Our first experience of a bus for a while was not a promising experience and did not make me eager to leave the Vietnamese train lines and head into Cambodia. We waited 45 minutes for our booked bus, only for a minivan to turn up and take us 200 yards down the road before chucking us out again. Eventually a bigger bus did turn up and we were on our way to the border.
After the usual visa admin (including fingerprints and retina scans) we were rolling through the flat Cambodian landscape. Here and there people drove their cattle or stooped to plant rice. The sparse fields were lined by long irrigation ditches, dug by slave labour under the Khmer Rouge, which shone red as they reflected the setting sun.
We reached Phnom Penh long after dark. It is another chaotic city, a strange mix of old and new with huge, shiny Samsung buildings rising up next to small rice stalls and rundown motorbike garages. Flashing neon lights advertise seedy massage parlours and the roads throng with the most overcrowded motorbikes yet.
In need of a street cleaner
Phnom Penh is also the dirtiest city we had visited so far, Cambodia being the poorest country we’ve visited. The shops are messy and jumbled, rubbish lies in the street and the pavements randomly stop and start. Like a lot of places, the shops and businesses spill out into the street and everything is protected from the traffic by a line of parked motorbikes.
The people here are friendly and helpful but the level of English is much lower than anywhere else we’ve been. When we arrive at a stall to buy food the owner often goes off for the friendly neighbourhood English speaker to help us out.
The stalls in the street mostly sell noodles while the market, like a huge square roundabout on a massive junction, is an absolute bomb site, with napkins and food waste absolutely everywhere. In the evening Theo gets a lot of attention from the girls outside Happy Man Bar and Nice Friends Bar, until they see me plodding along behind him.
Wat Phnom is supposedly the spot where Madam Penh placed the four Buddha statues she found on the banks of the river, subsequently founding the city. It’s a simple Wat sat atop a small hill, the only one in the city apparently. There are dragons and snakes lining the stairs that lead up the large white stupa that dominates the hill.
The grand palace and Silver pagaoda less exciting sites in the city. Though beautiful they paled in comparison to some of Thailand’s palaces and temples and the famous silver floor in the sliver pagoda is mostly covered by protected carpets. We were cornered by a monk who wanted to practice his English and had the same conversation round in circles until the monsoon drove us away.
The main other feature to see in Phnom Penh is the huge domed market in the centre of the city. A warren of alleys run between the stalls selling everything you could ever want to buy. One shop was dominated by bright, strong scented flower arrangements. We turned into an alley, swamped in shirts and ties and it felt like we were walking into Narnia. We finally emerged into the vast shiny dome in the centre, which was packed full of dazzling jewellery.
A dark past
One side of the country that cannot be ignored during a visit to Phnom Penh is the bloody history of the Khmer Rouge. Droves of people died in the country between 1975 and 1979, and the people of Cambodia are committed to preserving the memory of the atrocities that happened here, in the hope that it may never happen again.
The Tuol Sleng Museum (Genocide Museum) was actually a school when Pol Pot ‘liberated’ the city and organised a mass exodus into the countryside. The city stood almost empty for Pol Pot’s reign with everyone labouring in the countryside. The emptying of the city was so complete some people were sent to the opposite end of the country, simply based on which part of the city they happened to be in on the day of the ‘liberation’.
Tuol Sleng school then became security office 21, a notorious prison where enemies of the party were taken to be tortured into a confession. These prisoners were then taken to the killing fields just outside the city and executed. Over four years it is estimated that around 20,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng.
The compound is a largish place surrounded by high walls. Flat, shapeless buildings surround two mirror image grassy courtyards with smaller buildings dotted around them. Building A was used for housing party cadres, and this was also where the majority of the interrogation and torture was carried out. The windows were panelled with glass to minimise the sound of the screaming for those outside. Torture techniques featured turning people upside down over and over again, dunking them in water, electrocuting, whipping and just old fashioned beating and maiming using all manner of gruesome looking metal hooks.
Building A was faceless and blank, rundown concrete walls housed nothing save a few metal beds. It was here that a few corpses were found after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979. Fourteen people, one female, were the last to be killed by the Khmer Rouge. Bloody and half decayed they were identified and buried in the grounds as a lasting monument to all who died at Tuol Sleng.
