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After our eventful night on the town we got up to go to the Vietnam embassy and to then take in some sights. One of our new friends wanted to show us around and to make sure we were taken care of so he stumbled through the day with us. First stop...Vietnam Embassy. All we needed to do was drop off our passports and application. Seems easy enough, right? Well instead of taking us to the main door our tuk tuk driver and guide drop us off at the guard’s station. So we ask the guard where to go to enter the embassy. His reply..."Visa, leave passport here come back tomorrow after five". After a few more attempts we are assured that we won't be let inside that there is no need that all we must do is give the guard our passport and all will be good. Key phrase in Southeast Asia is "no problem!" After conferring with our driver and guide who assure us this is normal..."no problem" we leave our passports. Immediately after leaving, we our stressing about our decision especially since I saw a sign that said Visa with an arrow pointing down the block. Yet, our friend assures us this is the Cambodian way...you just leave your passport with police and they take care of it. So off we head to the Killing Fields.
The Killing Fields were a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge communist regime which ruled the country, from 1975 to 1979. Estimates of the number of dead range from 1.5 to 3 million out of a population of around 7 million. The executed were buried in mass graves. In order to save ammunition, executions were often done using hammers, axe handles, spades or sharpened bamboo sticks. Some victims were required to dig their own graves and because they were so weak they couldn't dig very deep. The soldiers who did the executions were mostly young men or women from peasant families. We visited Choeung Ek, the site of a former orchard and Chinese graveyard about 17km south of Phnom Penh. It is the best-known of the sites known as The Killing Fields. Mass graves containing 8,895 bodies were discovered at Choeung Ek after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. Many of the dead were former inmates in the Tuol Sleng prison. The Khmer Rouge regime arrested and eventually executed almost everyone suspected of connections with the former government or with foreign governments, as well as professionals and intellectuals.
Today there is a stupa on the site that contains the skulls of many of the victims as well as the excavated graves. After seeing the Killing Fields we headed back into town to go to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The site is a former high school which was used as the Security Prison 21 (S-21) by the Khmer Rouge regime. Tuol Sleng is a Khmer name meaning "hill of the poisonous trees."
The Khmer Rouge renamed the complex "Security Prison 21" (S-21) and construction began to adapt the prison to the inmates: the buildings were enclosed in electrified barbed wire, the classrooms converted into tiny prison and torture chambers and all the windows were covered with iron bars and barbed wire to prevent prisoner escapes.
From 1975 to 1979, an estimated 17,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng (some estimates suggest a number as high as 20,000, though the real number is unknown). The prisoners were selected from all around the country, and usually were former Khmer Rouge members and soldiers, accused of treason.
Upon arrival at the prison, prisoners were photographed and required to give complete biographical information. After that, they were forced to strip naked, and all their possessions were removed. The prisoners were then taken to their cells. Those taken to the smaller cells were shackled to the walls. Those who were held in the large mass cells were collectively shackled to long pieces of iron bar. The prisoners had to sleep on the floors, while still shackled.
The prison had very strict regulations, and severe beatings were inflicted upon any prisoner who tried to disobey. Almost every action had to be approved by one of the prison's guards. Likewise, sanitary and health conditions were awful. The unhygienic living conditions caused skin diseases, lice, and other ailments, and few of the inmates ever received any kind of medical treatment.
The torture system at Tuol Sleng was designed to make prisoners confess to whatever crimes their captors charged them with. Prisoners were tortured with electric shocks, searing hot metal instruments, hanging, and through the use of various other devices. Although many prisoners died from this kind of abuse, killing them outright was discouraged, since the Khmer Rouge needed their confessions. After the interrogation, the prisoner and his/her family were taken to the Choeung Ek for extermination. Out of an estimated 17,000-20,000 people imprisoned at Tuol Sleng, there were only seven known survivors.
When prisoners were first brought to Tuol Sleng, they were made aware of ten rules that they were to follow during their incarceration. What follows is what is posted today at the Tuol Sleng Museum; the imperfect grammar is a result of faulty translation from the original Khmer:
1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.
The buildings at Tuol Sleng are preserved as they were left when the Khmer Rouge were driven out in 1979. The regime kept extensive records, including thousands of photographs. Several rooms of the museum are now lined, floor to ceiling, with black and white photographs of some of the estimated 20,000 prisoners who passed through the prison.
Other rooms contain only a rusting iron bedframe, beneath a black and white photograph showing the room as it was found by the Vietnamese. In each photograph, the mutilated body of a prisoner is chained to the bed, killed by his fleeing captors only hours before the prison was captured. In some of the rooms blood is still visible on the ceilings. Other rooms preserve leg-irons and instruments of torture. They are accompanied by paintings by former inmate Vann Nath showing people being tortured, which were added by the post-Khmer Rouge regime installed by the Vietnamese in 1979.
It's really hard to talk about the sights we saw in Phnom Penh because it’s just inconceivable how such evil exists in the world. As hard as it was to view these pictures and to read the stories it was something that we needed to see. It's hard to believe that so many innocent people died for no apparent reason under horrific circumstances.
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