Security Prison 21, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

S-21, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

After the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, DJ Camera drove me across the city to an extremely dense section of sprawl. Faded buildings stood looking at the remnants of a school. The school was fenced and largely walled off and topped with razor wire. Care had been taken to provide some division between the school and the houses behind. The compound consisted of five or so buildings that looked like a plain old school because it was once just that. At an opening in the wall, next to another ticket booth, milled the standard group of tuk-tuk drivers and amputees.

Again, I was not bothered. The sun was strong and the shade beneath the fruit trees, while not cool, was a little more bearable. At most, the beggars and drivers made half assed efforts to solicit, but it wasn’t anything more than shallow obligation.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, formerly called Security Prison 21 (S-21), formerly called Chao Ponhea Yat High School. It marks the decent into madness, panic, hysteria and cruelty. Even in the middle of the day, walking the grounds and the halls of this place makes you feel uneasy; claustrophobia and panic aren’t ever far away.

The history of this place is everywhere. It was once a school. Fruit trees dot the grounds and if it weren’t for the obvious modifications that can turn a school into a place of hell, it simply looks like a school. There weren’t many people there so it was often hard to believe it was even a museum.

Inside a cell.

After the Khmer Rouge took over, the school was turned into a center for imprisonment, interrogation, extreme torture and murder. For a handful of years in the mid to late 1970’s, somewhere around 17,000 people, most innocent, came here to answer for their crimes against Pol Pot’s regime.

The place has this unchanged feeling that makes you uneasy. Rows of connected classrooms now host miniscule holding cells made of decaying brown wood, inches thick. In the middle of the floor there are rusted shackles and stains of a hasty paint job. The paint is red and in whatever light that comes through barred windows makes it look like blood.

To step into one of these cells and close the door is to feel that sense of hopelessness and doom. There is not enough room to move and there is no breeze; humid, oppressive air becomes stagnant and suffocating.

What’s more are little relics of S-21’s past life that weren’t removed seem to serve as a taunt to those who were imprisoned there. At the end of the hall an ancient chalk board still clung to the wall, its faded green contrasting with stone and reinforced wood and metal latches.

A classroom turned cell-block.

The open-air hallway of the second floor of the prison is sealed by a net of barbed wire. This “net” I was told was not so much to keep somebody from escaping, but to keep a person from being able to commit suicide by jumping from the railing.

The whole place was terrible. On the grounds were a handful of graves, whose occupants were so badly decayed and mutilated that their identity is unknown. They were the last to die S-21 before the Vietnamese overtook the Khmer Rouge.

The methods of torture in this place were creative as they were cruel. In an effort to extort a confession or get more names, guards would electrocute, suffocate, drown, half-hang, stab, beat, rape. If names were given, guards would repeat the process on people who probably had no idea what they had done. There are stories of victims who were tortured so badly that they confessed to outlandish things like joining the CIA at the age of 12.

A line of Cells.

Infront of one of the buildings is a set of uneven bars that adorn every playground. Guards punished their victims by tossing a rope over, tying their captives arms behind their back and hoisting them into the air.

Throughout the classrooms that weren’t full of prison cells or methods of torture, there were photographs of mutilated people, some alive and some dead, who had spent time at the prison. Their stories were painful to read as their spirits were as broken as their lives when they left that place, if they lived.

For a time in the beginning, prisoners were executed at the prison and buried nearby, but soon the sheer numbers made that impossible. After a time they were carted over to that other cheery place, Choeung Ek, the Killing Fields, where they were killed with whatever could be found.

After I left, I thanked a still hungover DJ Camera for bringing me to these places, had a drink in my room, woke up and got the hell out of Phnom Penh.

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The Killing Fields of Cambodia

The next morning when I met DJ Camera in the restaurant downstairs he was not so chipper. He greeted me with a genuine hotel, but his eyes were vacant and he looked uneasy. I thought for a moment and wondered if our destinations for the day had him uneasy and morose.


No.

It was the booze. DJ Camera was royally hungover. I wondered if maybe he was still drunk.

