Holiday in Cambodia: Day 7, Phnom Penh

Day 7: Phnom Penh

I cried today.

I get that there are those tourists that can go to a country that has previously borne witness to grand atrocity or extreme human obscenity, who then choose not to go to the worst sites because they can be hard going. I also kind of get those who go to these countries in a sense of mindless oblivion of history and then do their thing (which probably involves only eating at places that advertise a western menu or feature a king, clown, or colonel).

I’m not one of these travellers. I feel that I have an obligation to go to these places, to see where the shit went down, to try to respect any people who make these places available to visit and say, “yup, it was shit, but we’re moving on and this site is a monument to NEVER AGAIN”.

Do I ever really understand these places? Thankfully, only superficially in passing. I understand how a people can get so beaten down that they’ll hop on the bandwagon of the first lunatic who promises something better. I understand how a lunatic can inspire/brainwash enough followers to carry out their fucked up plans, especially when you start with kids. I understand how the followers/recruits often do worse shit than you’d think imaginable, in order to show that they are in with the new “good” guys. Afterall, they could be the one digging their own grave or be blindfolded in front of a pit in the dead of night, while music blares to hide their screams, waiting for three feet of rebar to crush their skull.

On an intellectual level I understand how this stuff happens, how people can be fixated on ideals and get elevated to a position where they have the power to do something about them. Where they surround themselves with other idealogues, cynical opportunists, and power-crazed psychopaths and then the shit hits the fan.

I understand that not all evil people are evil all the time.

Man, I am just full of understanding right now, aren’t I?

Sometimes shit goes down that is so heinous, so abhorrent, so fucked up, that even with the comfort provided by distance, time, and privilege, I have to fall back into a safety blanket of rationalisation. While I understand, I just can’t comprehend. And sadly, I can imagine.

I’m not going to put any content warnings or trigger warnings on the rest of this entry, because the places I went to this morning are beyond trigger warning, places where shit got so real only a sociopath wouldn’t get totally ripped up inside. So if you haven’t realised it yet, sometimes people do bad things.

The story begins with S-21, a high school turned into a prison of torture, where targeted undesirables were taken in order to have confessions about how they were plotting against the Angkar, Pol Pot’s crew. (Brief context, the russellpedia style: Cambodia spent most of the early 1970s being flattened by the US army and air force, thanks to being next to Vietnam. They also had a deeply unpopular government. While this was going on, Stalinist-inspired Pol Pot formed the Khmer Rouge, or red Khmer, red being the colour of communism, and there was a civil war just to make sure that Cambodians all over the country didn’t miss out on the bombing and bloodshed. In April 1975 the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia’s capital, where for a few hours the local populace got to rejoice before the KR rolled in properly and forced everyone to leave, saying that more bombing was coming but it was really because Pol Pot’s cunning plan was to turn everyone into rice farmers.)

S-21 was just one place that traitors were taken, without trial, to confess. Traitors, in the new world, were the educated, academics, doctors, engineers, anyone who had soft hands or wore glasses. Plus the usual suspects: gays, monks, foreigners, smart-mouthed women, and even some people who actually were part of the previous regime. The KR turned a school with a good reputation into a prison that specialised in torture, and imposed a sadistic regime on the prisoners. Initially the plan was to extract confessions and then execute them (one of the basic premises was that anyone in S-21 had to be guilty).

The killing fields. When Duch, the commandant of S-21, ran out of places to bury bodies at S-21, a new location was found approximately 20km away, a Chinese cemetery. Prisoners were then, after they had run out of things to confess, blindfolded and taken by truck a couple of times a month to the killing fields, where they were then bludgeoned to death, kicked into a mass grave, and then covered in DDT to hide the odour and make sure they died. This was all done in the middle of the night to avoid undue attention, and music was played to hide the sounds. The reason for death by axe/rebar/club was two-fold: it was quieter than shooting, and bullets were expensive.

This was done with such secrecy that by all accounts no one knew what was going on, right up until the Vietnamese invaded and expelled the KR to the far western border with Thailand.

Today, most of the victims have been exhumed, and many bones have been forensically examined interred in a large stupa on the grounds. The stupa has large windows on all sides, and skulls and other bones are categorised and visible within. In order to promote the belief of never again, nothing is hidden, the skulls are categorised by victim age and cause of death. And there are a lot of skulls. It’s estimated that over 13,000 people were executed at this site, and this site is just one of over 300 that are known.

And then there’s the tree. I just don’t know how to write about the tree. For all of the sadness, walking around the grounds, listening to the audio guide, the explanations of each site, testimony by guards, it was the tree that broke me. Even writing this two days later, at a tacky airport restaurant, I’m still close to tears trying to get these few words out.

The Khmer Rouge executed anyone they considered a threat, and that included babies, which they justified by the metaphor that to kill weeds you start at the roots. So while the parents were being bludgeoned to death, babies were grabbed by their ankles and beaten against this tree.

In less than four years, over 100 babies were executed here in this manner.

