Torture Chambers and Killing Fields

Yesterday (Thursday), was a very full and sad day for everyone in our group. In the morning we visited Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21. This was the main Khmer Rouge prison in Phnom Penh during the regime. It was used mainly to interrogate and torture people, suspected enemies of the regime and/or former members of the Khmer Rouge. It is still in its original condition, now used to remind people of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge era (1975-79). It was a high school until the KR converted it into their torture chambers. Of the estimated 14,000 people that passed through Tuol Sleng (S-21), only 7 survived. Of those 7, there is only 1 living today. And we met him yesterday!

He met us at S-21; walking slowly with his hands crossed in front of him he approached our group with sullen, saddened eyes and a grim look on his face. His name is Vann Nath and he is a painter. He is famous around Cambodia for surviving Tuol Sleng and for his paintings depicting real torture scenes from his stay in the prison. Some of these paintings are at the prison. He walked around with us and explained the various paintings and gave a little background on each one. He explained that he saw certain tortures himself or one of the torture victims told him how the Khmer Rouge would tortured that individual. When the KR was forced out in 1979, Mr. Nath started to paint these scenes from his memory. We were very lucky to have a private audience with the only current survivor of the torture chambers of this hell on earth.

When Mr. Nath completed his descriptions of the paintings at the prison, he entertained our questions. We had many. “Did you see these horrible things yourself?” “How long after you survived the prison did you start to paint these scenes?” “What do you think of the Khmer Rouge Trials?” “Have you ever confronted any of the guards of the prison since you have been out of the prison?” We asked a lot of questions to him while we also snapped photos of him. Other people visiting the museum prison started to guess that someone very special was there because we were crowded around him taking pictures and asking him questions and stuffing voice recorders in his face. Several other people gathered around to join us in hearing him answer our questions. I finally asked him, “What was special about the 7 people that enabled them to survive this horrible place, when nearly 14,000 others did not survive.” He went through the seven people and mentioned a special technical skill that each one had that the KR needed. His special skill was to paint portraits of Pol Pot. He also said all the portraits were destroyed when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and freed the people from the Khmer Rouge in 1978. We all felt very luck to meet the only survivor of these torture chambers. It was interesting because this yesterday morning, hours before our visit, we read a front page article in the newspaper (The Cambodia Daily) about Mr. Nath and his frustration with the ECCC (Khmer Rouge Trials) in the delay in getting the trials started and his lack of faith in the courts getting justice for all the horrible things that the Khmer Rouge inflicted on its on people.

After visiting the prison and meeting with Mr. Nath, we immediately headed to Choeung Ek about a half hour’s drive outside the city. Choeung Ek is better known as one of the “Killing Fields” were the KR murdered and buried millions of people in mass graves. I can hardly explain the impression this place left on all of us. First, we saw a monument erected that is several stories high and full of skulls collected from the mass graves. It was very chilling! You could see how many of the people died by bullet holes in the skulls, blunt force trauma, or a cracked skull. Most of the people that were killed there were forced to kneel over an open pit blindfolded, and they were hit on the skull with a shovel or end of a rifle and fell into the grave on top of other bodies. It was so hard to visible be reminded of such horrors as you walked around the excavated pits and could see clothing and small bones embedded in the dirt that are actual remnants of the victims. We bent down and touched these dead people’s bones and clothes! One of my colleagues found a human tooth! It was a part of someone who was murdered and/or tortured for no reason. She held in her hand and walked around contemplating what to do with it. What would I do it I had found such a thing? Do you keep it? Maybe take it home and put it in a box as a personal reminder of human suffering and pain? Or, maybe bury it somewhere on the Killing Fields, giving it its proper rest? Or, would I place the tooth somewhere in the Killing Fields for the public to view as they walked through as another reminder of the senseless tragedy that Cambodians endured.

In the afternoon, some of our group participated in a workshop by a filmmaker who has worked on the East-West Center’s Asian International Justice Initiative films. He helped develop a series of outreach films to be taken out into the rural villages to help explain and educated the villagers about the Khmer Rouge Trials. It was a great workshop as he solicited our ideas about how we would go about developing such a project. It was very interactive with engaging discussion from the group.

Finally, after dinner we met with Sok Chea, the subject of the video we saw yesterday, Deacon of Death: Looking for Justice in Today’s Cambodia. Sok Chea started off talking about her story and her quest for justice in confronting Mr. Karoby, the man she remembers killing many people in her village when she was six years old. As she got further into her talk one could feel her sense of frustration with the ECCC and as she continued she started to get very emotional about the subject until she was crying heavily about the subject. She mentioned what it was like to experience her mother being blindfolded and told to kneel down and almost being killed by the Khmer Rouge. She also recounted seeing the soldiers hang someone up and cutting their abdominal cavity open while they were hanging and soldiers eating human livers with palm wine. It was very obvious that she has never healed from this experience. She still waits for justice to occur.

It was a very hard day as we did a lot and had to contemplate on death the whole day.