by Tara Winkler
After several hours, we reached Phnom Penh. The city hummed with the sounds of construction work and mad, cheerful, chaotic traffic. We soon had cars, trucks, motos, bicycles, dogs, cows, buses and tuktuks coming at us from all directions.
Cambodia’s tuktuks are a cute take on the auto rickshaw. Seen from a distance, they resemble tiny horse-drawn chariots, except with motos instead of horses.
We also saw a few cyclos, an earlier cousin of the tuktuk, careening through the traffic. The cyclo is basically what you get when a bicycle mates with a wheelchair. The chair sits over the front wheel, so the passengers can get up close and personal with the hair-raising Phnom Penh traffic.
But the family vehicle of choice in Cambodia is definitely the moto—that 125 cc motorbike/scooter hybrid that seems to be everywhere in South-East Asia. And I don’t say ‘family vehicle’ lightly. Whole families get around by moto, with babies, grannies and little kids wedged in a row between Mum and Dad.
The road rules in Cambodia seem to be:
1) It’s hot, so why walk when you can ride?
2) Don’t worry about rules, just drive very slowly and try not to crash into anything.
3) Beep your horn cheerfully at everyone so they know you’re coming.
As the sun sank that evening, we settled on the balcony of a beautiful French Colonial hotel looking out into the street and the river beyond—a vast body of water where the Mekong and Tonlé Sap come together.
The riverside is the centre of Phnom Penh’s colourful nightlife—everywhere we looked, we saw street vendors peddling noodles, car parts, Buddhist trinkets, balloons . . . Everyone seemed to be chatting, yelling, laughing and bargaining. They greeted and thanked each other with the traditional sampeah, a prayer-like gesture and head bow I’d seen performed throughout Thailand (and in the occasional yoga class).
The tuktuk drivers, leaning on their chariots and smoking with raffish, bad-boy charm, jumped to life whenever a tourist passed by with a cheerful: ‘Tuktuk, lady?’ Young women sold sugary treats from their street stalls to boisterous little kids who chased each other up and down the promenade, stopping now and then to hit up passing tourists for a dollar.
I was enthralled. Cambodia was wild and I liked it.
The next morning we set out in a convoy of tuktuks to visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
Travelling through the streets by tuktuk is crazy fun. It’s like a lazy version of motorcycling, with the wind in your hair and the roar of the engine (tuktuk roughly translates as ‘putt putt’), but with a roof over your head and a cushy bench seat to lean back into.
We threaded through the city centre with its bustling shops, massive hotels and French Colonial pubs, past the ubiquitous street markets and food stalls selling sugar cane and noodles and coconuts and fried tarantulas.
I was so entranced by the journey, I didn’t spare a thought for the day’s itinerary. The words ‘genocide museum’ didn’t sink in until we spilled out of the tuktuks. I had done a little bit of reading on Cambodia’s genocide when I booked the trip, but when we headed through a set of high concrete gates, I had no idea what I was in for.
The atmosphere inside was immediately sombre.
The museum is a former high school, and looked to me like a typical Aussie public school—if a little broken down. In the 1970s, the school was renamed ‘Security Office 21’ and then ‘Tuol Sleng Prison’ and became the main—and most notorious—office and torture facility for the Khmer Rouge.
It’s impossible to understand Cambodia today without understanding what happened there between 1975 and 1979.
The Cold War and the Vietnam War of 1962–1975 were in many ways a clash between western capitalism and eastern communism. Throughout the war, the popular Cambodian head of state and former monarch Prince Norodom Sihanouk tried desperately to hold onto power and keep Cambodia from being drawn into the conflict raging just over the border. There was a pervasive fear in Cambodia that, if drawn into the conflict, the country would lose its independence and disappear from the map altogether.
Sihanouk allowed North Vietnam to establish bases in eastern Cambodia. He also let China use routes through Cambodia to send military supplies to North Vietnam. The US and its allies (including Australia) responded by carpet-bombing vast tracts of eastern Cambodia.
