How Can This Happen?

Shackles on the floor of Tuol Sleng

(Dana) The Holocaust. Apartheid in South Africa. The annihilation of 25% of Cambodians by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.  Three almost unfathomable human tragedies perpetrated by human beings against other human beings. Three atrocities for which I had limited historical context before this trip.  Three incredible history lessons for the 6Explorers through visits to Yad Vashem (Jerusalem), the Apartheid Museum (Johannesburg) and this week, Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek (Cambodia).

On April 17, 1975 — literally the day I celebrated my 10^th birthday — Pol Pot’s forces “liberated” Phnom Penh from the “imperial” leadership of General Lon Nol.  At first, citizens cheered, but within days, spirits crashed as everyone was driven out of the city and relocated to farms.  The Khmer Rouge wanted to create a utopian agrarian Communist society with the farmer as the model citizen.  Education was banned for cluttering the minds of youth (even though 8 of the 9 top Khmer Rouge leaders including Pol Pot were former teachers!) Collectively, they needed to wring 3 tons of rice out of each hectare of land, 50% more than had ever been grown before, to both feed fighting forces and trade with China for weapons.

To accomplish their agricultural and societal goals, Pol Pot’s comrades began brutalizing their fellow countrymen. All capable hands were forced to work the rice fields and build irrigation ditches.  Labor camps mobilized children as young as seven.  As the work increased, rations plummeted.  Starvation, edema, dysentery and other diseases became rampant.  And if that weren’t enough, the Khmer Rouge rounded up anyone deemed subversive to their plan.  Targeted were former capitalists, military personnel , educators and artists.  Thousands were taken away from their homes, never to return.

Those thought to have betrayed the Angka (the state) were taken to the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh to be tortured.  We spent a few hours at the prison learning about their nightmare.

Mugshots of "enemies" tortured at Tuol Sleng

Built as a high school, Tuol Sleng still has chalkboards displaying French and Khmer lessons.  I could almost see happy Khmer children running in the courtyards or talking with friends in the hallways or climbing the stairs.  But that image is quickly erased by the barbed wire that kept prisoners from committing suicide from upper floors, by the twenty 0.8×2 meter cells built within classrooms to isolate prisoners and bybuilt rusting shackles still on the bloodstained floors.  This monument to human suffering is still raw.  Nothing is behind glass.  I walk around the individual classrooms where the final 14 officers were tortured with serrated palm branches; their bodies found by the Vietnamese liberators on January 7, 1979.  I stand and take photos where 40 prisoners were shackled together in agony.  I can almost hear the groans of the prisoners, although according to accounts, the prison was eerily silent as all conversation was severely banned.

Of the 12,000 victims taken to Tuol Sleng, only seven survived. Seven. The rest were jammed into trucks 300 at a time, 3-times per month.  Although they naively thought that their destination was someplace better, sadly they were transported 15km away to Choeung Ek — the Killing Fields.  There they were stripped, blindfolded and forced to stand around open pits.  Hoes, axes and poles struck the backs of heads, killing most. Bullets strafed the pits to ensure success and pesticides were dumped to minimize the smell.  A loudspeaker blared to drown out sounds of the dying.  And children were ripped away from their mother, held by their ankles and beaten against the killing tree to conserve ammunition. Incredible.

The lasting reminder of The Killing Fields

I insist on visiting Choeung Ek.  We walk among the 100+ pits including one of 450 victims and one of 100 women and children. We see clothing remnants and bones sticking up from the earth. We know there must be more victims in the unexcavated back section. We pause at the tree were so many children lost their lives. And we pay homage at the Buddhist memorial stupa with 17 layers of skulls and other bones of the 8,895 known victims.

Afterwards, we review the events.  We discuss the genocide.  We wonder whether some guards may have also been victims; kill or be killed.  What a history syllabus.