Building B contained display after display of photographs. General shots showed the Cambodian people working in the countryside, then there were mug shots of the party officials, Pol Pot and others, then the army. Rows of young boys in flat caps stared out of endless pictures, they trained them young, just 16 or 17, so they could be fully indoctrinated in the party, so much so that they would turn on their own parents.
Three or four rooms were full of head and shoulder shots of the victims of the Khmer Rouge, taken from the party records. People of both genders and every age. They look brave and defeated and scared and resigned and unsure and confused and blank. Children, the elderly, women with babies, they’re all there. The soft faced wide-eyed little boys look no different to the ones you see running around in the streets today. Did they know what would happen to them? Did they wonder if anyone would ever hear their story? I bet they could never have known that a 23 year old British girl would stand and stare at their sad little faces in 2012 and wish more than anything that someone had come to their aid, that anyone had helped them. Couldn’t the other nations at the time have saved even one life?
Building C has been left as it was at the time. The bottom floor has poorly built walls of brick in the old classrooms to form long, narrow cells. There are chains coming from the floor in each one. On the next floor there are packed in cells of wood. Unlike downstairs, where the inmates were held by chains, these ones have doors. They looked like slightly oversized coffins.
It was silent and gloomy and probably the only place I have ever been that truly felt haunted by the past. You can almost feel the agony of the place leaking from the walls.
On the top floor there were other displays, among which were the confessions of some of the inmates, crimes as serious as not watching the cattle well enough and stealing shows and tobacco. There were even confessions from Westerners, Americans who went to Cambodia after Vietnam, accused of being CIA spies.
The recentness of these events was pushed on us further by the presence of an elderly, grey-haired, smartly dressed gentleman. A survivor no less, one of seven, signing books that account his ordeal as a child in Tuol Sleng.
Once their time at Tuol sleng was over the victims of the Khmer Rouge were taken by truck to a site just outside the city. Our tuk tuk followed the same route and we rattled along dusty roads crammed with lorries and 4x4s, trucks, tuk tuks and motorbikes. The suburbs of the city are a dirty, rundown, sprawling mass of shops and businesses. After the almost shanty-town like outskirts of the city the roads are lined by small towns, and between the buildings you can glimpse the green fields beyond.
Eventually we turned off the main road and reached a sort of artificial tourist village, all drinks stalls and tuk tuks.
On the site of the killing fields there is now a Genocide Centre where we were given an audio guide and left to look around on our own. It’s a relatively small place, just over two and a half hectares with a vast memorial stupa in the middle. The audio tour leads you up the main drive to the place where the trucks of prisoners were unloaded. At the start of Pol Pot’s reign two or three trucks of 40 or so people a week were brought to the killing fields but by 1978 trucks were bringing anything up to 300 people every day. Most were executed immediately but some were held in a ‘dark and gloomy’ detention centre until it was their turn to die.
Finally there was nothing left to look at except the graves. A wide field mottled with rounded hills and dips where the mass graves were found. We saw the open mass graves where 450 people were buried, where over 100 Khmer Rouge soldiers were murdered and one where hundreds of women, children and infants were piled, some raped before their deaths.
The survivor stories from Pol Pot’s range on the audio guide were awful, years of fear, torture, long term psychological damage. One man battled all the way through work, famine and prison before finally reaching freedom in America. I thought nothing could be worse than Tuol Sleng but I was wrong. I had always assumed that the victims of the killing fields were shot, but bullets are expensive so with a generator providing light and propaganda songs blaring out to mask the screams people were knelt over the graves and hacked apart with hoes, machetes, hammers, in fact any tools that came to hand.
When it was over chemicals were poured over the bodies to suppress the smell and to finish off anybody unfortunate enough to still be alive and the grave was closed. The guide said that when the site was discovered a tree on site was covered in hair and skin from where infants had been killed by being swung against it.
The audio guide recreated the songs and the sound of the generator as we looked at cases of clothes and bones and the huge stupa, filled with skulls. The sounds brought to life the image of such horrific nights, chilling us to the bone. How could you even find people willing to kill in such a way?
We think of genocide as being history. Something committed at least fifty years ago by long dead dictators or at least by anomalies like Hitler and the Nazis. But the history in Cambodia is recent and raw and I can’t help but wonder why other countries didn’t do anything to stop what happened here. The scenes at the killing fields felt so real, so close to us in history and we were very quiet in the tuk tuk on the way home.
Emma Pocklington 