A Terrible Place

A few years ago I spent several days in Cambodia. At that time Phnom Penh, the capital city had only been open to the public for a year. The entire city had been emptied by the Khmer Rouge in 1975. In the year before I arrived the city's population had gone from a few thousand to a million people. In many areas you could see that the city had been taken over by the jungle. Squatters filled formerly private homes. People with devastating injuries were everywhere. There is no one - no one - in that country that has not lost friends and family to the civil wars. Every one has been in the labor camps or the refugee camps. It is a sad place. But it is also hopeful. The tourist trade is bringing much needed capital to the country and the government is making a determined effort to provide the kind of stability necessary to provide for long term investment.

But Phnom Penh was not entirely empty during the Khmer Rouge insanity. A high school - three separate two story buildings - in Phnom Penh was used as a prison and interrogation center where some of the most unspeakable atrocity's of the regime took place. This was the notorious S-21. Now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

A sad place. The interrogation rooms were so stained with blood it still shows 20 years later. There is a wall sized map of cambodia made of human skulls. The cells in which the prisoners were kept were so tiny I could barely squeeze through the doorway, the space was not long enough for me to lay down in and two seated people would have been quite crowded. Sometimes four people were kept in these cells.

By chance tonight I ran across a Wikipedia entry for the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Its story is not so well known as some other torture camps. It's worth a virtural visit.

Prisoners at S-21 were required to conform to 10 rules which are posted in the Museum. The translation from Khmer to English could be better but these rules are:

1. You must answer accordingly to my questions. Don’t turn them away.

2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.

3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.

4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.

5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.

6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.

7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.

8. Don’t make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.

9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.

10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

We need more people to reflect on the horrors of S-21 and similar facilities. Particularly, the ones being run by the CIA and by governments which accept the "extraordinary rendition" of US suspects for the purpose of torture.

Five years ago I would have said that the idea that the US could actually send people to be tortured in such facilities was the product of the idle schizophrenia of conspiracy theorists. Today, not only am I ashamed to see it on the front pages of our newspapers, but I am frightened by the people who believe such actions are supportable.