S-21

It may seem odd to the reader that I haven't written anything to date about the Khmer Rouge. We visited S-21 (security prison 21) over a month ago. The prison, a high school before the Khmer Rouge came to power, is now a musem. At the time, we were both affected by what we saw. The prison has been preserved in tact since the Vietnamese liberators arrived there in 1979. The curation of the site is incredibly powerful, in particular, room after room of inmate photographs (the Khmer Rouge documented everything thoroughly) have a profound impact on the visitor - grim black and white mug-shots of some of the estimated 20,000 men, women and children who were killed here ; you can see in their eyes that they already know what their fate will be. We didn't manage to take too many photographs during our visit, hopefully these give you an impression of how truly disturbing this place is - of note, the Khmer Rouge used water-boarding (right) as well as many other horrendous torture methods to extract confessions.

Although the visit to S-21, the subsequent reading I did, and the media coverage of the current Khmer Rouge tribunal really got me thinking about genocide and justice, for some reason I couldn't find a way to write about it. I tried hard to put my thoughts together but I just couldn't get it right. It was somehow too academic, and maybe deep down I felt that as an outsider it isn't something I should comment on. Today, unexpectedly, we got talking to a Khmer Rouge survivor about their experiences and I think this is why I have managed to write this post. Out of respect for them and their story I don't want to share the details. Suffice to say that even 30 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge they couldn't talk about what happened without a faltering voice and a tear in the eye, and their story was striking not just for the events of the Khmer Rouge period (1975-1979), but the impact on their life of the extended troubles through the civil war prior to the rise of the KR, and the decade after their fall when many people feared to return to the country and lived in refugee camps overseas. It affected me deeply.

This is the first time i've been able to talk to someone directly about what happened to them, it was obviously terribly painful for them to relate even now and I know everyone in Cambodia over a certain age has similar stories. It's sometimes easy to forget how troubled the past of this country is, going about your daily life in Phnom Penh. Younger generations of Cambodian's have been poorly informed about the countries turbulent past. Although their parents have told them their stories, many children don't believe it and incredibly the school curriculum doesn't currently require history teaching of the period. However, to end on a postive note, the Cambodia Daily reported today that the Documentation Centre of Cambodia has now distributed 25,000 copies out of a total 175,000 of the school text book "A History of Democratic Kampuchea". Apparently, the book contains a stark account of the period. Although it will make for hard reading, and i'm unsure how many people will react, it seems to me to be important that young Cambodians know what happened here.