Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek, Cambodia: Asia's Heart Of Darkness

Choeung Ek: Magic tree (All photos: Sean Paul Kelley)
Choeung Ek: Shallow graves
Tuol Sleng: Nameless victim
Tuol Sleng: Nameless mother and infant

11/26/2008
The Young Turks (California, USA)

Today, with much reluctance, I visited the killing fields of Cambodia and the Tuol Sleng prison in downtown Phnom Penh. What I found there was a gruesome reminder that we are only one war, one catastrophe, one single mistake away from the cruelties than man inflicts upon his fellows. Today was a tour of the darkness reaching out for the darkness.

A note of caution, some of the photos linked to in this essay are not easy to look at. Click at your own risk.

I began my day in an internet cafe right off the main boulevard here in Phnom Penh. I spent the morning there wasting time, not wanting to visit the places I came here to see. Actually, seeing is an incorrect word, it was more of a witnessing. I'd had no plans to stop here in the capital and visit the sites of Cambodia's haunting past. I'd intended to move straight on to Siem Reap and see Angkor Wat. But Cenk convinced me otherwise and I am glad he did. When I finally plucked up enough momentum to go the day started out nicely enough, as I drove through downtown towards the outskirts. The poverty here is intense, as urban poverty always is. And the difference between wealthy and poor is a yawning chasm, shanties are perched over the river and lake but the wealthy hide behind huge barricades and live in palatial homes that would make any 'gated community' back home blush.

Soon we were out in the countryside. Flat, broken, fallow in many places, but ripe with rice in others all that greeted me was the dust in my eyes, screeching tires and horns and school children riding their bikes home.

We turned the corner past a huge cement plant down a gravel lane. There a large, modern stupa rose up off the Mekong plain. But this was no ordinary stupa, no place of Buddhist worship, but something far more grim and solemn.

The stupa is a monument raised up in honor of those who died in the surrounding 'killing fields.' It's about four stories tall and is literally full of glass cases filled with human skulls. These are real skulls, the last remains of the victims of Pol Pot's regime.

Lizards scurry across the dusty paths, a cool breeze ripples through the trees, a school playground filled with the noises of happy children surround me. But none of it drowns out the roaring echo of suffering emiting from this place. It is immense and total in its enormity.

The site occupies about 15 acres of land and is pockmarked with shallow crater-like holes, which once held the remains of the dead. There is a tree, marked by a sign, where children were murdered, and another where a loudspeaker hung, better to drown out the moans of the dying. A chemical plant once stood on the grounds, better to sanitize the inevitable illnesses that breed in such horrible places. In one spot is a glass full of human teeth, all that remains of several hundred victims, all women and children found naked.

I'm not sure what I found more disturbing, the sense of loss the place conjured up or the poor children just outside the grounds, begging for a dollar in exchange for a photo.

* * * *

After Choeung Ek I traveled back into town to the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Here is where the many of the victims found in the shallow graves of Choeung Ek were 'processed.' Tuol Sleng used to be a school, and I try to imagine the carefree voices of children in the front yard of the school, but I cannot. It is too grave, too solemn a place. Too haunted. The 'processing rooms' are awful. Many remain in the same condition they were in at the fall of the regime. A lone, metal bed standing in the middle of the room, the rules of torture spelled out clearly. All that is missing are the electrical wires attached to the bed for 'shock therapy.'

There are many photos of the victims here. Some are clearly terrified, aware of the fate that awaits them. Others are children, old women, young men and boys, all gone. Nothing is left but a echo of their life ricocheting off the walls filled with the grainy black and white photos of the dead.

Outside in the yard is a gallows--a gruesome reminder of what torture really is, not to mention a painting of a man being waterboarded.

Is there a lesson here? I don't know. How did it happen? Why? What was this young man's crime? Or this woman's? All I can say is that I left here grateful for the luck of my birth and continuing gratitude for each breath I take, as so many had both stolen from them far too soon.