S-21

A sobering day. Went this morning to Tuol Sleng and the killing fields of Choeung Ek. Tuol Sleng is the former high school that the Khmer Rouge turned into a torture and interrogation centre, codenamed S-21. Officially it's called a prison, but when all but about a dozen out of at least 14,000 prisoners there, all supposed 'class enemies' - i.e. victims of Communist Party paranoia - were sentenced to death, you can't really call it that. They've left a lot of it more or less as it was when the Vietnamese liberated the city in 1979 - you walk into the first lot of cells, formerly classrooms, and can see the iron beds that prisoners were shackled to, as well as on the wall a photograph of the bodies discovered there by the photographers who arrived with the Vietnamese army. They'd been tortured to death, literally about a day before the prison was abandoned. You find yourself wondering how much pain those walls have witnessed and how much a human being can inflict on another, but you can't get your head round it. You see the electrified barbed wire preventing prisoners from throwing themselves from the upper levels of the buildings (suicide a luxury they were denied). You see the boards displaying hundreds of black-and-white mugshots of prisoners taken on their arrival, one board made up entirely of photos of children, and feel like crying.
Choeung Ek is a pretty piece of green over the road from a school, attractive longan trees growing in an orchard to one side. You can hear the kids singing in the distance. If you didn't know, you'd wonder what the several dozen pits were doing there. This is where prisoners were brought from S-21 to be executed and buried in mass graves. The numbers are staggering: the Vietnamese exhumed almost 9,000 bodies but think that at least 20,000 were buried there (and Choeung Ek was only the principal burial ground of dozens all over the country: it's estimated that from 1975-78 through execution, starvation and disease, Pol Pot's government cost Cambodia about 2m people, 20% of her population). In places you can still see victims' clothes half-buried in the dirt. Perhaps most distressing of all, in fact of anything I've ever seen, is the 'Killing Tree', against which up to 100 babies and small children were beaten to death. What's happened to the mind of someone to whom smashing a baby's skull in the name of ideology has ceased to be something wrong, I don't know and pray I never will.
Sorry to darken the mood so much but it's impossible to describe something like that lightly; on a more positive note, as my book says, it does go to show how far the Cambodians have come in the years since. I hope, so far as it's possible, that they succeed in putting the past behind them.
OK, deep breath, other matters: I've also now seen the National Museum and Silver Pagoda which were pretty cool. The National Museum's in a lovely old Khmer-style building, bit shabby and lots of the exhibits for some reason were in packing cases, but what there is on show - the vast majority of it Khmer sculpture - is worth seeing. The Silver Pagoda is part of the royal palace complex, with some extraordinary (and extraordinarily valuable) stuff inside: even the floor must cost a bomb, it's made of half a ton of solid silver! Not to mention the 90kg solid gold lifesize Buddha figure, covered in almost 10,000 diamonds (perfect for my back patio but don't think the budget will stretch), or the stacks of other Buddha figures and Khmer sculpture they've got packed in there. If you're ever in Phnom Penh you should definitely have a look.
Still haven't decided where I'm going next, or when I'm going there: to be honest I'm quite tempted to stay in PP for another day, it's a cool place. Tonight I should be checking out the famed/notorious Heart of Darkness, despite its sinister name the most popular nightspot in the city, but also one where if you're not careful you'll find yourself on the end of a beating from some rich kid's bodyguards. Well, I've been missing the old bar brawl scene, will probably get all misty-eyed at the first sound of crashing chairs... You'll have my review soon.
In the meantime, take care all of you. Bye for now.