Phnom Penh

In Phnom Penh we had only one day, and we wanted to spend it well. After breakfast we hired a TukTuk for the whole day. This turned out to be a great idea. We got to see a lot of the city, and many beautiful areas between the horrors we saw at the different museums documenting the crimes of the Khmer Rough. The driver took us to S21 first. S21 used to be a high school before the Khmer Rouge gained power after the revolution, but today it is called Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The communist regime made it into a detainee camp. People were tortured and killed in these buildings from 1975 to 1979. There are many things at S21 that make it still look more like a high school than a prison, at least on the outside. The building is not very unlike the high school Paul went to in Australia, and Redwood High school, that I went to. There are tile floors that look like any classroom and corridor built in the 1960's. S21 was the prison where people sent to the Killing Fields were detained in the last days, weeks or months of their lives. One building was made into a mass cell complex, where hundreds of prisoners were living. They only had an area of about two square meters each, and there was noting but the tile floor and brick and wooden walls. This building had barbed wire on the windows and balconies in case the prisoners would try to kill them selves. The more high-ranking "enemies" were held in big classrooms, some of them with a room for themselves. They had a bed in their room, which they were often strapped on to while being tortured with electro shock. We could still see the beds standing there, some with a battery case on them. On the walls they had put up pictures of people being tortured on those beds. The next buildings were all torture rooms, and bigger cells, but they were all filled with pictures and mug shots of hundreds of prisoners that had been there. There were old men, children, women with their babies, and everything in between.

The "Khmer" is what the official ethnic majority of Cambodia is called, and Khmer is their language. (There are maybe more Khmer mixes with Chinese and Vietnamese, but the government does not want to admit that. )Between 1200 and 600 years ago the Khmer Empire was one of the strongest and biggest in South East Asia. During this time the temples of Angkor were erected. Leaving Norway, the Angkor temples was the destination on top of the list of things to see, and I am amazed by the wealth and power of the Khmer Empire.

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge gained power after a violent revolution. They surrounded the city of Phnom Penh, at that time a city of more than 2 million people. Hundreds of thousands had fled to the city to escape the fighting around the country. Today the city's population in just above one million. The Khmer Rouge, a totalitarian regime led among others by Pol Pot, wanted to take Cambodia back to an agricultural society. They even went as far as abolishing money. They led the Democratic Kampuchea, which they called their country, with a firm hand. Everyone educated was looked upon as "lazy", and sent to camps all around the country to work in the rice fields. Pol Pot was educated himself, and after winning a scholarship he went to Paris to study. Here he did not manage to keep up with the studies, and never got his degree. However, he did find a lot of time to the communist movement, and this is where he first learned to become a communist.

When the revolutionaries captured the capital, they sent everyone out to the countryside, evacuating the whole city in just three days or so. Thousands died on the march out of the city. Some was shot, some starved to death, some were evacuated from the hospital and did not even make it out of the building. The Khmer Rouge wanted to be completely self-sufficient and would not import anything to the country. This was including medicine and other necessities. The inadequate planning turned into widespread famine, and all over the country people were dying.

At S21 they kept sending people to The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, but before they sent them off, they would torture them for information. One of the things they did was to hang someone upside down till they fainted, then dip their head in a jar of filthy water, normally used as a fertilizer for the plants around the prison, which would wake them up instantly, only to hang there till they fainted again. The structure used to hang people up like this was the old swing in the schoolyard.

The driver took us to The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, about 15 kilometers/9 miles out of the city. Here they were playing music when the prisoners arrived, so people arriving there did not always figure out what was going on at these fields. All over the fields they had dug big ditches, about 4 meters deep. People were aligned along the ditches and shot so they fell in. There were separate ditches for women and children. By one of the ditches there is a large tree, and here the Red Khmer would hold babied by their feet, smack their head against the tree and throw them in the ditch. The babies' moms were forced to watch, and often raped before they ended up in the same hole as their child.

Here at The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, there are 129 mass graves, one of them filled with 450 bodies. The excavations of the graves in the early 1980's resulted in world wide support for the Cambodian people, and in the UN, they needed to wash up their policies, after letting the Khmer Rouge representing their victims in the UN until 1982. The graves are almost covered again now, due to rainfall over the last 30 years, but we could still find pieces of bone sticking up form the ground, and the guide told us that after rainfall you could see it everywhere.

In Buddhist tradition the remains of a dead person should be kept in a nice place, often after being cremated, so a few years ago they built a "Stupa"(building to house Buddhist relics) to put all the big bones and sculls in. The "Stupa" in Choeung Ek was large, and inside they have 17 levels with large shelves. Nine of them are filled with sculls, the rest with other bones.

All over Cambodia there are more than 20 000 mass graves that have been excavated. One count suggests that the remains of 1 112 829 victims of execution are found in these graves. The Red Khmer killed a total of almost 3 million people directly, or indirectly.

The fall of The Red Khmer was in many ways due to the internal conflicts that spread fear among the red leaders. When communication with Vietnam broke down, Pol Pot was expecting an attack form Vietnam, and decided to attack first. This resulted in a few villages along the border being destroyed and burned, but the superior Vietnamese forces pushed the Khmer back and gained control over Cambodia. When this happened, the people in labor camps all over the country left the fields to go home and find their families. This resulted in another large famine. No one harvested the crops, and plenty more people died. People are still struggling with the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge. Unlike Russia, China and Vietnam, where the communist leaders are still worshipped, even if just as many people died under some of their command, the people of Cambodia hate the Communist party, and have been open to the western world.

The rest of the time in Phnom Penh was spent eating and sightseeing, looking for the beauty of the city. But with all the horrors close in mind, it was hard to find a "happy place". The happiest place on the night bus on the way up to Siem Reap turned out to be the place where we stopped to get food, and the food was not all that great. Although being a nice enough bus with reclining seats, the bus ride was not the best. It was a tourist bus, and I felt like a package tourist again, and that for the first time since the tourist boat in Ha Long Bay.