S21 and The Killing Fields

Before you read this post, please note - This post contains disturbing images, some of which depict the physical remains of deceased persons. Those easily upset or disturbed, or those ethically opposed to viewing such images should not continue. I have no wish to offend or upset anyone.

However, my intention with this blog was to illuminate on the salient points of my trip and I believe it would be a diservice to the victims of the Khmer regime not to accurately portray what I have seen today. The decision to include these images was not taken lightly, nor was the decision to take such pictures an easy one. The ethical question of being a "tourist" in such a location is a difficult one, but one that I believe can be resolved so long as the proper respect is given. As such, I have taken these pictures so that people who will never visit Cambodia, S21 or the Killing Fields will have a somewhat accurate idea of what happened there. It is not my intention to be disrespectful, and if some of you believe I have been as you read this post, I can only offer appologies.

With that in mind, a short bit of history.

In 1975, the Khmer Republic was overthrown by what is today referred to as the Khmer Rouge. This name is given to those who were followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the organisation which seized power in Cambodia, funded and armed by Vietnamese Communists.

While parading itself as the saviour of the people, the regime quickly turned to terror tactics, murder and even genocide in order to reshape the country as they pleased. Pol Pot, the leader, and his cadre wanted to make Cambodia a self-sufficient agrarian communist country, but went so far as to deny external medical supplies to the people, so that there was little or no real medicine available to the population. Many thousands died of treatable diseases, including malaria.

Suspected "capitalists" - professions, citizens from urban regions and especially intellectuals - were the targets of initial purges, but soon anyone with dissenting views became a target for an increasingly paranoid state.

Much like during the Nazi regime in Germany, those who had no interest in the political views of the party were conscripted into the workings of the regime or signed up before they could be conscripted forcably, simply because they would be executed if they failed to. Many of these people then found themselves as soldiers, prison guards and executioners. Of these, many were in turn imprisoned or executed as the state began to purge itself in a fit of paranoia.

The death toll is considered to be somewhere between 1.4 and 2 million - about half were executed while the rest died from starvation or ill health - in a country that probably only had seven million people in 1975. In percentage terms, a greater portion of the Cambodian population died under the Khmer Rouge than Jews died under Hitler.

Such things as this should never be easy to talk about, and one suspects that the true gravitas of the places I visited today will be incommunicable but there seems to me a real responsibility to try. When I was thinking about this earlier, I thought of a quote from a Battlestar Galactica character, Saul Tigh, speaking about the impending death of his unborn son and his love for the mother: "I don't need to say it. I shouldn't need to say it to anyone. Isn't it enough that I feel it? Shouldn't need to spout the words; I feel it less with words. Just let me Gods-damn feel it and I'll fill the frakkin' room."

To be honest, I often agree with him, and hate false cliched responses to emotional situations or events. I agree that it is enough to feel something and not need to dress it up in words. But words are important too, and sometimes it is necessary to speak of things, so that others can understand where you are, in your own head, as well as so they can learn some of the things you have learned. Hopefully, I will manage to convey something more than the simple words "it was awful" and the absolute nothing that such a bland statement manages to convey.

S21 was a notorious prison in Phnom Penh where suspected dissidents, high ranking or otherwise, were taken to be interrogated and held. Before becoming a site of torture and death, it was a school. Walking around it, some of the original blackboards are still in place, and you can see where the walls have been knocked through to turn rows of classrooms into prison-cells. Stains still mark the floors.

Several of the rooms have been left as they were, while others have been turned into photographic memorials.

I'll take you through it as I saw it. The first thing you notice is how much like a school the three buildings look. There's an eerie strangeness to that, because you know what you know, and cannot quite equate the two things together. It gets easier when you notice the fourteen white tombs in front of building A. A mass grave that was discovered in that area, several years ago. After this you notice the exercise poles, once used by students but turned into instruments of torture by the regime. Prisoners would have a their hands tied behind them and then the rope would be used to hoist them upside down until they lost consciouness. Afterwards, they would have their heads submerged in a far of filthy water to bring them out of it, after which the interrogation would begin again.

During processing the prisoners were made aware of the ten rules of the prison, which I will let you read for yourself -

1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Kromin order to hide your secret or traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

The first floor of building A was where high ranking prisoners were interrogated. Iron beds and clamps to lock the prisoners are in each room, one to a room. These were people to be interrogated alone. Upstairs, the rooms might have two or three beds, indicating that man people where tortured in each room. Often the interrogations would continue without a break, for hours or days, with rotating shifts of torturers.

The spent ammunition cases which appear in most of the prisons were used as toilets.

The third floor is probably the least affected place. It retains its blackboards, a creepy vision of reeducation camps which existed throughout Cambodia, or prehaps merely an awful juxtaposition against which one may view the torture a floor below.

The bottom floor of the next building contains both pictures of the victims and also of Pol Pot and his cadre, all those who led the regime.

Building C was the main prison area. It is wrapped in a web of barbed wire and there is only one gate. The classroom were converted into small cells and the walls knocked through, presumeably to make easier for the guards to keep an eye on the captives.

