Phnom Penh: S-21
Trip Start
Sep 05, 2008
1
59
68
Trip End
Ongoing
Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Tuol Sleng, or S-21, was previously a secondary school in a residential district of Phnom Penh. Under the Khmer Rouge, during Pol Pot's regime, its function was switched and it became a prison (Security Prison 21; S-21). Between 1975 and 1979 around 20,000 people went through its gates. They were tortured there, usually for between one and four months, before being killed. At any one time there were between 1,000 and 1,500 people held here, yet when the Vietnamese liberated Phnom Penh in 1979, only seven prisoners were still alive.
The museum (as it is now) pulled no punches. The classrooms on the ground floor each contained a picture of the same room when the Vietnamese arrived. Almost all showed a body shackled to the bed; you could identify the bed on each photo as being the same one that's still there, in the same room.
The first and second floor classrooms had been divided into cells, divisions made by bricks on the first floor and wood on the second. The empty cells had a footprint about the size of a single bed, the divisions were about seven feet tall.
Other classrooms had been cleared and contained mugshots of the prisoners as they arrived at the prison; some were about three or four years old. There were pictures of people after torture and after being killed. Pictures of the captors showed many of them to be only 13 or 14 years old. The prison detailed that after a year or two of being captors many of these were turned on by their own, and ended up being detained, tortured and killed by their own.
The museum went on to describe Pol Pot's vision. He believed there was no use in academia, and that everyone should farm in order for the country to prosper. The capital, Phnom Penh, was evacuated and it people forced to live in the country. Any members of the previous government, doctors, teachers, students, monk, anyone with any education whatsoever, even anyone who wore glasses, was taken as prisoner. The vast majority by-passed prison and were taken directly to the killing fields. Pol Pot believed it to be better to wrongly arrest ten people than to let one "enemy" go free. Between one and three million died or were killed, of a population of eight million at the start of the regime.
So this is why 50% of Cambodia's population is under 25, why the policemen here look like they should still be at school. It's incredible that they could even begin to build a country after this; so many people were killed and almost nobody amongst those left had any kind of education or skill outside of farming. Where they started I don't know. How do you establish schools, colleges and Universities let alone a currency? But despite ongoing corruption the country looks, to an outsider, to be doing well.
