S-21 and the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh

Graphic.

I stumbled across the Khmer Rouge when I was reading one of my forensic anthropology textbooks. I studied Modern History for 7 years - how had this never hit my radar before?! Mao's China, The Cold War, even the development of the World Wide Web, but an organised national genocide in South East Asia? Nothing. The Vietnam War was in our textbooks but never taught, and I was the only one in my class to get far enough through the read about it. Rwandan genocide? Che Guevara? Mexican drug cartels? Nope, but hey, did you know that Gerald Ford was the 38th US president and has 4 children? Wow that changes my outlook on the world.

Education, however, is difficult. As in Rwanda, Cambodia hasn't had an opportunity to be angry, mourn, or heal these events. There has been no recovery time because subsistence farmers cannot afford to take a moral stand against the neighbour who killed half their family: when you depend on the food you farm, you can't stop farming because you don't want to share the field with certain people. So then an impossibly horrible situation occurs whereby victims are forced to stand alongside their abusers and just get on. Tutsi working alongside Hutu, Khmer living alongside Khmer Rouge. It creates a suppressed anger and resentment which bubbles under he surface, locked down by a glass floor of silence: silence because it's too painful to remember, too fresh to uncover, too dangerous to talk. 

It is difficult to get a personal understanding of the Khmer Rouge because it is never, ever spoken about in Khmer society. Everybody in Cambodia was affected: families, friends, even the base people (countryside families who had never been involved in the cities) suffered from rationing and punishments even though they were considered the aspirational type of Khmer. The scars are obvious: the countryside is riddled with unmapped landmines, littered with killing fields, and blanketed in silence. The only way to learn when visiting, therefore, is to venture to the prisons and killing fields which have been memorialised for education. These are exceptional sites.

It was a bright, sunny Tuesday when I peeled myself off the rubber seats in the back of the Tuk Tuk and walked into a beautiful green courtyard. Trees lined every side, children's play bars stood at the sides of the bright green lawn, and white frangipani flowers twizzled delicately as the light breeze lifted them from their branches and carried them floating to the pavement. I sat on a wooden bench and plugged in my earphones, watching birds fly past the light yellow buildings around me and began my harrowing journey through the history of the Khmer Rouge.

S21 is the Khmer Rouge official code for the secondary school which was used as Security Prison 21 (Tuol Sleng torture camp) during the genocide, and is now the main genocide museum in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge had over 150 of these camps, each of which later had designated killing fields. Over 20,000 prisoners just from S21 are recorded as being killed by the Khmer Rouge, and this is only from the records which were not destroyed in time when the Khmer Rouge learned their official reign was over. When the camp was liberated in 1979, when my parents were 19 years old, only 7 prisoners remained alive. 14 had been killed in such a hurry as to get them destroyed before the liberation that their bodies were still warm, blood still pooling, and the ink on their "confessions" still wet. 

The Khmer Rouge won the Cambodian Civil War against King Sihanouk in 1975. From this point they embarked on an aggressive line of agrarian socialism, with the goal of returning to simple countryside living and productive agrarianism. They also embarked on an aggressive line of using secret police, public anxiety, and blackmail in order to hunt out leaders of the opposition during the war and their supporters. S21 became a prison just 4 months after the Khmer Rouge took power, with the aim of gaining successful confessions from prisoners which would contain names and detailed descriptions of their traitor associates, and then sending them to "re-education camps". "Confessions" were gained by torture: common techniques were water boarding, whipping, beating, even using the children's play bars to suspend prisoners by their ankles until they passed out and then dropping them headfirst into jars of urine and faeces to make them come round again for the next set. Rape was not uncommon. When not being tortured, prisoners were either confined to cells the size of toilet cubicles which had been bricked into old classrooms, or were stacked together in open classrooms, chained by the ankle and whipped if they moved. Medics had been targeted early in the regime, and prison nurses were farmers with salt water. This only hints at the atrocities which occurred here. 

The museum is full of the case file photos of prisoners, and 'proof of death' photos which would be attached to signed confessions. Guards were not meant to cause death before a confession and so many confessions were written after the act - being caught in this would result in the guard becoming a prisoner themselves, which was common. Often, too, many photos would be taken and guards would keep them as a victory stash to prove their commitment to the party. The photos line room after room: men, women, grandmothers, wise men, teenagers, children, toddlers, babies. Blunt haircuts, black pyjama uniforms. The toddlers were the hardest to look at: they would know what was happening, and know they had nothing to do with it.

Over 500 non-Cambodians were also imprisoned, interrogated, and executed. Their deaths were often used as experimenting with techniques such as burning alive, skinning alive, and bleeding to death. Australian David Lloyd Scott used his confessions to send messages to his family, claiming his opposition leader was Colonel Sanders of Division KFC and that he learnt his skills from the East Star camp - East Star was his mother, Esther. I struggled to read his confession, and I had to go outside to listen to his brother reading it on the audio guide. One of the most harrowing things I've ever listened to. 

