The main reason why i came to Phnom Penh was to get a Laos visa, as it is not possible to get it at the border crossing that i will be passing through. While here i thought i should do some touristy thing, and i really want to understand this country a bit more. From what i can see on the surface there is a lot of poverty, there are a lot of orphanages, and there is a lot of foreign interest here, trying to help out in some way.
I don’t enjoy learning history from history books – that was proved when i got 17% for one of my history exams, so i knew nothing about Cambodias past. Slowly i started hearing about the Khmer Rouge, and when i visited the Toul Sleng Museum here in Phnom Penh, the reality of what happened struck me.
From what i can gather, a group of people, led by Pol Pot, decided that they knew what was best for everyone else in the country, and subsequently enforced their beliefs on others making them work the land like slaves. They destroyed so much of what had been important in the country prior to their take over – that includes temples and statues of buddhas, banks etc. There were about 20 000 people who did not survive their period of ruling, and they were tortured and murdered, and that included men, women and children.
The museum (Toul Sleng) used to be an old school which Pol Pot converted to a detention and torture centre. On the walls of the torture rooms are a single picture of one of the victims and the only other objects in the room are the bed and shackles where the people were tortured. The detention cells were tiny and some of them did not even have a window. In another section of the museum they have rooms full of photos of the victims – men, women and children. Looking into their eyes in the photo just brought me to tears – just being aware of the suffering that they endured.
I then visited the Killing Fields, which is where those who weren’t killed at Toul Sleng were taken to be executed. During an excavation there they discovered about 9000 corpses, and so they have built a huge stupa to house the bones of all those that were executed, and these are on display so that people can know the atrocities that happened. You also walk around the pits that were used to bury the corpses. There are still pieces of cloth and some bone fragments lying around the area, which makes it all seem a lot closer. When i think of WWII it seems very distant for me, as i was not alive during that time, but this happened during my lifetime. I was born in 1975, and that is when it all started – so to think that such atrocities existed not so long ago is quite scary... could there possibly still be people who think in the same was as Pol Pot did? Could something like this happen again in the future?
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