History books call this the ‘secret bombing’—US president Richard Nixon authorised the operation without the knowledge or approval of the US Congress. For five years, they targeted the bases and supply routes and deliberately bombed civilians, to put further pressure on the Cambodian government.
By 1970, many of Sihanouk’s colleagues in Phnom Penh had lost faith in him and the decisions he was making. Many of the people who lived outside Phnom Penh were also unhappy with Sihanouk, the USA and, indeed, city people in general. They felt they’d been abandoned to suffer through the US-led bombings, which had created serious social upheaval. It’s not clear how many Cambodian civilians died in the carpet bombing. But estimates range from a few tens of thousands to over 600,000. Hundreds of thousands more were displaced, leading to famine and terrible suffering.
Sihanouk was deposed by the pro-western Cambodian general and prime minister Lon Nol, who was rumoured to have CIA backing. The self-proclaimed president of the Khmer Republic had his work cut out for him. From day one, his army was locked in conflict with the guerrilla forces of Cambodia’s communist Khmer Rouge. The tough, mostly rural-raised Khmer Rouge army was headed by a shadowy group of leaders, which included the French-educated Pol Pot. These leaders were huge admirers of communism—particularly Stalinist and Chinese Maoist communism—and dreamed of creating a proud new empire in Cambodia . . . a return to the glory days of Angkor Wat.
Before the bombings began, the Khmer Rouge had little support within Cambodia. But four years of carpet-bombing had created serious socio-political upheaval, and the Khmer Rouge’s popularity grew.
The Khmer Rouge’s vision of a proud and prosperous Khmer empire was not unappealing to some of the people. And sympathies for the Khmer Rouge were further swayed by patriotism when the deposed Prince Sihanouk and his wife joined the Khmer Rouge. Many people joined them, saying that they were ‘fighting for their king’.
So now there were two major political factions in Cambodia—one led by the pro-western Lon Nol in Phnom Penh, and the other led by the pro-communist Khmer Rouge army, which was aided and supported by China, North Vietnam and the communist guerrilla fighters in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong.
When hundreds of victorious Khmer Rouge revolutionaries marched into Phnom Penh in April 1975 to overthrow the Khmer Republic and take control, many people cheered. But only at first. Almost immediately, the Khmer Rouge forces set to work, emptying every school, hospital, workplace and home in the city at gunpoint. They marched the former inhabitants out into the countryside to work on collectivised farms. Anyone who was too weak or sick to work was killed, as were many who admitted to having worked for the defeated Khmer Republic.
Pol Pot’s vision of a self-sustaining agricultural utopia, ‘purified’ of the corrupt influence of the west, turned out to be a slave empire. The Khmer Rouge burned money and destroyed modern technology. They destroyed all prior tradition and culture in Cambodia, and reset the calendars to Year Zero.
By August 1975, the innocuous high school in Tuol Sleng was a house of horrors. At first, it was a prison and interrogation centre for members of the former Lon Nol regime. But soon Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as it was also known, was repurposed as a secret prison, where anyone who voiced opposition to the regime was sent and subjected to slavery, starvation, torture, and eventually death. Among those detained were politicians, academics, doctors, teachers, engineers, artists, students, foreigners and monks. Around two thirds of those killed at Tuol Sleng were Khmer Rouge cadres themselves, so obsessed were the Khmer Rouge with hunting out ‘the enemy within’. Over its four years of operation, Tuol Sleng saw an estimated 14,000 people pass through its gates. Only seven are k
nown to have survived.
Throughout their internment, these men, women and children were subjected to extreme torture—too appalling to detail here. Most people confessed to all kinds of nonsense to escape the torture, and then found themselves transported to the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek to be executed.
Tuol Sleng was one of a chain of 200 such centres across Cambodia where enemies of the Khmer Rouge were taken to be interrogated and killed.
The overall number of people who died during the reign of the Khmer Rouge is hard to pin down, as so many also died from slave labour, disease and starvation. The number tends to hover around 2.2 million, in a country that had, at the time, a population of roughly 7.3 million.
Tuol Sleng, the Phnom Penh high school turned torture prison, is now a monument to the madness of that time—a permanent reminder of just how far human beings can go.
