A weekend off - part 1

I've been a lady of leisure this weekend and it has been fantastic. On Friday night I had a few drinks with some of the volunteers, and then I went for dinner. I had an early start planned for Saturday as a volunteer had offered to go with me to the genocide museum and the Russian market. Both are best done before the day heats up so we arranged meet at 8:30am.

The museum, Tuol Sleng, is the school that the Khymer Rouge turned into a prison and interrogation centre. It came to be known as S 21 and between 1975 and 1979 an estimated 17,000 people were held there. They were interrogated and tortured, made to confess to false crimes and pretty much all 17,000 were eventually killed - either on site or marched 15km to be executed at a site known as the killing fields.

The school classrooms were divided up into cells - some were group cells where everyone was chained together, and others were single cells - tiny tiny spaces. There were strict rules about no talking and having to ask permission for everything, even to take a sip of water.

At the time that Vietnam marched into Phnom Penh and liberated the country 7 people were alive in the prison, and they had survived mostly due to the skills they offered. One was a painter who they used to paint propaganda messages, and one was a mechanic who fixed the typewriters used by the regime. But the Vietnamese also found 14 people who had been recently tortured and killed, so some of the displays show very graphic photos of the bodies exactly as they were tortured and left.

The regime were meticulous in keeping records of everyone they held, and everyone was photographed at least once. The museum displays the photos and Cambodians used to come and look at the photos to identify lost ones. The museum also has testimonies from the survivors and memories from others who weren't detained but experienced the Pol Pot years. The testimonies describe the forced labour and the starvation they experienced.

I've just looked at the Lonely Planet entry for Tuol Sleng and it says 'A visit to Tuol Sleng is a profoundly depressing experience' and that it is. But I thought it was important to go. I'd read about it but seeing it in real life was obviously more profound. They are trying to turn the museum into an education centre so that people don't forget the horrors of the Pol Pot period.

One of the displays had a message from the Minister of Culture and this sentence stood out: 'a diverse society is a healthy society, which values open-mindedness, innovation and freedom.' With all the craziness in the world at the moment this sentiment really resonated.