I was holding it together fairly well, right until I got close to the tree. It didn’t come as a surprise, I already knew that this was here, but standing in front of it, listening to the testimony of the refugee who first discovered this (digging for potatoes but instead found bones and brain matter), something in me broke. I can almost, almost, understand why someone, possibly fearing for their life, or brainwashed into a rabid fervour, I can almost understand why they might execute a baby in this manner once. I’m not going to be the angelically altruistic arsehole who says they would never contemplate doing this, ever. I can see how doing this at night may reduce further the reality of the action. But fuck, I don’t know how anyone who did something like this more than once can ever be reintegrated back into society: either they are a sick fucker who derived pleasure from it, in which case they should be dropped into the deepest hole that can be found; or they’d be so aware of what they’d done they couldn’t get out of bed any day.

Like I said, something in my brain broke, and it’s going to take a while before the thoughts stop coming. Even 40 years after the last baby was murdered, and even though I doubt I’ll ever meet anyone who was involved in this, and even though I’m just a visitor here, fuck.

I can understand how someone wouldn’t want to go to the killing fields, who wouldn’t want to be near the tree, but that’s not for me. If I am going to spend my days and nights walking among these people who have survived so much, who are brave enough to put their worst moments on show, I owe them the opportunity to show me. I don’t know if I’m crying for myself or for those Cambodian babies and families, but I am crying.

After the killing fields was a tour of S-21. I didn’t cry. I think I’d already run through all the emotions on my ride back into the city, sadness, anger, frustration, amazement, a bunch more anger. That Cambodia has taken the path of justice over revenge is more than admirable, if it was up to me I’d be all for rounding them up, digging up the dead ones like Pol Pot, and then dumping their dismembered bits down every train station, bus station, and public toilet in Cambodia.

What Duch created at S-21 was horrific. Possibly 20,000 people were interred and tortured there over 3 years; when the Vietnamese troops arrived, the survivors could be counted on two hands, including two children. The others were prisoners who’d been kept alive because they had skills useful to Duch, such as an engineer who could fix things, and two artists who could paint endless portraits of Pol Pot. The Vietnamese found 14 prisoners still manacled to bedframes, bludgeoned to death in the guards’ last act of hiding their crimes. Photos of what the liberators found hang on the walls of each room, with the metal bedframes still in place. The 14 prisoners were then interred in the courtyard, nameless possibly never to be identified.

Though the blood has been cleaned up, enough evidence survived to paint a horrific picture of what went on there. Everything was designed to break the will of the prisoners, from the way they were constantly manacled (yet another use for re-bar), to the rules that basically meant that prisoners could be beaten for not taking a beating correctly, among other things. Interrogators were given guidelines by Duch on how to torture correctly: break the person so they’ll tell you everything, just don’t take pleasure from it. That guy was all heart.

Other safety devices installed by Duch included lots of barbed wire around the building balconies, after one prisoner managed to suicide by jumping over down into the courtyard below, as well as more manacles.

The prisoners at S-21 were dehumanised: stripped of all identity, given numbers, and while much documentation has survived the identities of most are not known: there are rows of photos, mugshots taken on internment, but these were separated from their files which has prevented identification. With the genocide accounting for approximately 25% of the Cambodian population, there is also a lack of surviving relatives to assist the process.

At the end of my tour I got to meet one of the survivors: one of the two children found when the prison was liberated. He’s now about my age. I’d like to say that I was able to say something meaningful to him, but all I could do was nod my head and buy the book that contains his account. Part of me thinks that was the right thing to do, to listen, to try to offer a smile, say a heart felt thank you, because what else could I offer someone like that?

There must be accounts out there that more eloquently describe these sites, maybe even some yet to be written. All I can say is go there, and no one will think worse of you if you end up sobbing in your tuk-tuk.

After an afternoon feeling quite wrecked, I thought the ideal way to spend the evening was by surrounding myself with those who’d be first against the wall should another KR emerge, who’d probably be on the front lines, in heels and tucked to the max: I went to a drag show.

The Blue Chilli club hosts possibly Phnom Penh’s longest running drag show, and it draws a decent crowd (and makes a decent mojito too). And the show didn’t disappoint, a little rough around the edges: a rudimentary stage with pole, very basic lighting, non-performing queens took turns on running the music; but full credit to the queens who pulled out all the stops and brought it. There were 5 or 6 queens performing, rotating between numbers (mostly lip-synching to western songs but there were a couple of Asian songs in the mix) and giving their all. It was only in the finale they started to fade, after more than an hour of high energy in a humid, sweaty club, under bright lights, and full make-up: conditions that would have had most folks curled up in the foetal position plugged into a saline drip.

It was a good night, it had a definite counter-culture feel to it, very easy-going and non-judgemental. I like a space where anyone is welcome. [That said, if I was to throw in a Michelle Visage-esque sidebar, I’d say that a lot of the outfits were done-up bodysuits, and maybe one queen could have padded better… but for a free show in a place with $4 mojitos does that really matter?]

From the killing fields to death drops: Cambodia at its best and worst.