Crazy Places (Part I)

Well, I've been to several crazy places in the past week - some of them crazy in a good way, some of them in a bad way.  The first one I went to was definitely of the bad-crazy variety: the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh.

Bed with picture of victim found in it

A Brief History of the Khmer Rouge

The Khmer Rouge is the communist party that ran cambodia between 1975 and 1979.  They first appeared on the scene during the vietnam war - at the time the US was semi-friendly with the cambodian government in power.  The problem we had at the time, however, was that north vietnamese troops were hiding just over the cambodian border from southern vietnam.  We decided to rectify that problem by launching massive bombing raids against eastern cambodia - a nation we were 'friendly' with - to chase off the north vietnamese.  Not only did this not really work, it had the unfortunate side effect of rallying cambodians to the Khmer Rouge rebellion (after all, if your government's 'friends' are busy bombing you back to the stone age, wouldn't you be ready for a revolution?)

Detention building (barbed wire prevented suicide)

Shortly after vietnam fell to the communists, cambodia did as well.  The Khmer Rouge were insanely radical even for a communist group though - immediately after conquering the capital, they ordered the entire population of the city to leave town immediately to begin growing rice.  They abolished little things like money and private property, and basically made everybody in the country a peasant... the theory was that if everybody was growing rice, they'd be able to grow so much that they'd sell it to foreign countries, and make enough money to industrialize.

Needless to say, this didn't work very well, since they didn't bother to think about things like irrigation, or feeding all of the peasants, or the fact that many people had never grown rice before.  The Khmer Rouge, instead of admitting that it may have made a mistake or two, decided that their plans were failing because of foreign interference.  They came up with all sorts of amazing conspiracy theories involving the US, vietnam, russia, etc. etc. etc.  They also began accusing their own people of not supporting the revolution, and of being foreign spies.

Detention cell

Tuol Sleng, which was formerly a high school, was turned in to an 'interrogation center'.  When people were accused of not supporting the government, they were kidnapped, brought here, tortured until they confessed (most of the confessions were obviously made up, in an attempt to avoid more torture), and then trucked off to the killing fields and 'eliminated' (except for the 'elimination' part, this has some rather frightening similarities to Guantanmo Bay....).  During the four or so years that the Khmer Rouge was in power, they managed to kill off roughly a quarter of the country's population - somewhere between 1 and 3 million people.  14,000 of them were tortured and killed at Tuol Sleng (not everybody who came there was put to death of course - out of 14,000 people who entered, 7 managed to survive).

Skulls of some of the victims

In 1979 vietnam invaded cambodia and knocked the Khmer Rouge out of power.  When they came across Tuol Sleng, they decided to keep it pretty much as it was, and turn it into a museum about the horrors of the Khmer regime.  The beds that people were chained to are still there (with large dents in them, where they were beaten), the torture instruments are still stacked against the walls, and there are even bloodstains still on the floor.  It's VERY disturbing.  The craziest part is the gallery full of mug shots - when people were brought to the interrogation center, the Khmer Rouge took everyone's picture.  The vietnamese army captured the pictures along with everything else, so now there are thousands of faces lining the walls of people who were tortured to death....

Torture instruments