From Globe and Mail Archives (Toronto, Canada)
May 18, 1983
CHOEUNG EK, Cambodia — About 15 hot and bumpy kilometres southwest of Phnom Penh, the Cambodian Government is carefully tending a ghoulish testament to torture, execution and mass burial.
This is where the victims of the Pol Pot regime which ruled Cambodia for four years were buried, after being held and tortured in a converted Phnom Penh high school.
Seeing one skull, and one set of limbs, is bad enough. Seeing thousands stacked in layers in a huge outdoor display stall, beside grave sites still littered with human remains, is gut-wrenching.
That is precisely the reaction the Heng Samrin Government and its Vietnamese backers, who overthrew Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge in 1979, want to induce.
The museum that Choeung Ek has become is designed not only to remind the world of the atrocities, in the way of former Nazi concentration camps in Europe, but also to help legitimize Cambodia's continuing civilian and military dependence on Vietnam.
Tens of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers are stationed in Cambodia, many along the western border with Thailand where a guerrilla coalition including the Khmer Rouge is fighting to oust the occupiers.
Despite the staged withdrawal of several thousand troops this month, tens of thousands remain - ostensibly to guard against the return of Pol Pot, who is denounced at every opportunity by the Government as a genocidal scourge unleashed with the help of Chinese expansionists.
Pol Pot's brutal legacy was a recurring theme in a recent two-day visit to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, organized by Vietnam to mark the troop pullback. Vietnam says that by the end of this month more than 10,000 of its soldiers will have left. Cambodia says a withdrawal is possible because the country is more stable.
Traditionally Vietnam and Cambodia were antagonists, but slogans like “Long live the militant solidarity between Kampuchea (Cambodia) and Vietnam” abound in Phnom Penh. “The Kampuchean-Vietnamese bond is an exceptional weapon,” Cambodian Foreign Minister Hun Sen writes in a propaganda booklet, “and it is the only one which allows us to live, and in the future to live in independence, peace and happiness.” The number of Cambodians bludgeoned, worked to death or starved in forced transfers to the countryside during Pol Pot's rule is given by Cambodian officials as three million, of a total population of seven to eight million.
This is impossible to verify, and sorting out direct slaughter from indirect killing brought on by forced marches and labour is difficult. But Choeung Ek has 129 mass graves, and the 86 that have been opened yielded 8,985 skulls.
Officials say each of Cambodia's provinces has three or four mass grave sites.
The chief monument to the barbarity of the Khmer Rouge is the former Tuol Svay Prey secondary school, which was a political prison, torture chamber and execution site. It too is now a museum.
Classrooms on the first and second floors were used for individual interrogation and confinement, those on the third for mass detention. Dried blood, crude iron manacles and a single steel mat remain in each of the concrete-floored interrogation rooms. A plastic can and a rusting ammunition box served to collect urine and feces.
One room contains a topographical map of Cambodia, made of human skulls. Books kept by the torturers document the victims in alphabetical order. Filing cabinets bulge with photographs of the dead. Pictures of emaciated people, some with their throats slit, line many of the walls.
The instruments of torture are various: vises, steel pincers, whips; tongs and pliers for pulling out fingernails. The gallows were designed to hang prisoners by their feet, hands tied behind their backs and heads submerged in water troughs.
Tiny brick cubicles served as cells for the victims, who were chained to the floor. Some died during their confinement and torture, but most were eventually taken alive to Choeung Ek, where they were told to kneel at the edge of mass graves and then clubbed to death.
According to graphs depicting the choking of life and culture under Pol Pot, between 1974 and 1978 the number of primary school teachers in Cambodia was cut from nearly 12,000 to about 8,000; the number of journalists from 300 to five; the number of functioning Buddhist pagodas from 2,800 to none.
Of more than 20,000 Cambodians who entered the gates of Tuol Svay Prey, only a handful survived. One of these was museum director Ing Pech, 56, imprisoned for 14 1/2 months after being accused of working for the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency.
He shows a visitor his hands, where the nails have been ripped out, and says he lost six children while the Khmer Rouge were in power.
