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January 24, 2006
This used to be a school
After having read David P. Chandler's Voices from S-21 while in Vietnam and Laos, I knew that I wanted to visit the notorious S-21 Prison in central Phnom Penh. Before having read Voices… my knowledge of Cambodia’s recent history was much weaker than I had realized. Now my understanding of what happened here in the ‘70s is another piece of the jigsaw puzzle we call modern South East Asian history.
The Tuol Svay Prey High School, later referred to as the S-21 prison under the Khmer Rouge, is now named the Tuol Sleng Museum. There are five main buildings at the former school site. The administration building in the center of the five structure E-shaped compound is used for the museum’s administrative purposes but the cells blocks and torture chambers of buildings A, B, C and D now host artifacts, picture galleries but most areas are as they were during the Khmer Rouge’s administration of the prison. The site is ringed by fences and barbed wire.
Building A is where many of the torture chambers were located. There are still some of the bed frames in several of the rooms. Building B is now mainly dedicated to photographs of the formerly imprisoned and later executed victims. Building C was full of cells for the prisoners. It stands out from the rest of the buildings because the upper floor walkways are enclosed in barbed wire and each of the former school rooms has been divvied up into cells with bricks on the ground floor, wood on the first floor, and nothing on the top floor. There are iron rings embedded into the floor that are all too real.
In the right side of building C, under the stair case, there was a bunch of graffiti by English language tourists. The scribbles were unanimous in their condemnation of what happened, but varied from the religious (“Jesus saves”) to the comparisons with recent events (“G-Bay”) to completely off kilt Michigan Militia-like ideological crap (“take away their guns” being the first step to such an atrocities). The only one that stands out in a positive aspect was “When this was a prison, nobody learned. When this was a school, nobody died.” Building D housed a photo exhibition of photographs and statements by former prisoners, guards and Khmer Rouge headmen—many of whom are still alive today. Pol Pot’s photograph had been heavily and repeatedly vandalized.
There were about two dozen westerners about, including a few Asian-Americans. The few that did speak spoke in hushed tones. No body laughed. Nobody smiled. Nobody made eye contact. It was eerie and I have not felt like that since my first visit to the Vietnam War memorial in Washington DC. I guess all such places, those memorializing the death of so people so recently like S-21, are like that.
Posted by stu at January 24, 2006 10:03 AM