For the first year all the bodies from S21 were buried around there, but then the regime ran out of space. At that point they moved the burials to Choeung Ek, a well known historical Chinese cemetery, which then became a full extermination centre. Prisoners arrived by the truck load in the dead of night, marched to the side of a pit, and were hit with hammers, pick axes, machetes or bludgeons to the back of the head into the pit of 6-400 other prisoners. Guns were not frequently used - it was better to save the bullets for the Vietnamese who were challenging the border. Afterwards DDT was sometimes spread over the bodies, just to finish up. 

Walking through the killing fields was a strange mix of fascination and horror. Every few steps there is a messy and rough scrap of material trapped in the mud, contrasting with the manicured walkway for visitors and the informative signs dotted around the site. Then there are random areas roped off with thin red twine. It took a while for me to click that this is not a historic site at all - it's completely active. Every drop of rain and every gust of wind unearths another pair of shorts, a scarf, a femur, a tooth. This isn't history at all, it's day in and day out horror. No such horror, though, as the killing tree. This has been documented as being used as "bullseye practice" of the cadres, so indoctrinated with the concept of "take out the seed and the roots cannot grow". Bracelets now hang in honour to the babies whose lives ended against that tree. 

The forensic interest in me was sparking all over the site, but nowhere more than the tall, thin memorial in the centre of the fields. The fields either side are known to have many mass graves too but have been left for farming - every so often a farmer will dump a bag of bones by the fence, or just throw them aside. The central monument is designed so you are cramped, uncomfortable, and face to face with the shelves upon shelves of bones. Thousands upon thousands of bones. They are colour coded with stickers to indicate evidence of different types of trauma. Thousands. At what point do we stop commemorating? Where is the line between this cranium being in the museum as a symbol of struggle, and this cranium being thrown to the side of the field so the farmer can harvest for their living? How do we cope with that alienation of bones from event, person, soul? And how do we honour these bones equally, knowing that many of the mix will be cadres and torturers next to innocent babies? Are lives equal, bones equal, deaths equal? 

All this education, and yet we are doing exactly the same in so many ways in the world right now. We have the Syrian crisis, we have the Israel and Palestine conflict, we have the camps in North Korea - all these things we know are happening, and in 40 years time will have their own museums and heads of state issuing formal apologies. They've had their headline, we frowned at the pictures and shook our heads as we muttered "terrible, isn't it...", and then it's gone. It doesn't exist anymore, because we've seen it, commented, and moved on. But it is going on, and he previous ones aren't over! Farmers in Cambodia harvest their crops and find a femur amongst the rice, throwing it to the side of the field like a tree branch. A Rwandan village decorates a church for Easter, securely poking the ends of brightly coloured cloths into bullet holes. This is what I mean by no time to heal: when resources are scarce, it's not an option to say "we will not farm that field" or "we will not go to that church". Fundamentally there are just too many sites of horror for that to even apply. 

It's not just a court for the "others", either. Spanish Civil War, genocide, and mass graves. I had no idea whatsoever that this had happened or that these graves existed, let alone that they are as recent as the 1970s. We have a real problem in dealing with genocide and a lot of it stems from the way in which history is created: only the "legitimate lips" have power, and the silence which should speak volumes doesn't make a soundbite or headline worthy of our 24 hour ticker tape.

One thing that really gets me is how these leaders are treated on the world stage. I love politics and I really enjoy studying the intrigue of diplomacy with despots, but there are some patterns which are outrageous. The Khmer Rouge were formally recognised by the UN as Cambodia's government during the genocide and after the Vietnamese liberated many parts of the country, war crimes such as rapes and sex slavery are well documented but unfollowed, and education about the genocide is terrible. The Rwandan government is full of leaders who were actively involved in war crimes in the 1990s. But what can be done? We can condemn, we can apologise, but anything more is imposing our own rule. This raises further questions of 'when does a violent rebel cross the line into freedom fighter' and reminds me of when I was very keenly watching the media and political flip from "oh hey, my mate Gadaffi!" to "boooo, Gadaffi you're bad", watching the endless confusion over how to deal with Putin, and the image of drowned refugee children which overnight made so many people too uncomfortable in thinking about the crisis that it became yet another 'mental tut' which meant the issue had been dealt with and we could move on.

One day I'll rewrite this post into something resembling a coherent argument, but for now I wanted to put this out in rough form. Genocide and the socio-political fallout really interests me, particularly looking at how people cope when forced to pull together the necessities to function from one day to the next when their world has been obliterated and they are aliens within their own lives. Sadly, I won't be short on research sites.