The Lou Bon Voyage

Section 21 Prison. Click the image to see more photos.

A few days ago we went to Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, and visited the killing field at Choeung Ek.  This was quite profound experience and I thought it deserved a separate post.  Hopefully you will also be able to click through the image above to see the rest of a small album I’ve put together.

Tuol Sleng, then, was also known as Security Office Section 21 and is located in an old school in a quiet suburb of the capital.  A corrugated iron fence surrounds the complex – which is surprisingly small – and venturing inside, there were three or four concrete buildings surrounding a courtyard that is now grassed over.

Our first stop was a movie room, located in one of the buildings; here we watched a film of 45 minutes or so that focused on a woman named Bophana.  Separated from her partner (as per the Khmer Rouge policy of keeping family members apart) she is forced out of Phnom Penh in the mass evacuation of the city, only to return later when she is arrested and brought to Section 21.  Her harrowing story is told through a series of letters between the lovers – they are increasingly frantic, as both Bophana and her lover begin to fear arrest: Bophana because her father was an important local leader before the coup, and her lover because of the Khmer Rouge’s increasing fears of inner plots against them.  Ultimately, both are arrested, tortured over a period of months at Section 21, and then murdered.  Even more tragic is the fact they were both imprisoned at the same time completely unbeknownst to eachother, and murdered – or ‘officially destroyed’ according to the records – within a day of eachother.

Once the film had finished we walked around the rest of the buildings.  They have been left almost entirely as they were found by the Vietnamese when the Khmer Rouge fled.  Only a couple of supports have been added to crumbling walls to prevent them from collapsing.

The rooms of one building had been divided into tiny cells by walls of brick and wood; here prisoners were held in shackles between tortures.  Larger classrooms in another building were used as cells/torture rooms.  When the Vietnamese discovered the prison they found the remains of fourteen people in these individual rooms; a photo of each corpse hangs on the wall, and their remains were buried in the playground area.

On the lower floors of the final building we visited, we saw paintings of the atrocities, which were done by an inmate singled out by the guards – he is one of the very few people who survived imprisonment here.    Alongside these are instruments of torture on display, followed by a shrine which includes the skulls of the many victims who died there.

One of the most profoundly affecting parts of the museum for me were the four or five rooms displaying photographs of victims.  These official shots were taken as prisoners arrived at Section 21, and for this reason each person is pictured looking directly at the camera.  I couldn’t even begin to comprehend what was going through their minds at this time; some look simply impassive, others’ faces have terror etched across them.  Difficult as it was, I walked around each display board and tried to take it all in.  For me, the hardest board to look at was one that displayed pictures of children.  Some were as young as two years old.

The museum not only serves to educate people like me, who knew very little about the atrocities committed under Pol Pot’s regime, but acts as a monument to all those who were tortured and killed here.  It is very simply preserved and put together.  The written explanations of the museum and of the regime as a whole are short and to the point.  This works, though, as I think most of what you see there is beyond words.

I would like to say that Section 21 feels like a peaceful place now, but in reality it just felt very, very still.  Most people walk around in complete silence and no-one raises their voice above a whisper; it is as though the place has been frozen in time.  As we took shelter from the heat before we moved on to Choeung Ek, we sat and drank a cold drink and it gave me cause to contemplate the thousands of people who perished within the prison walls, the fear and horror they experienced.  The fact that these buildings were once home to schools – to vital children, learning and playing before education was outlawed – made this more moving than I can really put into words.

I was feeling quite numb as we moved on to see the killing field at Choeung Ek, about 20 minutes outside the city.  Needless to say this too was an extraordinary site, which has now been developed – in a more overt way than Tuol Sleng, but still discretely – into a centre for remembrance.

A large stupa (temple) stands close to the entrance; inside, the remains of victims are displayed on shelves.  Clothes are on the bottom shelf, followed by layers of skulls and other different types of bone.  Outside, visitors are asked to light incense and place flowers to honour the dead (which of course I did).

After taking in the stupa for a short while we walked around the rest of the area of the field that is open to the public.  It is essentially a series of ditches, around which people were murdered and into which their bodies were dumped. Sites such as the truck stop, where prisoners would be unloaded, and the site where deadly chemicals would be stored now bear nothing more than a sign, a simple explanation of the horrors that took place.  Several of the larger mass graves have been preserved with fencing and roofs.  Again, simple signs explain features of the grave – how many hundreds of bodies found, whether they included women or children, whether they were clothed or naked.  Bizarrely, Choeung Ek did feel more peaceful to me, perhaps because the stupa has been built, or perhaps because it is surprisingly green; lots of plants have been allowed to grow and these have attracted a vast number butterflies.

As we took our tuktuk ride back to Phnom Penh I sat watching people pass by and it struck me just how recent this all was.  The genocide was going on when Paul was born, the regime was collapsing when I was born, and the full horrors of the Security Prisons and killings fields were being uncovered as we went to primary school.  Surely everyone in this country has a tale to tell; family members, friends lost, and not just in the killing – in the forced mass evacuations of the towns, or the intolerable hard labour and starvation.  The legacy clearly lives on, and not always in the most obvious of ways.  Before we had even been to Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek, Paul made a passing remark that he hadn’t seen many older Cambodian people.  I read today that because of the genocide, seventy percent of the population is under thirty.

I’ll leave this post with a final thought from some graffiti I saw in Section 21, obviously added in recent times: ‘The pain of man’s inhumanity toward man is unbearable’.  Looking round these sites, I felt this to be true; and yet the people of Cambodia do bear it.  Their warm, friendly, open welcome belies the utter horror they have experienced.  Suddenly I’m not so inclined to bargain for an extra dollar off a t-shirt when it only costs $3 anyway, and I don’t mind so much people continually trying to sell me things, when it is obvious they are just striving for a better way of life.  The issues of mass tourism are a whole other post (or three!) entirely, but on a very simple level, if our visit is of any help to this beautiful country then I wish we could stay for a year and not just a month.

Until next time,

Lou x