Genocide

In the morning of our second day in Phnom Penh, we went to visit the genocide museum at Tsoul Slek (S-21) and the killing fields at Choung Ek.  A pretty harrowing experience, but something we felt it would be remiss not to do on a visit to Cambodia.

S-21 was the prison in Phnom Penh that the Khmer Rouge set up to incarcerate, and kill those they considered against them.  This was initially all the intellectuals, teachers, politicians, rich people etc that they thought might oppose them and on whom they wanted vengeance.  This is billed as poor peasants kicking out rich capitalists.  Later, as he became more and more paranoid, successive layers of the Khmer Rouge organisation itself were imprisioned or killed as Pol Pot thought they posed a threat to him.

The buildings were previously a school and you can see them below.

There are three of them.  The open side is overlooked by other buildings but the Khmer Rouge emptied the city when they took over, forcing everyone to go and work on communal farms in the country.

They put barbed wire up to stop people jumping off the buildings and committing suicide.

They divided up some of the floors internally to create 2m x 1m cells.

Other rooms were used as mass cells or torture rooms.

Overall, not just in this prison, 20% of the population was wiped out.

There were seven survivors found at this prison when the Vietnamese came in. Two of them are still alive today and were at the prison signing their books and promoting a victims organisation.

We were really lucky with our guide who was a key researcher into the background and had written most of the material in the museum.  He was very knowledgeable and good to talk to and answer questions.

After the S-21 museum, we went slightly out of town to the biggest of many killing fields sites in Cambodia.  It took ages to get there because construction had blocked the road and we had to manufacture a short-cut through various villages and dirt roads.

This was where they drove lorry loads of people to be executed, usually at night, and buried them in mass graves.  There was an excellent audio tour that took us round the site and had interviews with witnesses, guards and survivors.

The undulations in the picture below are mass graves.

Some have been given roofs as a mark of respect.

They've build a giant Stupa to hold remains to Buddhist standards which really brings it home.

It has 17 layers like this.