20. Khmer Rouge, the dark side of Human Nature in Phnom Penh, Cambodia
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I entered Cambodia thinking I was ready to face the sinister horrors perpetrated by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge militias. But I soon realize that there are things you will never be prepared to face. It all happened in Phnom Penh, Cambodian capital. | |
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I crossed the border to Cambodia on a boat going up the Mekong River towards Phnom Penh, Cambodian capital. At the first sight, Phnom Penh looked like a city just as many others in Southeast Asian countries. The chaotic traffic, thousands of motor-bikes on the streets, too much pollution, details of old colonial architecture, overcrowded markets, poverty, lots of children everywhere.
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| Streets od Phnom Penh, Cambodia |
Yet, there was something clearly wrong. One could see too many people with prosthesis in their limbs, too many crutches in the streets of the town, too many beggars, countless orphans who lost their father, their mother, their hope; and there were also too much grief in people's eyes. The phantom of Pol Pot and his terrifying Khmer Rouge was still hovering over the lives of the Cambodian people.
I had heard beforehand about many examples of the cruelties carried out by the political regimen commanded by Pol Pot in order to swiftly transform Cambodia into a Maoist country. It is estimated that about two million people had been murdered in no more than four years, with a special focus on well-educated people - one knows knowledge is a natural enemy of easily imposing ideas - as well as their relatives. The national currency was abolished, postal services were paralysed. Cambodians were forced to move from the cities into rural areas where they worked as cheap or slave labour in agrarian cooperatives. The families were set apart. Millions of mines were set up in the whole country. And Cambodia was nearly made completely isolated from the international community. It was a dark period in the country's history.
I decided to get to know better that atrocious past. I hired a motor-bike and rode towards the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which was in the past the Security Office 21 (S-21), known as the most secret structure of the Khmer regime, specially aimed at interrogation, torture and extermination of those who were against the system. As I have recently visited the War Museum in Saigon I thought I was prepared for everything. But I couldn't imagine what I was going to find out here.
S-21 set its headquarters in an old primary school complex. If you close your eyes you could nearly imagine a normal school year with children jumping cheerfully, endless innocent screams, a soccer ball kicked by any candidate to a future soccer star, a few scratched knees because of harmless falls and some premature dates. One closes one's eyes and it seems the kids are out there, all over the place, as if the school were not, in fact, closed. One opens the eyes again and the iron window rails put any illusion away. As you enter the old classrooms, terror becomes frighteningly obvious.
I walked along the museum rooms in a deadly silence. Many classrooms were transformed by the Khmer Rouge into inquiry and torture areas. Some others into prison cells. Six-metre long iron rails were used to tie up around thirty prisoners by their ankles. Alternatively, from one side and the other, so that they were forced to be with their heads in opposite directions. They were laid all the time. They couldn't stand up, talk or just whisper. Not even piss or move their body without being allowed to. The order was to wait until there was not any other order to obey. Till the last day.
A Cambodian painter - one of the few that manage to leave the prison alive - pictured on a canvas that scene and many others observed with his own eyes during his imprisonment. I let my eyes go slowly along all his work. I felt impressed and stopped in front of two paintings set side by side. They tried to picture the way Pol Pot's regime killed young children. I stared at the pictures, completely paralysed. On one of them you could see a soldier throwing a child up in the air while another was shooting the little body with a gun. On the other one, a soldier held a baby by his feet and threw him against a huge tree, crashing the new-born's head pitilessly. “They did it to save bullets”, I was told.
Absolutely shocked, I left the museum and rode my motor bike to the Killing Fields where the prisoners coming from the S-21 complex were buried. Everything is so recent that you could still find human bones coming out of the ground. The quietness of the place was nothing but an evil irony. Half a dozen of mass graves ahead, I bumped into the tree pictured on the canvas. There are things you will never be prepared to face…
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