To say that visiting Tuol Sleng was a sobering experience is putting it mildly. The twelve of us drifted through the buildings together, united in speechless horror. It’s impossible to walk through the converted classrooms with their empty metal torture beds and bloodstained floors without imagining the terror that the inmates must have felt at the time.
Then we came upon a display of black-and-white photographs of the prisoners who passed through the gates. That was my undoing. The mug shots of thousands of prisoners, with their haunting stares, seemed horribly familiar. The Khmer Rouge’s meticulous record-keeping reminded me of the extensive documentation procedures of the Nazis. It took me back to those Thursday afternoons when I’d pull out Nagy’s old shoebox of photos of her friends and family who had died in the Holocaust and make her tell me the story behind each of them. In my mind, I could almost smell the putrid stench of the overcrowded train as Nagy, her Mum and her little sister Eve were shunted towards Auschwitz . . .
I realised with a shock that the tour had moved on without me and I was standing alone in front of the photos. I suddenly felt a bit sick. I found the first exit and stood dully in the shade by the side of the building. I didn’t want to see any more.
I’ve been back to Tuol Sleng once since that first trip. On neither occasion did I make it through the whole museum.
In a far more subdued mood, we travelled on from the prison into the countryside outside town, to the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek.
I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the next stop. I felt I’d already seen enough. But I wanted to stick with the group, so I gritted my teeth and prepared for the worst.
But, to my surprise, the grounds at Choeung Ek at first seemed nowhere near as confronting as I’d feared. It was a peaceful grassy spot in the countryside. The grass was green and covered by shady trees. The bucolic air began to dissipate, however, when we came upon the main focus of the memorial: a large mausoleum filled with thousands of excavated skulls from the surrounding mass graves.
Grim reality set in when we began the tour through the grounds behind the memorial. ‘Killing Fields’ is an appropriate label for this place. The remnants of mass graves formed deep sunken depressions in the earth across the fields, with narrow dirt paths weaving around them. Of the 129 mass graves, only 86 had been exhumed. Signs beside the graves matter-of-factly proclaimed the ghastly truth about what lay below.
MASS GRAVE OF 450 VICTIMS.
MASS GRAVE OF MORE THAN 100 VICTIMS, CHILDREN AND WOMEN, WHOSE MAJORITY WERE NAKED.
MASS GRAVE OF 166 VICTIMS WITHOUT HEADS.
One chilling sign read: KILLING TREE AGAINST WHICH EXECUTIONERS BEAT CHILDREN.
As the Khmer Rouge gained power and reach across Cambodia, hundreds of thousands of people from all over Cambodia were taken out to killing fields around the country and executed. At first, these were people suspected of colluding with the west and being ‘against’ the new communist regime. So city dwellers, the middle-class and educated people were immediately suspect. But as the Khmer Rouge’s utopian vision failed and food became scarce, practically anyone could find themselves being accused of anything and sent to the killing fields. Whole families, including children, were killed so they couldn’t grow up to spread their middle-class poison, or seek revenge for the deaths of their fathers . . . or for no clear reason at all.
On 25 December 1978, Cambodia’s traditional enemy, the Vietnamese, invaded Cambodia supported by hundreds of Khmer Rouge defectors and drove the Khmer Rouge from power. In 1979, Vietnam put a puppet government in place and though the Cambodians initially saw them as liberators, their views changed when the oppressive nature of the occupation unfolded. It is said that the Vietnamese denied the Cambodians food sent by aid organisations and instead used it to feed their own troops. This contributed to a widespread famine in Cambodia, which led to approximately 650,000 deaths in the year following the fall of the Khmer Rouge.
It then took years before the rest of the world offered a helping hand, and many more before the country began to recover.
Even today, Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in Asia, and the poorest citizens still go hungry.
Our Khmer tour guide said: ‘After rainy season we see many more bone come out. Look, you will see so much bone in the ground. We never can pick it all up!’
We all looked down. Until that moment, none of us had noticed all the human bones scattered through the dirt beneath our feet. My nausea returned—I told myself the heat was getting to me. I went and sat by the gate and waited for the rest of the tour to finish.
