The Horror of Cambodia’s Genocidal Past

I decided it wouldn’t be right to be here in Phnom Penh and leave having successfully avoided the reality of one of Cambodia’s darkest times. I was a child in the 1970’s and have early memories of newscasts reporting the activities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. I didn’t really have the comprehension to understand the enormity of what was being reported and that’s likely just as well. Pol Pot in my mind was Paul Pot, which sounded a silly name to my ear and Khmer Rouge seemed somehow unreachably exotic, but I had no idea the horrors unfolding in those depraved days.

Years later, I came to understand the Khmer Rouge had seized power in 1975 following the Cambodian Civil War. Lasting four years until 1979, the brutal communist regime was responsible for the deaths of between 1.5 to 2 million people – nearly one quarter of the entire population.

It was Pol Pot’s aim as a Marxist dictator, to create a Cambodian “master race” through social engineering. Admiring the self-sufficiency of the Cambodian tribes in the rural northeast, who were surviving on subsistence farming, Pol Pot’s vision was to create a communist-style agricultural utopia. Consequently, he decreed the forced movement of all city dwellers to intolerable farming communes.

The social engineering experiment proved a complete disaster – city dwellers had no skill, knowledge or experience in working the land. Many people began to feel the effects of overwork and disease as a result of the brutal regime. Many died through starvation and or exhaustion.

As the social engineering failed, extreme paranoia grew within the regime and everyone considered a possible enemy of the state, such as intellectuals, scientists and artists, were tortured in order to give confessions. Once extracted (many of them falsehoods) the ultimate fate was execution. S21 is just one of the approximately 150 killing centers created by the Khmer Rouge.

If you are fortunate to have the opportunity to visit to Phnom Penh, don’t leave without visiting Tuol Sleng, the museum on the site of S21. A former school, it was used to torture and kill 16,000 to 20,000 people. You can find more information here.

Given the above context, I’d like to tell you what it was like for me personally to experience this important, yet challenging, museum.

At the entrance to Tuol Sleng, there is a palpable feeling of hesitation as if visitors pause for the briefest of seconds to re-evaluate if what they are about to do is wise or necessary. Once crossed, this is a threshold you can never return from. Everyone I see enters the turn-style, myself included, to a world of horrific stories and heinous acts against humanity.

On tiled-floored, former classrooms, specifically commandeered for the purposes of torment, iron beds used in the actual torture of men and women sit as exhibits of inhumanity. It bends my mind to actually try to comprehend what needs to happen for a person to treat another with such depravity.

This is a place of horrors, of unspeakable acts of cruelty and unimaginable human suffering. I’m unable to get my way through this place without crying several times as I hear of the pain and humiliation experienced. It’s emotionally battering – and so it should be. This is a place we all should be confronted with, as a reminder of what can happen so it can never happen again.

I watch the other visitors. In the land of enormous, heart-warming smiles that is Cambodia, this is not a tourist destination for sporting your most enthusiastic smile. People walk slowly, sober, deeply affected by what they are learning. Unlike other museums, visitors here take their time, respecting the entire exhibition, without rush - a sincere act of reverence for those who passed here and their painful departure from this world.

It strikes me this former school is the exact opposite of LaValla School I visited just the other day. This is not an inspiring, life-giving space. Instead, it’s a deadly place, dedicated to the destruction and demise of people, their spirit and finally their very existence.

What’s clear from this experience is that when dogma and ideology are elevated as more important than the people they are supposed to serve, then we all ought to be deeply concerned.

My blessing is upon the spirit of all those who perished in this place and my wish is for all of us to learn the necessary lessons so that never again can such inhumanity, to so many, be repeated again.

Rest in peace.

#travelblog #Cambodia #history