Thursday, October 4, 2012
MAKING it to Siem Reap and finally seeing Angkor Wat was fulfilling.
But knowing a little more of the country I was visiting would be a plus,
and this is why I found myself in Phnom Penh.
A fellow traveler wanted us to make the most of our visit to Cambodia
and planned a side trip to the capital city for us to see another facet
of the country’s history, a more recent one.
I
wasn’t entirely prepared for this part of the tour, I don’t think
nobody will be. Yes, I’ve heard and read of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge and
the killing fields, but to be standing on the very spot of the
“incidents” was eerie, to say the least. It was nothing I expected.
The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (Tuol Sleng means "Hill of the
Poisonous Trees" or "Strychnine Hill”) was formerly the Chao Ponhea Yat
High School campus converted by the Khmer Rouge into a prison and
interrogation center-- Security Prison 21 or S-21, where the buildings
were enclosed in barbed wires and the classrooms altered to tiny jails
and torture chambers.
For four years, 1975-1979, S-21 held an estimated total of 17,000
prisoners (some suggested higher) that included government officials and
soldiers of the previous regime, students, factory workers and
professionals (academics, doctors, teachers, engineers, etc.) and even
monks. The regime driven by paranoia, the count soon included members of
the Khmer Rouge, people who were viewed as potential threat to Pol Pot.
Prisoners who were brought in were photographed, required to give
autobiographies in detail, stripped, shackled in cells, slept on floors,
forbidden to talk to each other, fed with four small spoonfuls of rice
porridge and watery soup of leaves twice a day, drink water with
permission, and hosed down every four days. Those who disobeyed the
prison’s strict regulations were severely beaten.
Within two or three days after they were brought in, all prisoners
were interrogated and tortured (beating, electric shock, hot metal
searing, suffocation, hanging, etc.) into confessing to the crimes they
were charged with. From the vast number of prisoners who were innocent,
the torturing was able to draw false confessions.
If the prisoners didn’t die of some disease due to unhygienic living
condition or committing suicide, the torturing did them in. Initially,
S-21 was the burial ground to its victims and eventually ran out of
space after the first year. It was then that prisoners were sent to the
Choeung Ek extermination center where they were executed by iron bar
battering, pickaxes, machetes, and many other makeshift weapons. The
bodies were then buried in masses.
S-21 was uncovered in 1979 by the invading Vietnamese army. Of the
huge numbers of prisoners, only seven were presumed to have survived and
as of September 2011, only three are said to be alive. I was able to
meet one of the survivors, his name is Bou Meng and he related his story
in a published book.
The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was established in 1980, the year
after the security prison was uncovered. It tells the unfortunate
stories of S-21’s prisoners and the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge regime.
Within its walls are the classrooms turned into torture chambers,
shackles to bound the prisoners, the implements of torture and hundreds
of faces in photographs of the prisoners.
Yes, I was not prepared for this. I exited the museum complex with a
heavy heart. I can’t even speak. And the sad moment was far from over as
my friends and I were heading to where the heartbreaking story of
Cambodia continues.
For more travel & lifestyle stories, visit http://jeepneyjinggoy.blogspot.com/ and http://apples-and-lemons.blogspot.com/
Published in the Sun.Star Davao newspaper on October 04, 2012.
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