While we should all be made aware of the horrors of war and take some strong lessons from it, the experience at both the Tuol Sleng Museum and Killing Fields had been extremely intense and felt too close to home for me. I could only stomach so much at one time. Especially when I considered that the holocaust that had wiped out nearly a quarter of the population had happened only three decades earlier. In sociological terms, it’s barely the blink of an eye.
That visit to Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields changed something inside me quite profoundly. On the tuktuk ride home, looking at the early evening activity on the streets, I couldn’t see any sign of the bitterness or darkness I might have expected from those who had undergone such horrific trauma so recently. All I noticed was the kindness and cheerfulness of the Khmer people around me, and I felt an enormous respect and admiration for them. With their warmth and contagious smiles, they seemed to embody the spirit of Nagy.
The next day, we travelled for seven hours to Siem Reap, home to the famous Angkor Wat temples. I was still recovering from the awful things we’d seen the day before. Everywhere I looked, I couldn’t help imagining the horrors of the bombings and the Khmer Rouge years. The crumbling huts, the roaming gangs of kids, the desolate rice fields . . . these sights outside the window of the bus didn’t seem to be just about poverty now—they seemed post-apocalyptic.
The following morning I overslept and stumbled, blinking and fuzzy-headed, out of my hotel room. I met Alicia, in a similar state, in the hallway.
‘Where is everyone?’ Alicia croaked.
I looked at my watch. It was 9.30 am. ‘I think we’ve missed the six o’clock bus to Angkor Wat,’ I said.
The only thing to do was catch a tuktuk out to Angkor Wat on our own.
As it turned out, our laziness was rewarded. Even though we had to put up with the midday heat, and missed some of the temples on our itinerary, we had avoided the hordes of other tourists who flock to the temples in the cooler hours of the day. We had the temples virtually all to ourselves!
Angkor Wat is a source of great pride for the Khmer people. A thousand years ago, it was a gigantic, thriving city linked with canals—the Venice of South-East Asia. Today only the incredible stone temples that once studded the city remain. We wandered through Ta Prohm, a temple that has largely been reclaimed by the jungle, and marvelled at the enormous, muscular tree roots that snake their way through the exquisitely carved stone walls.
There were no walkways or barricades in 2005, so we explored the enchanting temple like a pair of shorter, swea
tier Lara Crofts. We attempted to parkour our way over the ancient rubble and through the temple walls until the heat caught up with us and we decided we missed our friends—and air-conditioning! There is no doubt whatsoever that Angkor Wat has earned its place as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It is truly, magnificently awe-inspiring.
That afternoon we drove out of Siem Reap to visit a small NGO called the Akira (or Aki Ra) Landmine Museum. The museum, established by Akira, an ex-child soldier, was really just a wooden shack, displaying literally thousands of deactivated landmines and unexploded ordnances (UXOs). Most of the bombs had the letters USA printed on them.
A red-headed English volunteer named Ethan gave us a very casual tour through the shack. He told us the names of all the different types of landmines and explained their different purposes. It was a little unsettling how haphazardly the landmines had been arranged for display. Ethan assured us they were all safe and, to demonstrate, he picked up three anti-personnel mines and juggled them for about three seconds before reassuringly dropping the lot. One rolled and bumped into my foot. I bent to pick it up but a young boy on crutches appeared out of nowhere and snatched it up.
‘Hey! Thanks!’ I said, impressed by his dexterity. Then I added, in slow, unintentionally patronising English: ‘My name is Tara. What is your name?’
The boy flashed me a confident smile and replied in fast, fluent English: ‘You’re welcome! My name is Vanna.’ He was an athletically built boy with a gentle face, who looked about fourteen years old.
‘Vanna, why don’t you tell everyone about yourself and the other kids who live here at the museum?’ Ethan suggested.
‘Me and twenty more girls and boys are living here with Akira,’ the boy said, beaming. ‘Akira, he is like our father. He care for us and we can study here and have good life. All the girls and boys here, they are like my brother and sister. They also have problem with the mine.’