It took me eight months living in Phnom Penh to visit S-21, the high school turned Khmer Rouge security prison turned today's genocide museum. Granted, I was really waiting for someone to come visit so I wouldn't have to go by myself, but as my flight home drew close I knew I would need something to talk about when I got back. Not that I wanted to talk about the Cambodian genocide, but more so I could understand better what Cambodia's went through from 1975-79 under Pol Pot's Kingdom of Death. AND maybe legitimize my standing as a Phnom Penhite.
Walking up the concerete stairs of Tuol Sleng and into the room where they show the documentary, "Bophana" every day at 10am and 3pm, I tried to picture what it would be like to have seen this place as an actual high school, filled with students dressed in white shirts and blue pants or skirts. It wasn't hard. My flat happens to be next to one of the many Newton Tlay grade schools so every morning I'm used to hearing the school bell ring, repetitions of "A, B, C...", laughter and occasionally little waves from students as I walk down and out of the apartment gate. But this place... The cracked yellow, red and white tiles, barbed wire, and cell blocks left as the Vietnamese found makes you picture blood stains instead. Maybe I'm being too morbid, then again, as the documentary showed, torture and death did happen here. It happened ironically under the "Democratic Kampuchea," under Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Nun Chea, and other leaders frustrated by US bombings, eager to see a revolutionary era of a classless, productive, agricultural-based society. They emptied Phnom Penh and drew millions into the rice paddies, killing intellectuals and destroying the moral and social fabric of Cambodian society. 2 million died, including (I think) 8 foreigners, and many did so at S-21, at the time under the wardenship of Duch, currently under trial by the International Criminal Court and the ECCC.
I watch the documentary about a young girl sent to work in a rice field while her husband worked with the KR in Phnom Penh. Separated by distance and increasingly by the controlling mind of "Angka", the two sent love letters only to be discovered by the Regime later and accused of being CIA spies. Crazy.
I then tour the rooms, expecting to come across all the scenes I've seen portrayed in tourist books and magazines. I find the room with the prisoner's photographs, the prison cell with the bed, and the tiny cell-blocks. I've never been to Auschwitz, but I imagine it is much the same... An eerie stillness in the air, probably imagined... Japanese tourists with super-zoom cameras hording around an "English-speaking" guide mixing history with prisoner stories... Encased human skulls & bones, gathering dust. I really didn't expect to see a burly Italian transvestite walk by in high heels.
Oddly enough, what struck me was the graffiti. It seemed to me, that in various languages, though primarily in English, visitors had managed to find spaces on walls and corridors to write their own thoughts (i.e."Never Again") and spray paint images. I guess I wouldn't really consider it vandalism. In a way, it added a little humanity to the place.
Upstairs I come across a photo exhibition of the Swedish delegation that came to legitimize the workings of the regime at the time. Each photo has a comment underneath it, relating what the photographer saw and thought at the time (occasionally questioning if some scenes like running hospitals and schools were staged) and then what really was probably going. Things are never what they seem, must be that harsh lesson learnt. In a public letter posted and enlarged next to the exhibition, the photographer apologizes profusely to the global community for not having realized the Khmer Rouge was actually evil.
I look out of one of the window's at the neighboring houses. Some are bright new and painted, Chinese-style gold and silver banisters glimmering in the mid-day sun. Others have that sad standard aluminum roofing. After all that destruction, this is what has risen... A traumatized society quickly building to catch up with modernity, trying to forget the past and move on (sometimes without regard to humanity again), with a wider economic gap between the rich and the poor, but hopefully with a sense that what their parents suffered can never happen. (Words often echoed and ignored by political, religious, and community leaders).
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