Getting serious: Tuol Sleng genocide museum

Whenever I mention Cambodia to anyone their immediate reference point is the killing fields and the Khmer Rouge. I hope in time this beautiful country will become famous for other, more positive things, but for now it still seems to underpin everything that happens here.

I need to learn about that terrible period in the history of this country (and the world), so as a start I visited the Tuol Sleng genocide museum at the infamous ‘S.21’ building in central Phnom Penh. Not surprisingly, it’s intensely thought-provoking, but pretty grim.

Some facts:

· During the ‘killing fields’ regime of Pol Pot (1975-1978), the school was used as a prison camp, for detaining, torchuring and killing inmates

· S.21 (Security office 21) was reserved for the educated or those who posed a ‘special threat’ - basically anyone the regime didn’t like, including increasing numbers of Khmer Rouge activists themselves towards the end of the regime

· There are chillingly detailed records about the 13,000+ people killed in S21; only 7 inmates ever survived

· Many, many more were killed in the Cambodian countryside by the Khmer Rouge, by weapons, landmines, disease or hunger – estimates range from 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 (more on that in the future I’m sure)

Some impressions:

· S21 is basically an ordinary school, built around two sides of an incongruously pleasant lawn with blossoming trees.

· There are rooms of seemingly-endless portrait photographs of inmates. The images are haunting: most look impassive, some even seeming to half-smile, whereas I’d assumed they would look scared or even defiant - I wondered if they had any idea what was going to happen to them

· Classroom after classroom had been transformed into torture chambers – big rooms with just a single iron bed in the middle, often with various gruesome implements still in place

· There were also pictures of bodies taken by the liberating Vietnamese army, still strapped to the beds with great pools of blood below. The photos were graphic, but the stark sight of the bed and implements was almost worse, leaving me to imagine the horrible details

· The prison rules seem to give an insight into the mindset of the captors – ones which stick in the mind are “Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders” and “If you disobey you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge”. Oh and “When getting lashes or electrocution you must not cry at all”

· There were striking parallels with what I recently saw in Rwanda – not least the use of a place such as a school to commit such atrocities (too cruel anywhere)

And some questions:

· The same nagging question as I asked in Rwanda: how can this have happened in such a beautiful, friendly, peaceful country?

· Is it pedantic to ask whether this was actually, strictly-speaking, ‘genocide’ (there’s a long definition, but it’s basically trying to wipe out a race, hence the ‘gene’ root – was this actually the case here? Even if not, does that make it less bad?

· And a final, scary question: it happened here, so how can we be sure it won’t happen anywhere else?

There are a few photos at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=167539&id=749555800&l=4848adea5a - I guess I hope your weekend was a little less interesting.