Why does he work at the museum, when it can only prolong the memory? “To tell people what it was like. If there were no survivors, no one to tell the story, then what?”
This is where the victims of the Pol Pot regime which ruled Cambodia for four years were buried, after being held and tortured in a converted Phnom Penh high school.
Seeing one skull, and one set of limbs, is bad enough. Seeing thousands stacked in layers in a huge outdoor display stall, beside grave sites still littered with human remains, is gut-wrenching.
That is precisely the reaction the Heng Samrin Government and its Vietnamese backers, who overthrew Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge in 1979, want to induce.
The museum that Choeung Ek has become is designed not only to remind the world of the atrocities, in the way of former Nazi concentration camps in Europe, but also to help legitimize Cambodia's continuing civilian and military dependence on Vietnam.
Tens of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers are stationed in Cambodia, many along the western border with Thailand where a guerrilla coalition including the Khmer Rouge is fighting to oust the occupiers.
Despite the staged withdrawal of several thousand troops this month, tens of thousands remain - ostensibly to guard against the return of Pol Pot, who is denounced at every opportunity by the Government as a genocidal scourge unleashed with the help of Chinese expansionists.
Pol Pot's brutal legacy was a recurring theme in a recent two-day visit to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, organized by Vietnam to mark the troop pullback. Vietnam says that by the end of this month more than 10,000 of its soldiers will have left. Cambodia says a withdrawal is possible because the country is more stable.
Traditionally Vietnam and Cambodia were antagonists, but slogans like “Long live the militant solidarity between Kampuchea (Cambodia) and Vietnam” abound in Phnom Penh. “The Kampuchean-Vietnamese bond is an exceptional weapon,” Cambodian Foreign Minister Hun Sen writes in a propaganda booklet, “and it is the only one which allows us to live, and in the future to live in independence, peace and happiness.” The number of Cambodians bludgeoned, worked to death or starved in forced transfers to the countryside during Pol Pot's rule is given by Cambodian officials as three million, of a total population of seven to eight million.
This is impossible to verify, and sorting out direct slaughter from indirect killing brought on by forced marches and labour is difficult. But Choeung Ek has 129 mass graves, and the 86 that have been opened yielded 8,985 skulls.
Officials say each of Cambodia's provinces has three or four mass grave sites.
The chief monument to the barbarity of the Khmer Rouge is the former Tuol Svay Prey secondary school, which was a political prison, torture chamber and execution site. It too is now a museum.
Classrooms on the first and second floors were used for individual interrogation and confinement, those on the third for mass detention. Dried blood, crude iron manacles and a single steel mat remain in each of the concrete-floored interrogation rooms. A plastic can and a rusting ammunition box served to collect urine and feces.
One room contains a topographical map of Cambodia, made of human skulls. Books kept by the torturers document the victims in alphabetical order. Filing cabinets bulge with photographs of the dead. Pictures of emaciated people, some with their throats slit, line many of the walls.
The instruments of torture are various: vises, steel pincers, whips; tongs and pliers for pulling out fingernails. The gallows were designed to hang prisoners by their feet, hands tied behind their backs and heads submerged in water troughs.
Tiny brick cubicles served as cells for the victims, who were chained to the floor. Some died during their confinement and torture, but most were eventually taken alive to Choeung Ek, where they were told to kneel at the edge of mass graves and then clubbed to death.
According to graphs depicting the choking of life and culture under Pol Pot, between 1974 and 1978 the number of primary school teachers in Cambodia was cut from nearly 12,000 to about 8,000; the number of journalists from 300 to five; the number of functioning Buddhist pagodas from 2,800 to none.
Of more than 20,000 Cambodians who entered the gates of Tuol Svay Prey, only a handful survived. One of these was museum director Ing Pech, 56, imprisoned for 14 1/2 months after being accused of working for the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency.
He shows a visitor his hands, where the nails have been ripped out, and says he lost six children while the Khmer Rouge were in power.
Why does he work at the museum, when it can only prolong the memory? “To tell people what it was like. If there were no survivors, no one to tell the story, then what?”
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