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Sunday, June 17, 2007
Phomn Penh Day 6
our 6th day in cambodia was a sobering experience for us. at least, for the first part of the day when we visited the killing fields & genocide museum, which are stark reminders of the horrifying Pol Pot regime. from what we got from our guides, read abt in books & brochures & watched in videos there, basically the Khmer Rouge started in 1975, just after the city of Phonm Penh was liberated from 5 yrs of civil war & american bombing. led by Pol Pot, its soldiers rounded up fellow cambodians, who were thought to be american or vietnamese spies, tortured them in the prisons & then killed them by the masses. this lasted from 1975-1979.
our first stop was the genocidal centre, better known as the killing fields, where the massacre victims were killed & dumped in mass graves. actually there are hundreds of such sites all arnd cambodia, which have yet to be excavated. 
enlarge this to read...the english is a bit flawed but u can feel the anger in the words...
the memorial "stupa", which houses 17 stories of bones which were excavated in 1988 from the killing fields. most of them contain the skulls of the victims. the last few stories hold the long bones.
beneath the bones at the base of the structure are some of the victims' clothes which were cleaned & deodorized after the excavation.
one of the mass graves in the area. beyond these graves is a shallow river which was not excavated & still contains the bodies of many more victims. in fact, according to our guide, the rest of the sites will probably be left untouched for now, as enough evidence has been dug out for the ongoing tribunal to try the top leaders of the Khmer Rouge.
women, children & babies were not spared. the leaders of the Khmer Rouge believed that the whole family of a traitor should be slaughtered as none could be trusted.
as we walked arnd the grounds, our guide pointed out the small bones that could not be properly removed from the area...we were literally walking on these bones.
the victims' clothes also on the grounds of the area...
we proceeded to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which used to be the main prison in Phonm Penh for the so-called traitors & spies. here, they were chained & locked up in cells, starved & then brought out to be tortured periodically.
we were expecting a typical musuem with exhibits locked up behind glass panels. nothing prepared us for what we got instead.
the khmer rouge soldiers made use of the building & grounds of a high school as their prison. ironically, the man in charge of this particular prison, Warden Duch - responsible for ordering the torture & killing of 14000 of his fellow cambodians - used to be a mathematics teacher.
the barbed wire to prevent escape.
enlarge this also, quite chilling...these were the actual rules (translated) of the prison.
the cells for isolating prisoners while awaiting their turn to be sent to the torture chambers. as i was saying, definitely not your-run-of-the-mill museum. the cell walls still have scribblings on them, and in one, u can see numbers being crossed out, probably a prisoner counting down to freedom. the worst thing was that prisoners were duped into thinking that they would be sent to work in the plantations after they had confessed, & with this promise, were blindfolded, shackled & brought to the killing fields where they were bludgeoned to death or beheaded.
the man behind it all.
a survivor of the Tuol Sleng prison (only 7 survived out of the 14000 inmates) painted scenes that he could recall from his imprisonment. here, a soldier (or combatants as they prefered to be known) smashes a baby against a tree as its mother watches. rem the killing tree in the photos above? this was how it was done.
the shocking thing is that the "combatants" who committed such heinous acts were actually 10-15 year olds recruited by the Khmer Rouge leaders, & they were indoctrinated to such an extent that many even killed their own parents.
one of the many evil & ingenious methods of torture devised by the combatants. most of the prisoners were tortured so badly that they gave pages & pages of confessions to crimes they had never committed. e.g. one prisoner gave a 1000 pg confession that he was an american spy.
the actual torture instruments displayed openly, in the actual rooms that they were used. this is the barrel used in the torture method shown in the above painting.
other instruments of torture.
one of the beds used for torture, with some of the instruments still on it. the body seen in the picture on the wall was one of the 14 corpses left behind after the Khmer Rouge regime was overthrown and the prison hastily abandoned.
the faces of the innocent victims stare hauntingly. all prisoners had their pictures taken when they were brought in.
this is a photo taken during the excavation of the killing fields in 1988.
even an old bar in the exercise area of the former high school was converted into a torture device. here, prisoners were hung upside down in the hot sun until they lost consciousness. then they were brought down & their heads dunked in sewage water, causing them to regain consciousness, only to be hung up again. this was done repeatedly until a confession was obtained.
behind this bar, those white things sticking out of the ground surround one of the graves for the 14 corpses that remained after the prison was vacated. these 14 victims were probably the only few to get a decent burial.
in total, an estimated 2 million cambodians were massacred in the 4 year period. the trial still goes on while many of the top leaders are alive & free somewhere. pol pot himself died of natural causes in 1998.
later in the day, we visited the royal palace & silver pagoda, which as i mentioned before, was really quite lavish. unfortunately, we were only allowed to take pictures of the palace grounds. inside the royal palace, the ceilings were decked with beautiful frescoes & there was gold everywhere. the inside of the silver pagoda, though less stunning to look at, was more impressive cos of the real silver tiles on its floors (thus the name) plus the 90kg pure gold Buddha studded with like 4000 diamonds that stands in it. there was also an emerald Buddha as well as a Buddha relic in a glass case, purportedly an actual eyebrow hair of Buddha himself.
monks on the grounds of the royal palace...postcard-worthy photo...
after that, we visited the Wat Phonm temple. according to local belief, the city of Phomn Penh got its name when an old woman named Penh found 4 statues of Buddha which had washed up along the shores of the Mekong River. this temple was built on that spot & eventually the city sprung up arnd it. Wat Phonm apparently houses the original 4 Buddha statues but we could not tell which ones they were as the inside of the temple contained so many Buddha statues.
at the base of the temple, we pooled all our cambodian riel to give to the beggar & his son. we saw many more beggars in Phomn Penh than Siem Reap, & most were child beggars! most of the adult beggars are land-mine amputees. (the landmines were left behind during the years of war & many are still active)
Posted by Adila ::
9:20 AM ::
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beneath the bones at the base of the structure are some of the victims' clothes which were cleaned & deodorized after the excavation.
