The Khmer Rouge's Shameful, Tragic Legacy

Before coming to Cambodia, we had both heard of the country’s killing fields. Nevertheless, neither of us even vaguely appreciated the complete extent of the suffering imposed on this friendly country’s people a mere 30 years ago – representing recent history that transpired during our own lifetimes. As a result, we were not prepared for the abounding evidence of brutality and inhumanity that we witnessed firsthand at Phnom Penh’s Toul Sleng Genocide Museum. The haunting, all-too-real visit deeply troubled us, caused us to bemoan the dark savagery of humankind and led us to draw parallels to the current state of affairs in Darfur and Iraq. We hope that the writing below does justice to what we saw.

Toul Sleng is located in southern Phnom Penh in a relatively-quiet residential neighborhood characterized by multi-unit dwellings and small shops. The building originated as a place of learning, serving as a high school until May 1976. That the structure would become Security Prison 21 (S21), a gruesome torture chamber in which mostly-adolescent soldiers brutalized the country’s intellectuals, holds a particularly cruel irony.

By way of background, Cambodia’s descent into the dark days of Khmer Rouge rule began in the early 1970’s. As North Vietnamese soldiers sought sanctuary across the border, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces followed in pursuit, and Cambodia became a flash point in the Vietnamese conflict. The escalating violence in combination with an ineffectual and undemocratic leadership fomented considerable leftist discontent. This backdrop laid the foundation for the rise of the madman Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge party.

Pol Pot defied a Cambodian public hopeful for long-awaited peace and freedom by forcing the country’s entire urban populace to migrate to the countryside. His demented and revisionist agrarian ideology suspended basic freedoms throughout Cambodia (renamed Kampuchea), used force to restrict border access, and, worst of all, authorized the mass execution of intellectuals and their family members, Buddhist priests, those accused of petty crimes, foreigners, and anyone suspected of being disloyal to the state. In four years (1975-1979), half of Cambodia’s population (representing roughly three million lives) was butchered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge as the West stood idly by.

In Cambodian, the phrase Toul Sleng roughly translates into “poisonous hill,” which understates the facility’s horrific purpose. Civilian families, including children and newborns, were imprisoned here and systematically tortured until the arrival of Vietnamese liberation forces in 1979. At any given time, Toul Sleng held 1,200 to 1,500 prisoners with an average incarceration period of 2 to 4 months (some prominent political prisoners were jailed longer). Of Toul Sleng’s estimated 20,000 inmates, only 7 survived. The 14 corpses found in the individual cells by the Vietnamese are buried in the school’s playground.

As we approached the site, we took note of the ominous barbed wire atop the schoolyard’s perimeter walls. Once inside the grounds, a grim three-story block building stood before us, left in the same condition as it was found in 1979. The high school’s transformation was horrifying: ground floor classrooms subdivided into 15 square foot cells and interrogation rooms adorned with blood-spattered walls and blown-up pictures of disfigured prisoners. Middle floor rooms were designed to hold female prisoners in claustrophobic makeshift wooden cubicles. Undivided top floor rooms once housed rows of prisoners shackled together by their ankles.

The adjacent building housed an extensive and haunting exhibition of victims’ photos, as taken by their captors. The array of faces staring back at us in black and white poignantly personalized the depths of the tragedy that unfolded here. In one austere photo, a young girl of perhaps 9 or 10 manages a brave smile that immediately reduced us to tears. In another, the harrowed eyes of a desperately-thin man in his early 20’s reveal his sheer terror. Other photos appeared to reflect stoicism, disbelief or resignation.

In an adjoining room, we overheard a guide tell her tour group that she was one of Toul Sleng’s seven survivors. She had lost her parents in the prison and still bore shackle scars on her ankles. She had returned to Cambodia in the late 1990’s after more than 20 years abroad. She now gave tours at the scene of her life’s greatest sorrow in order to remind others of the heartbreaking events that took place here three decades ago.

Another photo exhibit depicted a chilling incident at the prison in two frames. In the first frame, we see a young woman from the front. She is seated holding a baby, but maintains her gaze forward at the camera. In the second frame, we see the side profile of the same woman, from the neck up, with a single tear running down her cheek. From this vantage point, we realize that the woman’s head has been secured in place to the wall, preventing her from looking down to see or tend to her crying baby. As the photograph was being taken, jailers silenced the baby by throwing it against the wall in plain view of its cruelly-immobilized mother.

By the time we had moved into the exhibition's final room -- past photos of slumped, lifeless bodies, photos of countless skulls uncovered from mass graves, cabinets of the Khmer Rouge’s preferred implements of torture and painted reenactments of scenes portraying prisoner mistreatment -- we were thoroughly shellshocked. Exhausted and emotionally-drained, we exited the grounds quietly. At that moment, we felt very small and insignificant. Once the facility faded from our sight, we felt a palpable sense of relief overcome us. We both knew that we still needed more time before we would be able to recount the experience in our own words.