Tuol Sleng Visit.
on Mary In Cambodia (Cambodia), 13/Feb/2011 03:06, 34 days ago
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.The following are my own observations, and not those of VSOA stay in Cambodia is not complete without a visit to Tuol Sleng or S21 as it was called during the Pol Pot Regime. So last week I finally decided it was time to go and see for myself.The buildings were former primary and secondary schools, surrounded by a double fence topped with dense barbed wire, in the heart of Phnom Penh. In 1975 these schools were taken over by the Khmer Rouge and turned into a centre for detention, interrogation, torture and killing. Some of the classrooms were divided into cubicles/cages less than a metre wide and 2 metres long where individual prisoners were kept in isolation. In other rooms prisoners were crowded together without light or sanitation. Some rooms contained an iron bed frame. Many of the prisoners were shackled to these beds. Higher up there were torture rooms. There was a huge photographic exhibition.Very few people came out of S21 alive, but I was amazed to see how so much that went on there, was documented so carefully, photographs of prisoners, confession archives, stories of individuals, evidence of the most horrific torture, torture tools and shackles. An estimated 10.000 adults and 20,000 children were tortured and killed in S21 between 1975 and 1978.Kang Keck Lev, known as Duch was the chief who was responsible for S21 .Before the Khmer Rouge time he was a mathematics teacher. He was eventually arrested and was the first and only Khmer Rouge leader to be found guilty to date. A number of others are to be tried this year.In January 1979, when the reign of terror ended, 14 bodies were found in Tuol Sleng. One was a woman. The bodies were so decomposed that they couldn’t be identified. I saw their graves in the grounds of the museum.I went from Tuol Sleng to Choeung Ek, better know as The killing fields. This was another harrowing experience. 89 of the 120 mass graves have been opened, a monument in the centre holds thousands of skulls. A short film told the terrible tale.I think the day was a necessary part of my time in Cambodia, but it is not something I would want to repeat. It’s easy to read history about man’s inhumanity to man, but to realize that this was happening during my adult life, that the children murdered were of a similar age to my own children, that mothers my age had to watch their children being battered to death, is too awful.May all who suffered rest in peace.This was a day when taking photographs didn’t seem appropriate.