**Warning: we went to learn about the genocide today. I'm not going to leave anything out so you can really hear in detail what happened to these people, but there's some sick stuff in here. Just wanted to warn you....
We woke up late morning with the Canadian girls and went to hire a tuk-tuk for the day to take us to the main sites of PP; Royal Palace, the Genocide Museum, and the Killing Fields. So, a tuk-tuk is a motorbike that had a trailer hitches to it where we sit in little seats, versus a rickshaw which is a guy biking a trailer where we sit in the front. So what happens is we walk outside our hotel and immediately there are tuk-tuks asking us where we want to go, usually yelling "tuk tuk lady?" In PP, they said lady or sister. We previously decided on a price among ourselves and pretty much tell the tuk tuk driver what we want, he laughs and says no, its too far, then we walk away, and he comes yelling after us OK OK! Works like a charm, every time. So we got a tuk-tuk all day for $12 = $3pp. Awesome.
Our first stop was the Royal Palace. Cambodia's official title is The Kingdom of Cambodia, and yes there is a king. I went inside with one girl while the other two went to get tickets for our cooking class the following day, as they had been to Bangkok (I haven't) and said nothing in SE Asia beats that huge palace. So like many important buildings in SE Asia, you have to be properly dressed, meaning legs covered to knees and no shoulders. At EVERY place I have been, if you aren't properly dressed, since its hot and everyone who comes to see are tourists, there is a bin of random sarongs or scarves to wrap yourself in so you can go in. Not here. There was a sign saying you CANT use a scarf/sarong, which is just weird. SO I had on shorts and the other girls had a sleeveless shirt. They didn't have a bin and you had to buy these ugly white shirts to go in. Not worth our money, as the place was pretty overpriced anyway. SO I snuck my camera through some gates and snapped some pictures anyway.
History time:
In the middle of the 20th century, Cambodia was in a civil war. There was the "bad guys" and the Khmer Rouge (KR for ease of typing). They were political parties battling it out for control of the kingdom. It coincided with the Vietnam War. Days after the fall of Saigon (Vietnam War, when the North took over the main city in the South), PP fell to the KR. It was called "Liberation Day", April 17th, 1975. The people thought that the KR were the good guys, communists, and people kind of celebrated, still not knowing what to think. Within days of the liberation, PP turned into a ghost town. Pol Pot, the leader of the KR, also called Brother No. 1 (which confused many locals because they thought there was someone above Pol Pot, who was the leader, not just a brother, and Pol Pot just let them think that) he had some twisted ideas. He wanted to create a country that went back in time, back when it was just farmers. To him, this meant killing all of the intellectuals and forcing people to become farmers.
The city became a ghost town because he forced the people out to work in villages and become farmers. Obviously, you can tell this effected more people than some, as many farmers out in the borders continued their work, just with worse conditions. The killing of intellectuals wasn't known, just that there would be men coming in the middle of the night to take away a member of the family. Then, the whole family would disappear. The farmers were forced to work under terrible conditions with little food, resulting in the death from starvation of 1.5 million people. This continued from 1975-1979 when the Vietnamese finally intervened, stopping the genocide that took place, which I will explain in a minute. The KR, being a political party, still exists today. The leadership claims to not have known about the harsh conditions and blames it on the lower members of the party. More on this later.
Tuol Slung Genocide Museum (also called S21)
This museum is actually the place of the largest prison ran by the KR, located in the heart of PP. As schools, factories, and all other stores in the city was abandoned, the KR took over this high school, S21, and turned in into a torture camp for the intellectuals of Cambodia. When the KR decided they found an intellectual, or someome they didn't like, trying to oppose them, they arrested that person, claiming them to be either CIA or KGB. They tortured the prisoner until they confessed to flase allegations and gave up the names of their family members. Then they and their whole entire family (children, cousins, aunts, parents) would be taken to a killing field (10's of them throughout the country) and they would be killed. In 1979, when the world got its first glimpse at what was happening here, they found 14 (or 16) bodies at S21. They had built a grave site at the entrance of the museum. The school consisted of 4 main buildings, three stories each, making two court yards. Three were used to imprisonment. There were large rooms with metal bed frames and shackles with large dark blood stains under the beds. In the rooms they actually found tortured and murdered victims, they took a photo of the gruesome scene and hung it on the wall for us to see when we entered. Every single room had a large blood stained floor directly under the bed. Each building had a different type of cell, many consisting of pantry-sized rooms made from concrete where prisoners were shackled to the floor and fed almost nothing out of dog bowls.
