still have not been convicted. The main five war criminals are held in comfortable jails, living in much better conditions than an average Cambodian, and most likely will not be convicted before they die of natural causes. I also heard that the current Cambodian prime minister used to be a member of Red Khmer and he is still a prime minister. How this can be allowed to happen is unbelievable.

The Pol Pot regime used children to do most of the dirty killing work. They chose poorest of the villages and recruited children aged 10-15 to join the Red Khmers. These children were illiterate and not educated and therefore an easy target for brainwashing. Some of them were taken from the lunch table, no questions were answered, they were just quickly taken away from parents. The photo of the child soldiers below shows the red khmer soldier uniform,a black outfit, a cap and sandals.

If the soldiers were so young then, they are now only in their mid 40s now. So I asked one of the guides where they are now and how they are treated. He said that they have left the village they were from, they have started somewhere new and they are everywhere. One can easily escape the past in Cambodia. He said that he knows one a bus driver who used to be a red khmer soldier. “But what can you do” he says smiling sadly.

I cannot understand what Pol Pot was trying to achieve. He called the revolution when he took power year 0 and started the new rules. He killed all the educated people, forced everyone back to agriculture, and cruelly executed everyone with an alternative opinion. How did he think he would make a country bloom with that approach? He was a paranoid madman who also executed all his highest officers one by one, so no one was safe even on the same side. By 1978 he had killed so many people that there were not enough people left to work, so he invented the concept of arranged marriages to produce more offsprings to the country: form a line of men, form another line of women. Take a spouse who is given to you – have a baby in a year or you are both killed.

When I ask people how they see the future, no one is waiting for a miracles in the July 2008 election. People say the same party that has ruled the country for 25 years will win again regardless of whom they vote.

After the killing fields we stop to an orphanage that holds about hundred kids. HIV is the biggest cause for these children having no parents. The kids are performing traditional Cambodian music and dances. They are very talented and enthusiastic and beautiful as well. Some foreign support is given to Cambodian orphanages, but the donations are minor and do not cover the costs.

In the afternoon we go for a cyclo tour around Phnom Penh. Cyclo is a three-wheeled bicycle taxi. It is a new thing in the streets of Phnom Penh and not yet as popular as tuk-tuk taxis, but it is hoped that there would be more of them in the future to decrease the pollution. The traffic never stops but somehow the cyclo riders manage to blend in.

In the evening we take tuk-tuks and head further from the town to have a dinner with the local family. Before entering the house, we go visit a school downstairs. Every evening for an hour the neighbourhood children can attend an English class. The class lasts for an hour and the teaching is free. We are welcomed by these talkative little kids, who all want to practice their English. I talk to a girl named Pari, who wants to be a fashion designer. She is excited to hear I am a designer, but web design turns not to be as cool as fashion design J. She draws a sketch of the top I am wearing and I get to keep the original artwork.

The dinner is excellent. Cambodian food is generally mild unlike in the neighbouring Thailand. For the dinner we have noodles, soup, spring rolls, fruit and as a special treat some tarantulas. When I eat mine, some of the ladies are close to fainting.. Some people do not try it even though I try to convince them it is not that bad. People seem to be afraid of spiders. The spider legs are actually nice and crispy. The meat in the body is quite heavy and leathery, but with a bit of tarantula whisky it goes down surprisingly well. The taste in my mouth afterwards reminds me of my cat’s breath after it had eaten a mouse. But it is definitely a thing worth trying. I wonder if mouse tasted anything like it.