Killing Us Softly

S-21 and The Killing Fields

Thanks to a hit Hollywood movie of the same name, Cambodia is most known for the “Killing Fields” of the Khmer Rouge regime. After the ruins of the temple city known as Angkor Wat, it is the next largest tourist attraction in the country. There are over 300 makeshift burial grounds and caves in Cambodia, dotting the landscape like scar-covered wounds. They mark a five-year period of pain and brutality that is now completely removed from the country’s textbooks. But the fields remain as testament to this tortuous time.

Re-tracing the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh is a two-part endeavor. First stop is Tuol Sleng, or Security Office 21 (aka S-21)), part of the most secret organ of the Khmer Rouge regimeS-21 started life in 1962 as the Ponhea Yat High School, named for an ancestor of King Sihanouk. Re-named during the U.S. backed Lon Nol regime in the early 70’s, it was later established as S-21 in 1976 by Pol Pot (short for both political potential, and the Khmer words for poison stake). The Khmer Rouge leader #1 was himself an academician who later turned on the country’s intelligencia, professionals and artists as Western lackeys and traitors to the communist cause.

S-21 is a 3-storied, L-shaped building, surrounding an open courtyard, enclosed by two folds of corrugated iron sheets that are covered with electrified barb wire. The classrooms were converted to prison cells and torture chambers. The photographs on the walls depict the gruesome, almost medieval methods of interrogation. Others reveal some of the faces of the more than 10,000 prisoners – men, women and children - who passed through its gates on their inexorable march to death. Eyes wide with fear and disbelief, flat with fading defiance, sunken in desperation or hollowed out by resignation stare out of the black and white headshots that meticulously record the faces of the victims.

The complex is nestled in the heart of the city, in the midst of a well-populated neighborhood. One can imagine the terror its residents felt as they listened to the screams of the victims late into the night.

Our guide has a personal connection to S-21. Her father and sisters were slain during the Khmer Rouge. In fact, there are nearly no Khmer above the age of 30 who do not have a relative that was killed by the regime. Usually they have several, along with stories of colleagues and neighbors who turned them in to save their own skin or kin.

When the regime was finally defeated, many of its leaders become members of the ruling government, or were pardoned by the victors. They never stood trial for their actions. Our guide pointed out several pictures of S-21 officers who were left to ripen to old age, unharmed and unpunished, alive to this day.

They have whitewashed the events of the period and eliminated any reference in the textbooks so the rising generations have no knowledge of those terrible times. Our friend Theary, who is in her early 20s, had never been to S-21 even though she lives right there in the capital. To her the Khmer Rouge, the interrogation camps, the killing fields are fables told by her parents of a time long past and almost unfathomable.

And so healing has taken the form of forced forgetting that your president has merely changed uniforms, and your family’s former betrayers still live just down the road. In fact, they comprise the few elderly living in Cambodia. The generation that would be old today was wiped out decades ago.

Choeung Ek Genocidal Center is the Khmer name for The Killing Fields, a 30-minute ride by tuk tuk into the suburbs of Phnom Penh. It is a national monument. In the past decade, they have erected a grand, gleaming stupa, or Buddhist temple, housing the bones of the dead. Ascend its marble steps to the glass walls that reveal ascending shelves of skulls, relics of the souls interred in the meadows surrounding it.

Grass now covers scoured out depressions of earth, resembling the impact of a meteor hit. These are the mass graves dug by the victims themselves before they were killed and tossed inside. Swatches of clothing emerge half buried in the ground, strange plants in this garden of death. Butterflies dance among the wild flowers.

Each evening, a score of monks huddle at the door of the stupa face the skeletal remains and chant for the dead, their marigold robes swaying in the breeze. These souls, those times are not forgotten.

They are part of Generation One, carefully retrieving the shards of a shattered society, struggling mightily to remember the legacy of loss of the past. They are on a mission to rescue the traditional art forms and spiritual practices that carried their cultural heritage for centuries. This generation is leaping into the 21st century, attempting to span the breach in technology and industry between them and the western world. They are weaving a bridge from the looms of their history, and reclaiming their past along with their destiny.