They found all the torture equipment still here. Water boarding was common. They turned monkey bars from the school into a device where they tired a victim upside down until unconsciousness then was dunked into a pot of water. And continued. They didn't do this to women. Instead, they cut off their nipples and mad scorpions and bugs bite the raw flesh. They were fed almost nothing. They were not allowed to speak or do anything. All of the buildings had a wall of barbed wire completely enclosing it, to keep the prisoners from jumping off and committing suicide. They photographed and height each prisoner and they left behind every record. There were rooms and rooms set up with the photos of the people who were imprisoned here, who all but 7 died. There were only SEVEN survivors ever found , which happened when they were let go near the Vietnam border in 1979.
In the rooms, there were artist depictions of the stories that were documented about this place. Many of the workers who worked in the prison were forced to work there out of fear for their lives as well. There were so many documents about this place on display so they could be read.
The most interesting part was a few rooms dedication to the current court trials about the 5 heads of the KR. I wasn't completely clear about this part, but Pol Pot, his 4 ring leaders (2 men and a COUPLE, yes a women did this too)., and Duch, the nickname of the man who ran S21, plus many others were arrested. For some reason, after they were given a death sentence, they were released by the King of Cambodia, I think on some weird technicality. Pol Pot died while still under house arrest in 1998 before being released. The others were re-arrested in 2006, not after the UN recognized the KR as a legitimate party to be heard before their court. Duch confessed to everything, saying he is completely responsible for the actions at the prison. As genocide is hard to use as a term in this use, since technically it was against intellectuals/political parties and not a particular race, he was only given a 35 year sentence. But he's in his 70s and wont live it out. The other 4 are still awaiting trial for a long laundry list of things. In the museum, they had copies of incriminating letters being used in the court cases to help convict these people. Our guides said they are all upset, as they get to live in prisons and get fed and sleep, which is heaven compared to how they made their own people live for 4 years.
We went to the killing fields next. When the prisoners were finished confessing, and the KR believed they had found all of the family (to prevent retaliation by a family member for killing another), they were loaded into a truck, in rags or naked, and brought to a field 17km out of the city limits of PP. This was the "field of choice" for the men and women from S21, while there are 10s of fields throughout of the country. They were unloaded and brought into the "waiting room of death". Music blared, as speakers were attached to trees to try and drown out the sound of screams and moans of death. The KR chose this spot as it was an old Chinese grave site, and they believed it would be inconspicuous to kill people here. Even though it was only 17km away from the city, it was a far distance to travel by non-motorized means. WE were told people who farmed on the outskirts could hear it, but they either couldn't do anything about it, or chose to rather not know, since they themselves were probably at deaths door. They found 130-something shallow graves and unearthed 92 of them, as the rest had been washed away from the years and years of floods. They uncovered 8,900+ skulls, with the single largest grave housing 450 people. As Buddhists believe in putting bodies in a stupa after death, all large intact bones and skulls were transported into a giant stupa built in 1988 on the grounds, and placed on one of 17 layers so the families could come prey for their loved ones. Every tour guide had some history about this place, a few we heard say their family was in the stupa. Pretty much anyone born before the 1980's was affected.
There was two particular graves that were especially gruesome. Well, they all were. There were just what looked like rolling hills, which really were the dug up graves. The people were bound and blindfolded and killed by farming tools. The KR believed bullets were too valuable to be used to kill this many (they killed 1.5 million total in the fields around the country) so they used hoes, bamboo sticks, any farm tool. The bodies were hacked alive and many were actually buried alive. One was reserved for the soldiers of the KR who tried to run away and were caught. They were beheaded by bamboo stick, more to torture than to instantly kill, as you can imagine how long it took to hit someone with a bamboo stick to take off their head. Another grave was reserved for women and children. Small children were taken from the mothers and had their heads hurled against a tree, smashing it, before being thrown into a grave. Some were thrown in the air and they used a bayonet to cut the babies in two mid-air. It was terrible.
To this day, after it rains, bones and clothes reach the surface. Just waking around, you could see bone fragments and teeth in the dirt and pieces of shirts and clothing coming up from the earth. IT was the saddest thing I have ever seen.
After this, we took a break and had some food. IT was pretty hard to find cheery conversation, but there was a small 2 year old who wanted to share her mangoes with us so we played with her and that lightened our mood. We also ate food by this cow who just wouldn't stop moo-ing and it was quite funny. Kara and I stopped at the two famous markets in town, Central and the Russian market. IT was quite sad, nobody wanted to barter and nobody seemed interested at all in selling stuff. Maybe because they close at 5pm ,as does EVERYTHING in PP, and it was like 4pm, or just because they can rip off tourists more because its the popular capital. But shopping was weak.
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