Genocide For Dummies

Filed under Cambodia, Death, Phnom Penh

Just don’t laugh at the dead kids, alright?

Smoking is permitted at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum, but laughing is not.

That’s certainly what’s suggested by the signs. There’s nothing on the walls forbidding smoking, drinking, dogs, littering, drug use, the wearing of shoes, skateboarding or heavy petting.

At first, I took the single warning sign – a man’s head, smiling, mouth wide open, inside a red circle with a line through it – as a prohibition of talking. Silence in the museum.

But Peter, the unlikely-named Khmer tuk-tuk guy who had taken it upon himself to be my tour guide for the afternoon, told me it was a warning for tourists not to laugh.

They need a sign for that?

It’s a genocide museum.

“But it’s okay,” Peter said, in his excellent English. “You can laugh if you want.”

It was such an absurd thing to say that I actually did laugh out loud, once and involuntarily, and immediately felt like the world’s biggest tool.

I’d selected Peter from the gang of tuk-tuk guys offering their services outside my Phnom Penh guesthouse because he looked the oldest of the pack.

Crowsfeet on his otherwise youthfully Asian face, and flecks of gray in his hair. Probably in his mid-forties. He’d be old enough to remember Pol Pot’s regime from maybe his early teens.

Since the main reason I decided to subject myself to Phnom Penh was to learn a little more about Cambodia’s most recent society-defining horrors, I figured somebody who was around to remember it first-hand might be my best bet for a driver.

I was not wrong.

Peter insisted on going above and beyond his tuk-tuk-driving duties, following me around the museum, explaining the story behind anything and everything I saw. Normally I would smell scam, or at the very least somebody trying to pump the tip, but Peter seemed genuinely enthusiastic about his chosen role.

Peter also always seemed terribly surprised and impressed when I understood what he was talking about perfectly. I guess many of his passengers also have English as a second language.

When I was umming and ahhing about whether to go to the shooting range, he told me point blank he’d only take me there BEFORE seeing any of the genocide stuff, despite that being the least convenient route.

“And I tell truth and warn you, it’s forty dollars US for AK-47 with 30 bullets,” he added. “A lot of foreigners say that is, what you say, bullshit? You understand ‘bullshit’, yes?”

“Oh, yeah, I think so.”

I guess the cow lives, for today.

Peter told me his doctor dad had been killed by Pol Pot, and that he’d been forced to work the rice paddies, gratis, as a ten-year-old. Chain gangs, more or less, judging from the photos. The only food he was allowed to eat were meagre portions of “porridge” and scavenged banana and papaya roots.

He showed me some scars on his belly he said were from diarrhoea, a scar above his eye he said was from taking a beating with a bamboo cane, and some cracks on his tongue he said was from some other form of abuse I didn’t quite understand.

Frankly, he could have been making any or all of that shit up. I have no idea. I didn’t think diarrhoea did that to a person. If it did, I expect most of the surface area of my body would be a single patch of luminous pink scar tissue, the last few months I’ve had.

Building A at Tuol Sleng contains the interrogation chambers. Thousands of people were tortured horribly there in the late 1970s, before being carted off to Killing Fields to be beaten to death.

There’s a metal bed in the centre of each room. On each bed, some manacles, and a metal ammunition case that the torture victims had to use as a toilet.

Each room also has a single blown-up monochrome photograph of the room’s final occupant, chained to the bed, in whatever condition they were found when the facility was liberated.

That is: dead, and fucked up beyond recognition.

“The stains on the floor, you’re standing on,” Peter said, “are blood.”

I almost called bullshit – it’s been 30 years, for crying out loud – but the faded brownish smears on the tiles seemed to match closely the patterns of those in the photographs.

In one room, on the bed was the rusted blade of a small garden shovel.

“What was that for?” I asked.

“Look at the photo, and tell me,” Peter said.

The photo was low-quality, black-and-white, angled wrong and blurred slightly by the blow-up, but I could tell there was something terribly wrong with the man’s head.

“They used it to cut off his face,” Peter said. “He was Australian journalist. You understand ‘journalist’, yes?”

“Yeah.”

Building B is filled with mugshots of the guards and prisoners. A lot of them are children – on both sides. Guards and prisoners significantly under the age of majority.

At the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, a little south of town, I learned that the younger kids were mostly killed by swinging them against a tree. The adults were either beheaded, stabbed, or beaten to death with big bamboo. Often, the women and kids were raped first – their bodies were almost all exhumed naked.

A handful of the photos at the museum showed some of the results of the tortures and killings. People with all or part of their faces or heads beaten to jelly, or with bits sliced off.

Choeung Ek also has a massive, yet perversely rather tasteful, yellow-grey stupa, set amid disturbingly serene grounds, which is filled to the brim with the skulls of many of the thousands of local victims

It’s rather macabre. I asked Peter why the bones had not been reburied, or burned, or subjected to whatever passed for a funeral rite in this culture. It seemed wrong, given that this all happened in my lifetime. Some of these skulls will have living relatives.

“So nobody forget,” was all Peter would say.

Building D at Tuol Sleng has more photographs, and some artistic representations of the various tortures carried out at this former primary school building.

One of the paintings depicts waterboarding. The original wooden waterboard itself, resembling a tilted medieval rack, is right there in the middle of the room.

I listened, bemused, while Peter explained in detail how it was used.

“You do realise,” I said, when he had finished, “that they’re doing this exact same thing right now to unconvicted terrorist suspects in America?”

He shook his head.

“No, no, no,” he said. “You don’t understand. This is from Pol Pot time. Not now. Not any more.”

“Peter, mate, trust me,” I said. “They really are still doing this shit in America.”

He looked at me like I was smoking crack.

---

No related posts.

2008-07-17  ::  Kevin Murphy