Jen Vuk
The Age (Australia)
Don't make Pol Pot's grave an attraction, but remember his victims.
IT TOOK three decades of internal politics, and a tangle of red tape, but justice finally came to Cambodia at the end of March when 66-year-old Kaing Guek Eav faced a UN-backed court for the alleged atrocity he oversaw as chief of the Khmer Rouge's infamous S-21 torture camp.
Call it symmetry or coincidence, but on that same sweaty afternoon, newly arrived in Cambodia's seething capital, Phnom Penh, I found myself standing at the gates of S-21 (now known as Tuol Sleng Museum).
Entering what was once a suburban high school — before it fell to the Khmer Rouge and its murderous ideology — I couldn't shake off a growing unease. After all, here was the site where more than 15,000 men, women and children were detained and tortured, ending with their execution at nearby Choeung Ek (the Killing Fields) between 1975 and 1979.
What's more, unlike New York's Ground Zero, Bali's Sari Club and Port Arthur's Broad Arrow Cafe, Tuol Sleng is no spectre.
Standing tall and intact, furnished with instruments of torture, stark head shots of the dead, and dried blood still evident on the walls, the site is almost every bit as gruesome now as it was in early January 1979 when Vietnamese troops stormed in and drove out what was left of the imploding regime.
Today, Tuol Sleng, the Killing Fields and the Angkor Wat complex near Siam Reap complete Cambodia's trinity of premier "attractions", but it's the former that have become favourites on the dark tourism trail.
The term "dark tourism", coined by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley in their 2000 book, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster was too catchy by halves and had me bristling.
After all, it concerned deriving ghoulish pleasure from sites associated with death or suffering. Could it be true? Was I just another trauma tourist drawn to the sideshow of the macabre?
This tension between visitor and place is the subject of a 2009 collection of essays, Remembering Places of Pain and Shame — Dealing with Difficult Heritage, edited by Melbourne academics Professor William Logan and Dr Keir Reeves.
In it, Logan and Reeves pose the difficult question: Are there places whose history is so painful they shouldn't be preserved? Logan, a UNESCO professor of heritage and urbanism, argues that "relics of the perpetrators of pain and shame", such as Anlong Veng, the site of Pol Pot's grave in Cambodia, which has been the subject of an unofficial push to turn it into a heritage destination, "should be allowed to disappear".
While there is "no useful message" in keeping Pol Pot's name alive, he adds, "keeping places where people suffered; there is a message in that".
And therein lies the rub. What was the message among the haunting ephemera at Tuol Sleng?
Certainly, stare long enough at the photos and you'll start hearing voices; a compelling contrast to those of us looking on and rendered mute.
But not altogether silent, perhaps.
If I shut my eyes, I suddenly become open, attuned, to the spaces in between. The tragic, mournful vibrations of a humanity ill-equipped to deal with or understand the detours.
As academic, author (and my friend) Maria Tumarkin writes in her 2005 book Traumascapes: "Because trauma is contained not in an event as such but in the way this event is experienced, traumascapes become much more than physical settings of tragedies; they emerge as spaces where events are experienced and re-experienced across time."
In a paper last year (Dutiful Tourism: Encountering the Cambodian Genocide), Melbourne University researcher Rachel Hughes found that in place of "greater understanding", the majority of her interviewees expressed a "hope that their 'being there' was at least significant. In other words, the experience is no longer epistemological but testimonial; not 'I now know more' but 'I visited'."
It's with some relief I realise that I, too, am overwhelmed by what's before me. Pity, guilt and, yes, understanding make way for cold, naked gratitude — for a life light years from the aberration of Tuol Sleng and for the opportunity to bear witness to it.
Tumarkin would say this is a natural response to what was, after all, a nerve centre of terror.
Far more than the sum of its parts (walls, floors and ceilings, guide book entry), Tuol Sleng is a concrete incarnation of suffering; left as it is, in the here and now, for those of us divorced from its reality to brush against.
I later read that Kaing Guek Eav begged forgiveness under the spotlight of international interest and a Cambodian-dominated public gallery.
It's a mighty step for a country shackled to a past it would sooner forget, but can't tear down — a concept this accidental tourist was only starting to get her head around.
Jen Vuk is a Melbourne writer and editor.
