In Phnom Penh you are never far from reminders of Pol Pot’s reign of terror. In Phnom Penh itself, Pol Pot’s psychopathic minions converted a former high school into a central torture center. Where students once studied and played, tools of torture replaced the tools of learning. The metal beds, blood-stained floors, and grim implements of torture remain today in these cruel rooms. The guide who took us through the torture center spared no detail.
In the courtyard–the ultimate in cynicism–a sign lists the rules of conduct victims must observe during torture. One rule advises, “While getting lashes or electrification, you must not cry at all.” We’ve posted a picture of this sign in the Photos section.
In the unlikely case that these grim rooms fail to break your heart, a documentary movie playing in the last building certainly will. In the movie, families, survivors, and torturers alike tell their stories of the times: touching ones of young couples summoned to a distant village, never to return. A former guard describes with stunning nonchalance how he forced victims to kneel at the edge of a pit, clubbed them, and allowed them–dead or alive–to fall in. Victims, those crippled few who survived with bodily injury alone, tell their horror stories, too.
En route to the “Killing Fields” 9 miles southwest of Phnom Penh, our car crept and bounced along a nearly impassable road for some miles. Our guide was quieter than expected: His father disappeared during the Pol Pot times and may lie somewhere there.
All arrivals are met by amputees in wheel chairs, victims of land mines. And children, lots of rib skinny, impoverished children, await you, open the car doors, smile and ask for a dollar. As you enter the fields, you see that picture you’ve seen before–the tall glass-walled memorial with storey upon storey of skulls. Then you walk down the paths alongside the pits and read the signs telling what’s known about the fallen victims in each one. And there is a children’s pit, even a children’s pit.
You still see occasional teeth and bone fragments and bits of cloth scattered along the paths. Today, local children play beneath the trees in this grim place, and the park guides reluctantly shoo them away when they beg a pittance from the stunned visitors.
As encountering any historical atrocity, you have to wonder, “why the cruelty?.” In Pol Pot’s case you might say ideology explains it: they believed they were killing the past to plant a new future. But I believe it was more. I believe baser instincts were freed to run wild. I believe these cadres relished the savagery, the bloody torture and killing. They enjoyed it and had found an excuse.
Tags: Cambodia