The last building contains extracts from the only stories of the only fourteen people thought to have survived S21, as well as similar extacts from the biographies of those who were forced to work there, often fearing for their lives if they did not do as instructed by the their superiors.

Next, I travelled out to the Killing Fields, specifically the field at Choeung Ek. There are many sites around Cambodia that were used as execution grounds and contain mass graves. This is perhaps the most famous and the most easily accessible.

This place is much more like Dachau. The air here has a quality of silence almost impossible to reproduce. Those who have been to such sites, and so many of them exist, will know what I am talking about and those who haven't just won't understand what I mean. I often wonder if the sense of silence, of a hushed deathly stillness, is real, or if it is something we bring with us to such places. I have no more answers today than I have had before. It is more than just the quiet of solemn respect. Words are simply not spoken, and when they must be, there is a hushed, funereal whisper to them. I mean it when I say funereal too - it is not just some melodramatic conceit I've conjured up. It is not like when you are quiet in a church. It is quiet the way you are quiet in the presence of a body, in the presence of the dead.

The first thing you see and probably visit is a large stupa, or Buddhist shrine for relics. It functions as both a memorial and a shrine and is a place for silent contemplation of the deaths that occured here. From outside it is a beautiful building. At the front it is possible to get flowers and a stick of incense which can be left as an offering at the front of the shrine. You can also make a donation here.

I took the flowers and incense and left my donation and entered the stupa. This tall structure contains 5000 human skulls in ascending shelves. Although I knew what I was about to see, it was still a surprise, the slow damning awareness of exactly how many of there are. 5000 is a number. Seeing so many actual skulls was something else. Seeing the broken ones, clearly beaten in or smashed was difficult, strange and affecting.

At this point I made the decision to take some photographs, which is allowed, though it becomes ethically vague. I hope that those of you who look at them now will be aware that I have taken them specifically for you, so you can appreciate both what I saw, and more importantly, what the Khmer Rouge did.

Following this, I spent several minutes actually praying, not to Buddha, or to God really either, but to whatever was listening I suppose, that some day, sites and sights like this need not be repeated. That we might outgrow our ridiculous penchant for violence at some point.

There are a few more pictures I would like to show you, but first I will explain exactly what the Killing Fields are. As part of its purges, the Khmer Rouge would collect state "enemies" and transport them to places like this. At first it was only a hundred a year, then only a few hundred, but eventually it was a few hundred a day.

People would arrive by truck and immediately executed, but as the number of people increased they had to start imprisoning them for the day, and continued into the killings long into the night.

The tree to the right is referred to as the killing tree. Children were beaten to death against it.

The bodies of the dead were then dumped in mass graves all around the field. Several of these have been excavated. In some of the graves, the bodies found have been headless (hence the skulls collected for the shrine). These graves are scattered around the area, but many have not been uncovered. Currently, it has been decided that no new excavations will take place. However, when there are strong rains, relics come up from the ground, mostly bone fragments and teeth, which are collected and put on display.

It's a strange thing, to walk in that place. Wouldn't it be nice to say that this was Cambodians killing each other? That it is nothing to do with us?

But we really can't. We may not have raised such a literal Golgotha, but we have our death camps, our own horrors. This place belongs, not merely to the Cambodians, but is a burden and a failure that rests on all of us. Not just because of international failures (of which there were plenty), but because humanity as a whole continues its genocides in other regions, in other counties.

It reminds me of this song, Right in Two, by TOOL, about these angels sitting watching mankind and wondering why God would have given them free will.

"Angels on the sideline,
Baffled and confused.
Father blessed them all with reason.
And this is what they choose.
(and this is what they choose)

Monkey, killing monkey, killing monkey
Over pieces of the ground.
Silly monkeys give them thumbs,
They forge a blade,

And when there's one they're bound to divide it,
Right in two."

People often say things like, "How can God let this happen?" And the simple answer is that he did not let this happen. If there is such a being as God, and I am by no means convinced of that, He gave us free will, and with that we have chosen an endless cycle of violence and oppression. Given the gift of intelligence, we made knives and swords and went out to slaughter our brothers and sisters. To call the Khmer Rouge a Cambodian tragedy is to ignore its context within the wider angle of the Vietnam conflicts of the period, to ignore the Cold War in general, more recent genocides in Rawanda and Yugoslavia, to ignore Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and even further, the Somme, Carthage, the fall of Troy and an endless lists of other cities and other countries.

I won't preach about how it's time to put an end to this, time to stop, because people just like you an me have known that since ong before the Romans burned Carthage, massacred its women and children and salted the earth. People have always known this kind of violence in wrong.

That's the really sad thing, that we remain such silly monkeys, ready to tear each other apart for our own little piece of nothing that we so jealously guard. We know it, and yet it happens again and again, in cycle after cycle. One wonders, if in a thousand years, if there is still a humanity, if it has burst out into the stars to colonise other planets, will it be other races we practice our genocides against, or will we still be slaughtering each other by the bucketful?

Pity I don't have an uplifting, "but-it's-all-okay" punchline for you here. I wish I did, it'd be nice - and I could probably do with it more than you anyway! But it just isn't there.

I'll cheer up for next time,
Shane.