S - 21

On our first full day in Phnom Penh I went with Sue to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.  I'm very nervous about genocide tourism, but Sue was very sure she wanted to go and I decided to tag along. The Museum is located in the Kmer Rouge interrogation centre S - 21, which was formerly a primary school.

The photograph opposite is of a notice in the complex and sets out the "rules" of S - 21.  During the three plus years of Kmer Rouge rule fifteen to twenty thousand people went through S - 21 and were executed in the "killing fields" outside the City.  S - 21 itself was only one of 150 or more such centres throughout Cambodia.  It is estimated that between one and three million Cambodians died during the rule of the Kmer Rouge and their notorious leader Pol Pot, or "Brother Number One".  The death toll was from executions, disease and starvation driven mainly by the Kmer Rouge's forced agrarianisation of Cambodian society.

The museum itself is simply the preserved fabric of S - 21 and is filled with photos of the people that passed through the Centre plus photos, drawings and text about what happened there and in Cambodia as a whole while it was under the control of the Pol Pot regime.  There is also information about the ongoing war crimes trials of some of the surviving Kmer Rouge leaders.

One of the most disturbing things about he place is its sheer ordinaryness.  From a distance it looks like any other large asian three-storey primary school.  As you approach you can see the crude fences and barbed wire and inside there are iron beds, roughly made shackles and badly-built cells.  Stood in the courtyard and looking around at the scene and my fellow tourists I felt angry and confused.  I couldn't bring myself to take photographs.

One large party was visiting the site while we were there and I felt a surge of anger rising in my breast as I watched some of the men taking photographs of torture scenes painted by former inmates. Then I felt the anger turning inwards as I thought "who am I to judge these people and their motives?"

In the end I was glad that I went because it helped clarify my thinking and explain my nervousness at going.  The real truth about what happened under Pol Pot or Hitler or any other of the thousands of dictators that stain our history is not that evil men did these things, or the Kmer Rouge, or the Nazis or the Cambodians or the Germans, but that we did it, us humans and anything that looks too closely at the nitty gritty details of these events gives us the chance to pretend that it was those evil people that did it and not our kind and civilised selves, when actually any of us could find ourselves on either side of the concentration camp barbed wire at any time given the right combination of economic and political circumstances and if you think otherwise you are, my friend, a deluded fool.  In fact, our only hope is to hold on to this truth and base our actions on the knowledge that of the many roads we can go down there are always some that lead back to S - 21 and Auschwitz-Birkenau.