The darker side of Cambodia

On our second day in Phnom Penh, we decided to discover the history of the Khmer Rouge regime and headed to the Tuol Sleng genocide museum. Tuol Sleng is where the Khmer Rouge imprisoned, tortured and executed thousands of people in buildings that used to be a high school. Walking into the compound that was so obviously a school, I was struck by how much this didn’t seem like one. There was no laughter or positive energy, just a tangible heaviness and a whole lot of barbed wire. Building after building on all three floors housed classrooms converted into torture chambers, mass detention rooms and solitary confinement cells in both brick and wood. The old gym structure for climbing ropes had been used as gallows where the Khmer Rouge would hang prisoners from their backwards-twisted arms. When they passed out from the immense pain, the prisoners would be revived by being dunked into terracotta pots of stagnant water, normally used as fertilizer on the nearby fields. Other rooms housed rows of bulletin boards of photographs of prisoners, each with an expression of horror, sadness and fear blatantly painted on their faces. The next room was full of implements of torture and gory paintings of how the Khmer Rouge tortured Cambodian civilians. The paintings were not very well done, but seeing the images of brutality that were described in the book I read by Loung Ung made it all sink in. The final room full of skulls and bones and pictures of the Killing Fields was too much and my eyes finally brimmed with tears. What would drive anyone to do something like this to fellow human beings? The last rooms of individuals’ testimonies were too much to bear – I had to get out. But being out, amongst the hoards of insincere tourists floating about, was nearly as unbearable. How could they be standing there, laughing, making plans to go shopping, when we had just seen such brutality? I just wanted to curl up in a ball and cry.

On the surface, Cambodians come across as positive, friendly and easygoing, but it doesn’t take much effort to see the negative effects genocide has had on them. Everyone has stories from the war and there are amputees everywhere. Cambodians cannot escape their collective past, but they are living with it and trying to cope the best they can. Like the Cambodians have done for the past three decades, I had to continue with my day, albeit slightly more conscious of the possibility of evil in regular people but also of the beauty in the living. The folded paper crane I found sitting on a cold metal torture chamber bed and the frangipani flowers on a mound of stained and tattered prisoners’ clothing were powerful and touching reminders of the past and stand in my mind as a sign of hope for the future.