The Killing Fields

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Saturday, January 12, 2008

golden spires

Phnom Penh is now a small but busy city: shady tree-lined boulevards lit with French lamp posts, a legacy of its colonial heritage; wide grassy walkways where crowds gather in the evening to play badminton, practise tai chi, socialise and flirt; a relaxed riverfront overlooked by a string of restaurants and cafes; bustling markets selling everything from fried spiders (my ultimate culinary horror) to locally-made branded clothes (check the 'made in...' label in your 'Gap', 'Next' etc garments); hundreds of people on the move in tuk tuks and cars, on motorbikes and bicycles; and all against the timeless backdrop of the golden spires of the wats (temples) appearing to pierce the blue sky. It felt like such a laid-back city that I found it

French colonial building

hard to imagine that these streets and spires, now playing host to the smiling, relaxed Cambodian people, were the same ones that had witnessed the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge just thirty years ago. It was even harder to rationalise the fact that many of the locals out and about on those streets who were above the age of thirty five, apparently engaged in 'normal' interactions, had almost certainly suffered at the hands of the regime, whether through loss of their homes, loss of loved ones, forced labour, or mental and physical torture in the grim "Security Prison". (At this point I hadn't been exposed to the skulls of those whose suffering was taken to the extreme, in the famed 'Killing Fields'.) After years during which the brutal communist regime successfully nurtured extreme paranoia among Cambodians, to the point that people were scared to talk openly with their own close family, for fear of being 'reported' to those in control, I watched old people interact with each other on the streets and wondered how they evolved to this point, how they ever learned to stem suspicion and to trust their neighbours again.

barbed wire at Tuol Sleng

rows of cell doors

But it was not until after a stomach-churning and ultimately numbing visit to 'Tuol Sleng', the 'security prison', temporary home to thousands of innocent victims from all regions of the country, from babies to the elderly, from peasants to intellectuals, that I began to appreciate the scale of the horrors to which this nation had been exposed. Of the vast number incarcerated in this evil place, a mere seven lived to tell the tale. Or paint the tale: the paintings by one of these survivors are displayed in the now museum. Let's just say you would not hang them on your living room wall at home. I walked through this old school building, requisitioned by Pol Pot and turned into a centre of barbaric torture: looking at the

pictures of detainees

rows and rows of photos of the detainees; standing in one of the tiny cells and trying to imagine the terror of its previous occupants; seeing the instruments of pain laid out on the bed frames in the torture rooms, and on the walls, graphic photographic records of the suffering on those same beds;

skull with bullet wound, from Killing Fields

standing under the 'gallows' and reading the description of how victims were slung from it and ducked into vats of water as part of the 'process'; reading the sickening 'regulations' poster which inmates were required to follow during the brutal torture sessions... I was initially shocked to my core but eventually felt numb: I think my senses opted to shut down rather than contemplate such deliberate prolonged agonising suffering.

bones from mass graves

mass grave sign

Perhaps this was why I had such a low key reaction when we visited our next stop, the 'Killing Fields'. It had also been the next stop for the 'Tuol Sleng' prisoners, but of course, while we stood, dazed, before signs announcing the volume of bodies disinterred from the mass graves, they had knelt in terror to be clubbed over the head, or have their throats slit before being thrown into pits in the ground, like human landfill.

torture cell with photo on wall

If I found it hard to process, and have had 'flashbacks' to the gruesome images I saw, I think back, again, to those old people on the streets of Phnom Penh: I can only begin to imagine what they have suffered and what nightmares still haunt them, and I marvel at the resilience of the human spirit, that they were able to overcome this situation.





It had been a depressing few hours and Susan and I retaliated with a brief visit to the market and then cocktail hour at the Foreign Correspondents' Club, overlooking the river: back to the relative sanity of Cambodia in 2008.

I know several of you have visited these grim places - I'd be interested to know how you reacted. I almost felt guilty for coming away so numbed.