Capital City!

Wat Time Is It?
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January 30, 2006

Our travel day from Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh was easy and lazy.  We arrived in the capital in the early afternoon and caught a tuk tuk to the Lazy Fish Guesthouse, which was perched on stilts over Boeng Kak Lake.  Our room with a "bathroom" (a toilet and spigot coming out of the wall) was $3 a night and we definitely got what we paid for.  We spent most of our time there on the deck/dock common area swinging in the hammocks and watching the orange sun set over the bright green lake.

Delving Deeper into Cambodia

Fat Happy Monkey Monk at Wat Phnom
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January 31, 2006

The last full day we were in Cambodia proved probably the most crucial to our understanding of much of what underlies the contemporary Cambodian psyche.  Most of the day we spent visiting the Killing Fields at Cheoung Ek and the Toul Sleng Museum.  We also discovered some adorable monkeys roaming freely in the trees surrounding Wat Phnom.

The Killing Fields:

One of the Exhumed Graves at Cheoung Ek
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About a half hour away on the back of a moto lie the remains of nearly 9,000 bodies have been recovered from 88 of 124 mass graves.  Today the graves are just large depressions in the terrain, some with signs stating the approximate number and state of the dead found in them, others with piles of bones near them as they are constantly being unearthed.  The graves' most frequent visitors are a myriad of colorful butterflies, whose ephemeral bodies float around as if in tribute to the souls of the dead.  Even with the bones and clothing still present, it  is impossible to grasp the horror that once took place on the location in which we stood.  Brown signs with clear white letters identify the Magic Tree, from which the Khmer Rouge (KR) hung a microphone to emit a sound loud enough to drown out the moans of the dying, and the Killing Tree, upon which KR men beat the smaller children to death.

Killing Fields Commemorative Stupa
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Cheoung Ek had formerly been a Chinese cemetery, which is why Pol Pot, the ruthless leader of the KR regime , selected it as the site for the mass slaughter.  Some Chinese coffins with their dead still inside peak up out of the ground amongst shreds of more recent victims clothing.  In front of the Field stands a towering stupa that was erected in 1988 to honor and house the recovered remains of the KR victims.  Its glass walls reveal the skulls of the dead men, women, and children as a austere and powerful reminder that such an atrocity once occurred on this ground.

Victims' Remains Inside the Stupa
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The Toul Sleng Museum:

Back in the heart of Phnom Penh is the site of S-21 (Security Prison 21), named Toul Sleng.  Once a high school, it was converted into a concentration camp style prison facility, where the KR held and tortured thousands of political dissidents, including women, children, professors, doctors, and people who knew how to speak a foreign language.  Most of the victims at the Killing fields were imprisoned and tortured at Toul Sleng prior to their slaughter and interment in the mass graves.

The museum is not so much that as it is the frozen remains of S-21.  The classrooms of the high school were turned into holding cells and interrogation rooms.  Museum visitors are compelled to walk through each open doorway and try to imagine, though this is impossible, the horrors that occurred here.  The interrogation rooms are empty save for a bare metal bed frame, an empty plastic jug, a metal ammunition box, and perhaps another instrument of torture, all unlabeled and laid gently on the bed.  On the wall hangs a black and white, poster-sized photo of the tortured victim's lifeless body that once lay the bed.

There were photo exhibits displayed on dividers placed in some of the larger holding cells.  Though there are some artistic and interpretive photos, however, the vast majority are mugshots.  There are thousands of these, as the KR meticulously recorded each and every one of their victims.  We still do not understand why the KR documented their killings so thoroughly.  Every prisoner had his or her picture and bio logged and filed.  Every face has a similar look:  total fear, though some are able to hide it or fight it better than others.

Other classrooms were hastily divided, by wood and brick, into tiny (about 1 meter square) individual cells.  The now open and empty cells are rapidly decaying, reminding us that nothing lasts forever, and we are thankful for that.  The facilities are housed in a large building, not unlike that of a typical American public high school, only the facade of this building is completely covered with an intricate mesh of razor and barbed wire.  Its purpose?  To discourage prisoners from taking their own lives.  Death here is the privilege of the captor only.  The prisoners have been stripped of every right to their lives and even deaths.

On the way out of the compound is the inevitable souvenir shop.  No one seems able to bear a look back at the courtyard with its gallows, where prisoners were hung by their feet or hands behind their backs until loosing consciousness and then dropped into a bucket of human waste in order to revive them for further cruelty.  The futile scribbles of graffiti on the walls of the prison left by museum visitors speak of peace and remembrance, but are shameful in their defacement and uselessness.  How could we ever forget?