Day 5 (27/9) - Genocide Day - Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (Part 1)
My roommate had bought some fruit chips, and looking at the label to find out what fruits were in the packet, I reassuringly found that the the main ingredient was "Some kinds of fruits"
I didn't buy any snacks back because the packaged food (except Amok Fish) was all Vietnamese or Thai.
The previous day, in my search for pretentious T-shirts (ie those not saying "Cambodia" in English) at the market I'd found one design with a bulldog wearing a blue beret and the word "UNTAC". Unfortunately they didn't have it in my size.
At first I was quite disappointed that we didn't get a room with a river view, but not only did the corridors open out onto balconies, the river also looked like this:
So it wasn't much of a loss
Another river scene while I was being ASAP when the others were breakfasting where we had lunch the previous day. It had been opened by the Singapore ambassador - no wonder we went there to dine.
For breakfast there was this interesting yogurt with corn and what the packet said was lotus nuts but seemed more like large red beans to me. It wasn't very popular with the girls, who were culinarily conservative (even if not in other aspects).
Street outside hotel and along river
Cavorting in the bus
Entrance to Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
Museum rules. I liked "Please sit in an appropriate manner" (presumably for the ladies) and "Please be concentrated (sic) spiritually and physically in order to pay respect to the souls of victims who died unjust (sic) at the place"
No laughing
Graves of the last 13 victims of the place. In the last days of the regime, the Khmer Rouge were killing each other.
Most people at the facility died of starvation.
Original bed of one of the last 13 victims. When the Vietnamese soldiers came in a week after the person's death, 2 birds and a pig were eating his body. The flower on the bedframe is a frangipani - it would seem that it has the same meaning here as in Malaysia (which makes that Frangipani massage parlour even weirder). The box you see on the bedframe was the prisoner's toilet. My notes also read "pour alcohol in" so I assume that's how the box has been sanitised for display.
Liberation photo
Camp rules. You will notice they're longest in French.
Another bed, and the corresponding photo. The guy was killed with the shovel blade which was found embedded in his head when the Viets came.
The doors and windows were closed so that people outside wouldn't hear the noise. Considering that this was in the tropics, you can see how that would make the suffering even worse.
Another bed and photos
The Gallows
8-14 year old Khmer Rouge interrogators who were brainwashed.
Many Khmer Rouge people executed people because if not, they themselves would be executed and indeed some were.
Victims who were meticulously given serial numbers. Those with the same serial numbers were arrested at the same time. Fortunately they weren't as efficient as the Nazis.
Victims' clothes
Kid victims
Victims and their many ways of dying
Foreigners who lost their passports were also brought here and killed.
In all, the detention centre had 7 survivors, but they survived only because they escaped when they were brought out to the Killing Fields.
Our guide said that as a young girl she had escaped to Vietnam with her mother and sister. Living near there, they'd walked over over a week.
You can see that some skulls are still blindfolded.
The death smirks are morbid.
Barbed wire outside building to prevent suicide.
Moving to another building
Cells. They had no doors because prisoners were chained to them. They were also not allowed to talk to each other.
I found this morbid and bizarre.
Chair used to photograph the victims
Any attempt to divine the feelings of the Cambodian people on this matter is problematic; if you speak to people you will get an unrepresentative sample and a referendum can be manipulated (the framing of the questions, a skewed campaign to influence the elctorate and preventing some people from voting and the like), so we can't say anything about it.
The Green Revolution
This photographer proclaimed that by taking photos of photos, he would present them in a new light. Bah.
All in all, I'm glad the Cambodian genocide happened. God would be less than perfectly good if he had restricted human free will, preventing us from being autonomous moral agents with moral responsibility for our fellows, and prevented the Khmer Rouge from doing all these horrible things. Furthermore, the sympathy, compassion and moral condemnation generated in people not just in the past and now but also in future generations more than outweighs the suffering of the victims.
Torture implements
Plucking out someone's fingernails and pouring alcohol on the raw flesh
Plucking out a woman's nipples. If no one had told me, I'd have thought it was a man but extreme skinniness probably accounts for this.
I shall segue slightly at this point to note that since Cambodian women were generally dressed conservatively, I was unable to confirm some suspicions I had. I could've looked at the local equivalents of SPGs, but here I would run into the problem of selection bias.
Creation of a Communist Paradise - Phnom Penh
Theodicies could be adapted to justify the extents the Khmer Rouge went to in their attempt to create a Communist Paradise, with their being substituted for God. Indeed, in many ways theodicy becomes easier since Communism is neither perfect nor omnibenevolent (and doesn't claim to be), and no humans can be omnipotent or omniscient. Also, since most of the deaths were not deliberate but rather the result of starvation or hardship, and that in pursuit of an ultimate good (the radical transformation of the country into a Communist Paradise) the Khmer Rouge weren't actually that bad.
Indeed, one could say that genocide is none of our business and that it is an ethnocentric act of neo-Imperialism and an unacceptable breach of sovereignty to condemn (yet alone to intervene in) the country's internal affairs (I was trying to look for a quote from China I remember about wishing a country going through some political turmoil happiness, but can't find it).
Skulls
Skull pit
Killing fields
Map of Cambodia made from skulls. Apparently it used to hang here, but no more. Oh well.
Map showing detention centres and killing fields. There were 343 killing sites (red) and 167 prisons (yellow - but this was the largest). There're 77 stupas and genocide memorials.
Politicised casualty figures - They arrived at a figure for the number of deaths (3 million - the highest estimate among the lot) during the period after a petition from one million survivors. Maybe every survivor knew 3 people who died, so they multiplied the number of survivors by 3 to get this figure.
Anthropomorphising and mystifying bones
Notice the missing language. Damn French. This given how many exhibits were not bilingual (let alone trilingual) but only in English.
Another back shot. I was curious why there was no VPL since these pants were being raved about as being extremely thin, but apparently they weren't tight enough.
I liked this shirt, though I disagreed with the last version of "missionary" (supposedly - spreading Democracy with a gun; common Iraqis have taken pretty enthusiastically to it, and sectarian killings aside I'm sure everyone prefers it to dictatorship)
There wasn't as much moralising or politicising of the tragedy as in Dachau - the good and bad guys weren't identified or even mentioned; there was some accusation of the Khmer Rouge leaders, but this was in small print on the wall in interviews with victims, rather than presented as part of the museum's narrative (through the guides and the scarce information panels). In some ways, this made the exposition more effective.
Yet, the museum also did not give a clear narrative - who were the Khmer Rouge and why did they do all of this? This would've confused many visitors who did not know much about this period of Cambodian history even if the visual impact remained. One reason for the lack of a narrative might be that they were wary of critics problematising any narratives they came up with, and decided to save themselves the effort. Another might be difficulties in coming to terms with their recent past, especially given how many ex-Khmer Rouge have been rehabilitated (if they tried everyone including accomplices, maybe 10% of the country would be behind bars).
Interestingly, while there was almost no information on the ground floor (very few photographs were captioned, and even then it was just a few words in Khmer) the upper floor had slightly more information (eg the politicised casualty figures. See also the next 2 photos). Maybe they were done by different people.
Defaced Khmer Rouge leader, Son Sen. (our tour had ended on the floor below, which explains the implied license given to vandalise)
For some reason Pol Pot's portrait is gone. Either it got defaced they had to remove it or someone carted it away as a souvenir.
Someone was telling me that Slavery had deadened his emotions. It would be interesting to compare the emotional reactions to traumatic stimuli of males and females before slavery and after, and see if there was a significant difference in the difference.
Quotes:
My friends and I always like to talk about our shit.