where cider meets condensed milk: S21 and the Killing Fields

where cider meets condensed milk

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

S21 and the Killing Fields

I arrived in Cambodia on Friday after spending an uneventful and humid night in Bangkok, and spent most of an uneventful and humid day in Phnom Penh walking around and waiting for the rest of our group to arrive. Phnom Penh is smallish-- about 1 million-- and everyone is really friendly and lively. Driving goes slowly-- my moto ride from the airport was very Easy Rider, only with more poverty along the roadsides. I went out to a traditional Khmer dance show the first night with 2 others from my group. We met up with everyone the following day, and kicked off the trip with a visit to the genocide museum (Tuol Sleng, or S-21) and the killing fields of Choeung Ek. The genocide museum was in a former high school where the Khmer Rouge soldiers held and interrogated and tortured prisoners before sending them out for execution. Some of the classrooms used for torture/interrogation contained nothing but a rusty bedframe, chains, and a metal bedpan, with photographs on the walls depicting prisoners. Other rooms had been walled into dozens of tiny cells where prisoners were held. Another room held stretching boards, clamps with which to hold limbs while soldiers pulled out prisoners' fingernails, and other devices for which you could only interpret a use by looking at paintings and drawings done by former victims. It was chilling, to say the least, and made more strange by the handfuls of children running around the in garden, among the gravestones and the hanging posts.

This was an athletic post for school gymnastics, but was used by soldiers for hanging. The water pot there was used to submerge victims heads underwater. Those that died here during torture before being taken to the killing fields were buried on the school grounds.

Prisoner's cell at S21.

The killing fields are outside of Phnom Penh city, out on red dirt roads amidst green lush fields. At the site, there is a large stupa in the center of a clearing, and several gazebo-looking structures with maps and descriptions of what happened. There were bunches of children begging for money, several of them with fantastic English and great manipulative skills. The area is composed of dozens of shallow pits covered over in dirt and grass, some marked with signs or a roof, many marked with nothing. At the first grave we saw, our tour guide explained that the villagers had collected many of the skulls, but had left the bones and bodies, and we were walking among their underground remains. Bits of cloth emerged from the dirt everywhere you stepped.

These boys on a bicycle called me over, and pointed to something I thought was a white rock, but was actually a tooth, and they showed me a bone end sticking up through the rocky ground. At another moment, a tiny girl of 4 or 5 and her brother were running around chasing each other and laughing, and she pulled a human bone off a displayed pile and ran after him, wielding the bone in her hand.

Most of the kids hanging around here would try to get money after a minute or two of conversation, like these boys that would sweetly sing "1, 2, 3, Smiii-ile!" for every passing tourist and then would pester them for a dollar for taking their picture.

The stupa was stacked floor to ceiling with human skulls, though many are still buried and have been left undisturbed.

posted by Raychaa @ 12:37 AM

1 comments:

At 9:27 AM, Anonymous said…

WOW sounds like a very educational trip so far. The Khmer dancing would have been cool to see! Good luck building in Siem Reap!