Today we visited the S-21 prison camp and the Choeung Ek killing field on the outskirts of Pnhom Penh. Before we tell you about our experiences there, it is first important to discuss the story behind them as well the Khmer Rouge occupation in Vietnam.
The Khmer Rouge was a Communist party that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 via their "puppet" leader Pol Pot. Their policies reflected an extreme and deranged form of communism. It included isolation of the country from foreign influence, closing shools, hospitals, and factories, abolishing banking, finance, and currency, outlawing all forms of religion, confiscating all private property and finally a MASSIVE relocation of people from urban areas to farm collectives on the countryside. Through agricultural labor, the "New People" would become "classless" and therefore equal. These actions resulted in the deaths of an estimated 3 million people (out of a 7 million total population) through brutal torture and executions, work exhaustion, illness, and starvation. In terms of the number of people killed as a proportion of the population of the country it ruled, it was one of the most lethal regimes of the 20th century.
Two of the more internationally well-known remnants of this gruesome period are S-21 and the Choeung Ek killing field. This post talks only about the first, while the next one will discuss the latter. Phnom Penh was taken by the Khmer Rouge on April 17, the Cambodian New Year. First they were seen as heroes coming to free the people from their unwanted in the Vietnamese War. However, the euphoric mood soon changed as every citizen was evacuated and forced to go and work on the countryside. Pol Pot's forces took over the Tuol Svay Pray High School and turned it into the S-21 or "Tuol Sleng" (literally meaning "poisonous hill") prison camp. Here, suspected traitors were tortured mercilessly until they even confessed acts they had never even committed. The desire to create the ultimate self-sustaining agrarian society fueled a killing spree that targeted the educated and those supposedly still loyal to the former government.
But how did they find all of these "traitors"? There are several ways they did this: they had snitches in every village and town, they fooled educated people into believing that they were needed to help build the new economy (but were imprisoned and executed instead if they "confessed" that they were in fact educated), they killed everyone with glasses - a "sure" tell sign of intellect; the people without a tan because they were believed to work in offices, and finally they would check people for callouses (=eelt) on their hands! In the meantime, while the educated were eradicated, many others who slavishly labored on the rice fields died of inhumane treatment (e.g. one bowl of watery rice soup p.p. per day). Most of the rice production was used not to feed the people, but to buy weaponry from China instead and used to kill their own people.
Coming back to S-21, this place was just one of the facilities where the educated and other traitors (including quite a few unfortunate foreigners) were "questioned" to death. S-21 is now called the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and features many grueling stories about the torturing and inhumanities that occurred. For instance, the women prisoners were raped and tortured to insanity. This led many of them to commit suicide by jumping off the prison roof when they were having their weekly shower. To "correct" this behavior, the Khmer Rouge put barbed wire over the entire cell block which made jumping down impossible.
All prisoners were either kept in communal rooms where they were chained together by their feet, in separate "interrogation" chambers chained to their beds, or in small cement cells. In the latter, they had to ask permission for everything; even to move. If they did not do this, they would be beaten or put in solitary confinement. There are so many horrible stories which were all meticulously documented. Every prisoner had a photo-file of his or her forced "confessions". The museum uses their pictures to relate people to the horrorstories. On top of the torture devices, this makes for a very strong and lasting impression. We weren't there yet, however. The picture of individual torture was still going to be turned into an experience of mass genocide. Please check out the next post for more hell on earth.
Today we visited the S-21 prison camp and the Choeung Ek killing field on the outskirts of Pnhom Penh. Before we tell you about our experiences there, it is first important to discuss the story behind them as well the Khmer Rouge occupation in Vietnam.
The Khmer Rouge was a Communist party that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 via their "puppet" leader Pol Pot. Their policies reflected an extreme and deranged form of communism. It included isolation of the country from foreign influence, closing shools, hospitals, and factories, abolishing banking, finance, and currency, outlawing all forms of religion, confiscating all private property and finally a MASSIVE relocation of people from urban areas to farm collectives on the countryside. Through agricultural labor, the "New People" would become "classless" and therefore equal. These actions resulted in the deaths of an estimated 3 million people (out of a 7 million total population) through brutal torture and executions, work exhaustion, illness, and starvation. In terms of the number of people killed as a proportion of the population of the country it ruled, it was one of the most lethal regimes of the 20th century. 
Two of the more internationally well-known remnants of this gruesome period are S-21 and the Choeung Ek killing field. This post talks only about the first, while the next one will discuss the latter. Phnom Penh was taken by the Khmer Rouge on April 17, the Cambodian New Year. First they were seen as heroes coming to free the people from their unwanted in the Vietnamese War. However, the euphoric mood soon changed as every citizen was evacuated and forced to go and work on the countryside. Pol Pot's forces took over the Tuol Svay Pray High School and turned it into the S-21 or "Tuol Sleng" (literally meaning "poisonous hill") prison camp. Here, suspected traitors were tortured mercilessly until they even confessed acts they had never even committed. The desire to create the ultimate self-sustaining agrarian society fueled a killing spree that targeted the educated and those supposedly still loyal to the former government. 
But how did they find all of these "traitors"? There are several ways they did this: they had snitches in every village and town, they fooled educated people into believing that they were needed to help build the new economy (but were imprisoned and executed instead if they "confessed" that they were in fact educated), they killed everyone with glasses - a "sure" tell sign of intellect; the people without a tan because they were believed to work in offices, and finally they would check people for callouses (=eelt) on their hands! In the meantime, while the educated were eradicated, many others who slavishly labored on the rice fields died of inhumane treatment (e.g. one bowl of watery rice soup p.p. per day). Most of the rice production was used not to feed the people, but to buy weaponry from China instead and used to kill their own people. 
Coming back to S-21, this place was just one of the facilities where the educated and other traitors (including quite a few unfortunate foreigners) were "questioned" to death. S-21 is now called the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and features many grueling stories about the torturing and inhumanities that occurred. For instance, the women prisoners were raped and tortured to insanity. This led many of them to commit suicide by jumping off the prison roof when they were having their weekly shower. To "correct" this behavior, the Khmer Rouge put barbed wire over the entire cell block which made jumping down impossible.
All prisoners were either kept in communal rooms where they were chained together by their feet, in separate "interrogation" chambers chained to their beds, or in small cement cells. In the latter, they had to ask permission for everything; even to move. If they did not do this, they would be beaten or put in solitary confinement. There are so many horrible stories which were all meticulously documented. Every prisoner had a photo-file of his or her forced "confessions". The museum uses their pictures to relate people to the horrorstories. On top of the torture devices, this makes for a very strong and lasting impression. We weren't there yet, however. The picture of individual torture was still going to be turned into an experience of mass genocide. Please check out the next post for more hell on earth.
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