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.

Phnomenal

After a pleasant night out with Ann and Ben, we snagged a few, short hours of sleep before rising early the next morning for a 7 am flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital and largest city. As it turned out, the morning became a bit of a debacle, and one that the lovely-and-rigorously-toilet-trained Kaberi found less than amusing. With Vik doing his best impersonation of Stan Slowsky (the unwitting terrapin pitchman for Comcast High-Speed Internet), we ended up leaving the hotel at 5:40 am.

Due to our cabbie’s rather unhurried driving on an empty tollway, it took us 30 minutes to arrive at Bangkok’s frenzied international airport. We devoted an additional 5 minutes to finding the appropriate nondescript Air Asia check-in counter. Another 10 minutes elapsed during a scintillating give-and-take with the check-in agent from which we learned that we would be allowed to check in a grand total of zero bags. It took 20 more minutes to clear Customs and another 10 minutes to walk to the low-cost airline terminal (which we suspect was located somewhere near the Cambodian border), bags in tow.

By now, we were within 5 minutes of our flight’s departure time, but not really any closer to boarding the actual aircraft. During the prerequisite X-ray screening, a Thai security officer took issue with the expensive Swiss Army knife safely ensconced in the recesses of our not-exactly-checked-in backpack. A frantic negotiation then ensued between us, the security officer and the Air Asia employee dispatched to the scene to scold us for holding up the flight. After finally reaching an amicable resolution – we would check in our bags planeside and the airline would vouch for the knife – we became the last two persons to board (by this point, Vik’s shirt had started to singe from the glare boring into him from behind). Adding further insult to injury, the actual flight ended up being a whopping 45 minutes long.

With our early morning arrival into Phnom Penh, we immediately made our way into the city center. Phnom Penh is constructed in low-rise fashion, sprouting from vivid orange flatlands, with broad promenades reflecting the influence of decades of French rule. The city was founded by a widow, Lady Penh, after she found that a trunk full of four bronze and one stone Buddhas had washed ashore from the adjacent Mekong River.

Despite considerable tangible evidence of Cambodia’s economic development (in the form of ubiquitous billboards hawking local and western brands), we perceived a decidedly-laid back feel to the environs, with only modest automobile traffic on dusty, but well-maintained roads. Phnom Penh is also easy to navigate as it is laid out in a grid with the mostly-numbered avenues and streets (some streets are named after foreign dignitaries like Nehru or Mao Tse Tung).

Our first stop was at our guesthouse, a stunning, French colonial affair, to drop off our luggage. Two white statue elephants stood guard over the imposing streetfacing exterior wall’s lone doorway. Once inside, we were transported into a lush oasis, where tropical foliage-shaded sunbeds encircled a serene, blue pool which, in turn, fronted a large, sunshine-yellow manor. After resting briefly at the poolside bar to take in the scene (French lounge music straight out of the Buddha Bar echoed around us as largely-European vacationers frolicked in or around the pool), we headed off to explore the city.

As we strolled around the neighborhood, we encountered no shortage of streetside cafes, restaurants and boutiques (much to Kaberi’s delight). In short order, we made our way into a charming café/patisserie catering to expats where we enjoyed our first fresh-baked sandwich in months. When it came time to pay the bill, we were surprised to find the tab quoted in U.S. currency. We soon learned that Cambodia is a dollar-denominated economy, with the country’s ATM’s dispensing greenbacks exclusively. Interestingly, Cambodians have adopted the use of American dollars in their transactions, but not cents (instead, Cambodians use riels with 4,000 riel roughly equaling a dollar).

As noon approached, Kaberi's plans to launch full bore into sightseeing were waylaid by Vik’s strong desire to seek both shade and shut-eye. The strategy ended up paying off in spades as most of the city’s cultural landmarks are mercifully closed from noon to 2 pm in deference to Cambodia’s unforgiving sun. The logic of Vik's course of action was further reinforced when we settled in under the lazy whirl of our room’s ceiling fan in the comfort of a billowing white canopy bed for a fifteen minute-going on-two hour catnap.

After reentering consciousness, we set off in the direction of Phnom Penh’s Royal Palace and Silver Pavilion complex. We opted to walk, rather than ride via tuk-tuk, the half-mile from our guesthouse and soon came to regret the decision. Slathered in SPF 60 in the 100-degree heat, we were caked in an unfortunate veneer of greasy sweat when we finally arrived at our destination. We did, however, manage to arrive just as the complex re-opened for the afternoon hours. To gain brief respite from the torrid sun, we largely admired the palace grounds from the shade.

At the Silver Pavilion we marveled at the extensive and weathered mural of the Ramayana, complete with Cambodian protagonists. We were also struck by the numerous depictions of a much-thinner Buddha than found elsewhere in Asia. Near the Pavilion stood the statue of King Norodom (originally a statue of a horse-mounted Napoleon with the head replaced), presented to the Cambodian monarch by the French in a rather conspicuous example of international regifting. Our sightseeing ended with a quick stroll through the salmon-colored National Museum, an impressive structure with four open-air galleries featuring many original statues from the Angkor temples and a central courtyard.

The next morning we awoke early to venture through the cramped food and clothing stalls of Phnom Penh’s Russian Market (once a reliable source for arms and ammunition). The market was an eclectic venue, with assorted vendors selling Louis Vuitton and Puma knock-offs next to others selling skinned chickens and other sundry aquatic and terrestrial life. Given Vik’s fragile emotional state as a recovering vegetarian, we opted to focus our time wandering the silk, silver and apparel sections. Our visit concluded with Kaberi spending $5 total on two light and airy wraparound pants to replace a pair of khakis thoroughly bleached by the Indian sun.

At the suggestion of Kaberi’s Carleton classmate, Becky, we stopped at Phnom Penh’s Friends Restaurant for lunch. Friends International is a Cambodian non-governmental organization (NGO) with an approach similar to that of one of Kaberi’s favorite Chicago grantees, The Inspiration Café. Friends provides a multitude of essential services for street children, including schooling, HIV/AIDS education and job training opportunities at the restaurant. After a very good tapas meal, where we sampled a number of traditional Cambodian dishes and interacted with friendly trainees, we walked away with a commemorative t-shirt along with plans to grab dinner at Friends’ up-scale sister restaurant, Romdeng, the following day.