by Jose Luis Clemente
Part 1: I am camera
Standing a few meters outside the high gray walls that surround and partially conceal the five building complex, it is difficult to suppose that it is anything other than what it actually once was – a characterless, unremarkable high school in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. But as you walk inside the sun-cursed compound, you notice crazy Alice in Wonderland objects that wallop the familiar shapes, forms and hues of sanity clean out of your mind. Rusty iron bars frame each and every window….twisted contraptions to inflict indescribable pain litter the yard…… jagged razor wire strung everywhere so that it chokes and dims the sun.
“Where am I?” you wonder.
And very slowly, it sinks in that you are in S 21, the infamous prison and interrogation center of the Khmer Rouge where 20,000 people were tortured, sliced and exterminated in a swill of screwball communist genocide.
You absentmindedly follow the tourist trail and enter a building where all incoming prisoners were photographed and “required” to give detailed autobiographies. Pack rats that they were, the admin-zombies kept extensive records of everything so thanks to their diligence, you come to a row of huge rooms lined from floor to ceiling with black and white photographs of victims of this ghastly porno.
Stunned incredulous
There is no escape from noticing that the Cambodians look like Filipinos and that trebles the horror and makes it more real and personal. You try your best not to take in the 5,000 black and white mug shots of 5,000 ex-human beings now reduced to ghost images frozen in picture frames. Why it’s almost like looking at your dead parents, uncles and grandparents!
So you steel your heart and imagine you are a camera that simply looks and records data. If in an unguarded moment you unwittingly see the victims, you can actually taste the unbearable despair with your eyes and you automatically protect yourself by switching off and rambling along minus any thought or sentiment.
From these rooms the prisoners were taken to crudely built cells so small that you could hardly twist your torso to pop the nagging crick in your back. Here in these dark shoeboxes, prisoners were shackled to the walls or the cold concrete floor and instructed not to make the slightest sound. In the larger cells found on the ground floor of the buildings, they were collectively shackled like matchsticks to long pieces of iron bars in alternating head to foot manner. In that state they were kept – bound, immobilized, silenced – waiting for their imminent doom.
With Maguid, a fellow traveler and friend
Within two or three days upon check-in at S21, prisoners were taken for “interrogation” which is the military-speak for foul torture that lasts until the captors get what they want or the prisoners die. You enter the interrogation rooms and despite bracing yourself for the worst, you involuntarily grasp at the machines they used to make prisoners confess to whatever heinous war or sex crimes they were charged with by their captors.
“Are we capable of such evil?” you wonder. The instruments of torture whisper back the retort “of course you are, of course you are.”
Waterboarding Devices
Low tech toys for Sadists
The vibes haunting the rooms impart despicable tales of how thousands of human beings were beaten, suffocated, raped, shocked, flaggelated, waterboarded, mangled, burned and hanged till they were stripped empty of their humanity and longed for death. The heaviness of the memories hang profoundly in the air and it soaks your skin shiny wet so as to soil your clothes.
Although many died while being interrogated, the out-and-out killing of prisoners was officially discouraged. What the Khmer Rouge really wanted were confessions to war crimes and lists of conspirators and traitors plotting or working against the regime.
Through torture, lists of traitors who were the prisoners’ relatives, friends, colleagues, or acquaintances were extracted, formed, shaped and mass produced with frightening competence and organization. Those in the manufactured lists were in turn arrested and tortured till they confessed and produced a further list of traitors. And on and on it went.
It’s an ever-escalating, self-fulfilling, self-nurturing swirling hurricane of sadism and violence that gobbled up and annihilated everything in the event horizon.
As you stumble around this Museum of Horrors, you feel the life squeezed out of you and you are unable to breathe from the immensity and weight of the discarded lives. You look around and notice that other tourists are equally stunned stupid as if they too had been gassed and pacified by policemen who are maestros in the art of crowd control. Everyone is in a daze and is fumbling for a coherent, commonsensical thing to say in the face of the mind-boggling madness. But words fail all of you and the only eloquence that prevails is the articulacy of silence.
And then you come to a room full of skulls.
