A very dark place

When staying in Phnom Pehn there are two places almost every tourist visits: the S21 detention centre, where thousands of Cambodians were detained and tortured during the reign of the Khmer Rouge until they gave acceptable confessions. Inmates would eventually be transported in a truck 15km south west to the infamous killing fields (the second tourist destination) where they would be brutally murdered and thrown into mass graves. Both are popular tourist destinations, perhaps due to how recently the atrocities occurred and also because of people’s morbid curiosity with war and death.

We decided to risk using our legs and walk to S21 from our guest house along scorching boulevards and congested side streets intercepting heckles from moto drivers wanting to help us get out of the heat and make a quick dollar. Walking seems to go against Phnom Pehn’s religious use of motorbikes and tuk-tuks and the disappointed drivers looked at us like we were crazy.

S21 was a school prior to being turned into a prison and if you ignore the barbed-wire topped walls surrounding the grounds from a distance it could still pass for a Cambodian school, minus the children. The paint on the walls has now faded grey and stained with rust and there are no sounds of laughter from the playground. In the main courtyard of the school is a large wooden frame, formally a chin-up bar for the pupils, that was used to suspend torture victims from with their hands and feet bound behind them whilst their heads were dunked into filthy water.

The first of the school buildings we entered had large classrooms each empty apart from a single metal bed frame used for torturing important political prisoners. Box cases for bullets were left on the floor: to keep scorpions and spiders in to administer poison to inmates. Spilt blood had left dark stains on many of the floor tiles. On the top floor of the building the plaster on the ceiling was peeling away from the roof as if the building was trying to tear itself down.

The second building had its rooms partitioned into tiny cells barely big enough for a person to lie down in. At the end of the corridor a bat infested stairwell spiralled up to the next floor, hundreds of winged rodents swooped and cackled peering down at visitors. Some of the rooms were filled with photographs of Khmer Rouge soldiers, most in their early teens, while others housed pictures of inmates of all ages, most looking scared and some near death.

After a couple of hours we were done with S21, it is such a sad place it is difficult to do it justice in writing. We headed out for some lunch when it began to spit with rain. Within 5 minutes the spiting rain had become a monsoon so we dived into the nearest restaurant. The heavy rain went on for over an hour and managed to flood most of Phnom Phen creating deep puddles in some places. The following day the government were accusing the rubbish collectors for not doing their jobs and that the drains were blocked with rubbish (true) and the rubbish removal company were blaming everyone but themselves.

Once the rains eased off we took a tuk-tuk through the deep puddles to the Killing Fields. The place is out if town in a leafy suburb of Phnom Phen next door to a bustling junior school. A large concrete pagoda has been erected in the centre of the site housing hundreds of the victims’ bones and fragments of their clothes that have been excavated from some of the mass graves. We walked round the site past graves that had held up to 450 bodies. Bones and clothing were coming up through the soil as rain waters were eroding the earth the bodies had been buried in. The clothing fragments were still vivid with colour making it feel very recent. A large tree stood before one of the mass graves where it is said that executioners would smash babies heads against it and then throw them into the pit. This is typical of the killing that went on at this place, all extremely brutal most adults were beaten over the head with a stick and many were buried alive. It is a very dark place.