Going to see places of the Khmer Rouge genocide January 30
Day before yesterday I went to see S-21 prison. It’s pretty amazing. They haven’t changed it much, just swept the floor and blocked off osme unsafe areas. It’s a lot like it was, without the people.
The prison is a high school which was converted to a prison when the Khmer Rouge occupied Phnom Penh in order to use it as an interrogation/torture/holding facility before taking people to be “liquidated”.
There is woven barbed wire mesh on the balconies, and in side, the first two floors are divided into cells just big enough for a man to lie down in. The upper floor was mass holding cells, the prisoners shackled to a huge iron bar that ran down the middle of the room, twenty people to a bar, on opposite sides.
I think the hardest part, beyond seeing the cells and the torture implements (ranging from lengths of electrical wire and umbrella rods used to beat people to much more gruesome mideival-like torture apparatus) and the paintings of scenes of torture done by an inmate that survived (one of seven that survived out of 10,000+ that passed through the prison), were the photographs. Photos of everyone that passed through the prison - room after room of women, men, and children of all ages. Even a few foreigners.
Also the photos of former Khmer Rouge members, both at the time, and now. I remember one boy in particular, a soldier in the Khmer Rouge. He was 14, the face of an innocent trial. Most of the pictures of the former Khmer Rouge members had an excerpt from an interview with them posted. Most of the excerpts were about how they though the leaders of the Khmer Rouge should be put on trial, and be held accountable for their actions (this has still not happend, despite pressure from the international community, largely because former Khmer Rouge members and friends of former Khmer Rouge members are in power now).
Yesterday I rode my bike to the killing fields 13km out of town. It’s where all the prisoners of S-21 were taken to be blindfolded, smashed in the head with a rod or pickax, and have their throats slit, before being dumped in a mass grave.
Most of the pits are dug up now, just holes in the ground, but there are more than 100 of them. A huge memorial stupa has been built, housing shelf after shelf of skulls. There must be 50 shelfs, easily. It holds over 8000 skulls of people who were killed and buried there.