That’s it, you have seen enough! Your brain bubbles over like instant noodle soup left too long in a microwave oven so you leave the room in a puff and greedily gulp down fresh air outside to compose yourself. You sit by the curb, cough to clear your head and desperately try to get a grip.
Part 2: I am witness
I am here in Phnom Penh to attend an Interfaith Conference that brings together “engaged practitioners and researchers who have an active interest in the dynamics of religion and international development.” The gathering is led by Georgetown University and it intends to “take stock of the ongoing work by different faith-inspired organizations and the policy implications from their interactions with development organizations.”
When the Conference finished, we had a free afternoon to explore the city so we quickly grabbed our cameras, shoved a fistful of American dollars in our pockets, hailed a tuk-tuk and made short work of the tourist spots around agreeable Phnom Penh.
S21 was one of the items in our mini-bucket list.
In a way, I am glad I visited this Genocide Museum because a brush with evil, no matter how slight and minor, compels us to come to terms with it, to deal with it lest it drives us to utter helplessness and despair. Difficult as this process may be, it can be a refreshing relief from our normal “long hair, don’t care” attitude to tell you the truth!
The run into with S21 brings to mind something I read ages ago – sorry the author and the name of the book elude me – that talks about the 3 forms of human presence in a world marked by evil: victims, tormentors and witnesses. Allow me to convey these forms according to the S21 context.
Victims
In the beginning, most of the victims were soldiers and government officials from the Lon Nol regime which the Khmer Rouge overthrew. Later on they included doctors, professionals, students and monks – the so called “new people” who were the embodiment of capitalism and the enemy of agrarian communism that the Khmer Rouge was trying to establish. Finally, the communist party’s paranoia turned cancerous and it went after its own members in bloody purges that decimated the Party.
Tormentors
The entity responsible for creating and orchestrating the genocide is the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the political movement behind the Khmer Rouge. It is made up of a motley crew of half-baked, ignorant, communist fanatics headed by Nuon Chea or “Brother Number Two,” and Saloth Sar or Pol Pot who served as chairman of the party and supreme leader of the Khmer Rouge.
Directly responsible for guarding, interrogating and killing the prisoners in S21, however, were the 300 armed guards and interrogators of the facility. When asked later after the liberation why they followed the unspeakable orders of their superiors, they replied that they had no choice. If they shilly-shallied or refused, they would have been arrested, tortured and killed they said. So they committed crimes against humanity because that was the price of the ticket to stay alive. In a sense, they claimed, they too were victims of the regime as much as the 20,000 prisoners they actually tortured and slaughtered.
Witnesses
To keep the facility humming, S21 employed a staff of 1,400 workers to grow food and cook for the prison, to transcribe tape-recorded confessions, to maintain records, to take photos of prisoners and so on.
These employees clearly saw the inner workings of the facility. They were witnesses who could have either stood up to ruthless power or remained compliant by the shadowy sidelines. Like the facility-employed tormentors, they too were scared for their lives and so they chose not to resist. In the end, because the madness went almost unopposed, it swelled and devoured 1.5 million of their fellow Cambodian citizens before it finally blew away.
About 500 tourists a day visit S21 and I was one of them. We are witnesses too. Thanks to the Genocide Museum, we have as well come face to face with genocide and sniffed its fetid breath. That hard line experience obliges us to respond. We must boldly expose and denounce the bankrupt ideology and political circumstance that gave rise to this madness so that this nasty plague never comes to visit humanity again.
We are all Witnesses
Of course, it is much easier for us now to say “never again” because there is no piss-pot dictator who will slit our throats when we do. But if we were under such a regime of terror, will we be more courageous than the S21 employees I wonder? Will we stand up to pure wickedness even if it means our certain prolonged and painful deaths?
I honestly don’t know. But I pray we will.
Victim, tormentor, witness – the three forms of human presence that represent the possibilities open to us. In a world filled with the manifestations of evil, which form of human presence will prevail?
The answer to that is, of course, up to us.
Let us, therefore, take into serious account that when the day arrives when evil once again rules supreme and we have to choose which human presence to offer as response, on our decision hangs the curse or the salvation of the world entire.
Scratched on the walls by a tourist who could not take it anymore "Nunca Mas"