IT TOOK three decades of internal politics, and a tangle of red tape, but justice finally came to Cambodia at the end of March when 66-year-old Kaing Guek Eav faced a UN-backed court for the alleged atrocity he oversaw as chief of the Khmer Rouge's infamous S-21 torture camp.
Call it symmetry or coincidence, but on that same sweaty afternoon, newly arrived in Cambodia's seething capital, Phnom Penh, I found myself standing at the gates of S-21 (now known as Tuol Sleng Museum).
Entering what was once a suburban high school — before it fell to the Khmer Rouge and its murderous ideology — I couldn't shake off a growing unease. After all, here was the site where more than 15,000 men, women and children were detained and tortured, ending with their execution at nearby Choeung Ek (the Killing Fields) between 1975 and 1979.
What's more, unlike New York's Ground Zero, Bali's Sari Club and Port Arthur's Broad Arrow Cafe, Tuol Sleng is no spectre.
Standing tall and intact, furnished with instruments of torture, stark head shots of the dead, and dried blood still evident on the walls, the site is almost every bit as gruesome now as it was in early January 1979 when Vietnamese troops stormed in and drove out what was left of the imploding regime.
Today, Tuol Sleng, the Killing Fields and the Angkor Wat complex near Siam Reap complete Cambodia's trinity of premier "attractions", but it's the former that have become favourites on the dark tourism trail.
The term "dark tourism", coined by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley in their 2000 book, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster was too catchy by halves and had me bristling.
After all, it concerned deriving ghoulish pleasure from sites associated with death or suffering. Could it be true? Was I just another trauma tourist drawn to the sideshow of the macabre?
This tension between visitor and place is the subject of a 2009 collection of essays, Remembering Places of Pain and Shame — Dealing with Difficult Heritage, edited by Melbourne academics Professor William Logan and Dr Keir Reeves.
In it, Logan and Reeves pose the difficult question: Are there places whose history is so painful they shouldn't be preserved? Logan, a UNESCO professor of heritage and urbanism, argues that "relics of the perpetrators of pain and shame", such as Anlong Veng, the site of Pol Pot's grave in Cambodia, which has been the subject of an unofficial push to turn it into a heritage destination, "should be allowed to disappear".
While there is "no useful message" in keeping Pol Pot's name alive, he adds, "keeping places where people suffered; there is a message in that".
And therein lies the rub. What was the message among the haunting ephemera at Tuol Sleng?
Certainly, stare long enough at the photos and you'll start hearing voices; a compelling contrast to those of us looking on and rendered mute.
But not altogether silent, perhaps.
If I shut my eyes, I suddenly become open, attuned, to the spaces in between. The tragic, mournful vibrations of a humanity ill-equipped to deal with or understand the detours.
As academic, author (and my friend) Maria Tumarkin writes in her 2005 book Traumascapes: "Because trauma is contained not in an event as such but in the way this event is experienced, traumascapes become much more than physical settings of tragedies; they emerge as spaces where events are experienced and re-experienced across time."
In a paper last year (Dutiful Tourism: Encountering the Cambodian Genocide), Melbourne University researcher Rachel Hughes found that in place of "greater understanding", the majority of her interviewees expressed a "hope that their 'being there' was at least significant. In other words, the experience is no longer epistemological but testimonial; not 'I now know more' but 'I visited'."
It's with some relief I realise that I, too, am overwhelmed by what's before me. Pity, guilt and, yes, understanding make way for cold, naked gratitude — for a life light years from the aberration of Tuol Sleng and for the opportunity to bear witness to it.
Tumarkin would say this is a natural response to what was, after all, a nerve centre of terror.
Far more than the sum of its parts (walls, floors and ceilings, guide book entry), Tuol Sleng is a concrete incarnation of suffering; left as it is, in the here and now, for those of us divorced from its reality to brush against.
I later read that Kaing Guek Eav begged forgiveness under the spotlight of international interest and a Cambodian-dominated public gallery.
It's a mighty step for a country shackled to a past it would sooner forget, but can't tear down — a concept this accidental tourist was only starting to get her head around.
Jen Vuk is a Melbourne writer and editor.
1 comment:
yes, absolutely true. anyone who had attended college can tell you the importance of learning from history, good or bad; it will no doubt benefit humanity and mankind, etc... god bless cambodia.
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