I was greeted by the manager, smiling just as much as the night before.

“Hello, Thomas!” He said. “DJ has lived through the night, I think.”

I ate a quick turkey sandwich and was soon in the back of a silent DJ Camera’s tuk-tuk, flying through the dust of Phnom Penh.

The Memorial Stupa contains thousands
of skulls.

We drove through the cluster of hotels and guest houses that populated the area next to the Chan Chhaya pavilion. I bounced in the back as DJ Camera picked up speed, mumbled something I didn’t catch, and launched us across a couple of lanes and into the frenetic every-way traffic fiasco that is every country in Asia.

Tuk-tuk is a good way to see a country. I used to think buses were the best means of efficient transport to see a country but tuk-tuks have this way of putting you directly into the action. For example, my eyes were constantly watering from the dust that was kicked up by the traffic. Also, as DJ Camera cut-off, squared-off, and otherwise basically played an extended game of Chicken with every driver in Phnom Penh, I felt a very real fear of death; something like a bus might have denied me this great cultural experience.

After a time the traffic thinned and the buildings on either side of the road descended in structural integrity until they were nothing more than shacks made of salvaged aluminum. The presence of shoes became rare.

We passed vehicles full to the tipping point with wood, goods, junk or people. Every so often we would pass green fields marked with giant puddles and the burnt-sienna mud and a cluster of water-buffalo. Kids walked and laughed in groups and bikes whizzed by leaving trails of dust and exhaust.

We crossed a river that was edged on both sides with houses on stilts, made largely of blue tarps and mismatched bits of wood, metal, and cloth. They stood on stilts and resembled tree-houses if you could put extreme poverty out of mind for a while.

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Mass graves.

Choeung Ek. Outside the ticket booth a handful of amputees begged money or stood in the shade. It was extremely hot so mostly they just hung around in the shade.

At first glance, Choeung Ek doesn’t seem to earn its other names. It feels like you are buying entrance into an old orchard, or a second rate park. Off in the distance stands a Buddhist stupa that reaches to the sky. It looks as though it might be a kind of museum. Signs in Khmer and English dot the trails next to these pool-sized divots that cut into the earth. Grass has grown over these holes so their presence is muted, not shocking but unnatural.

The Killing Fields.

That so much of Cambodia’s tourism, particularly in or around Phnom Penh, is directly related to such a horrible time in the country’s history says something about their willingness to face such a nightmare without balking. The atmosphere at Choeung Ek, the best known of many Killing Fields is subdued, quiet, a bit creepy, and sad but it also has this feeling of “look at this, look at what has happened here, how?”

Victims of the Khmer Rouge.

I walked around Choeung Ek because that is really the only thing you can do there; it isn’t a place you really enjoy or are entertained. Groups of people were doing the same thing as I, some with guides who spoke in whispers.

The stupa was full of skulls. Thousands of skulls. They stare out of a central tower in the center of the structure and from the walls opposite. To walk in the narrow path around the stupa is to be flanked on either side by the faces of horrible deaths.

Estimates say that well over a million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. Many of those people died in places like this and were buried in mass graves in places like this. Many people died in this place.

The divots in the ground were mass graves. Gnarled trees reach from their sloping edges, their shapes perverted by the uneven ground. Next to the trees are displays of what happened here and what is still happening as a result of rain and earth’s tendency to regurgitate what is put into it.

Remains that came to the surface.

There used to be a chicken coup in my back yard. It was destroyed a long time ago, but still pieces of glass come up through the dirt when it rains. Here, in Choeung Ek, torn strips of faded clothing and bones are still coming to the surface and are laid to the side. The bones at this tree belonged to a child, says the sign.

I walked through the woods for a while. The entire park was silent. At the back side there was a pond and then a barbed wire fence marking the end of the property. Shoeless and shirtless boys begged with their hands reaching through the links. Later I listened as a guide told his charges that he lost his whole family to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in these fields.

“Sad place,” said DJ Camera when I returned to his tuk-tuk. “Now, we go to school.”

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