Missy's Travels: Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields

It's always interesting to learn about a place, an event, or a historical period in time and then go see it (or what's left) for yourself. I suppose I've been doing a lot of that since I started this trip, but today was the first time that I've visited a place where I could remember, in acute detail, the hard facts and accompanying philosophical arguments surrounding this particular place and event. As I mentioned before, I have studied genocide in depth, and the Cambodian Genocide is no exception. To me, it is the most fascinating example of genocide perpetrated in modern times, in that it was the most radical attempt by an internal government to reorganize a society from the ground up. Cambodia may have been following in the footsteps of Lenin and Mao, but the Khmer Rouge took it much futher than those leaders ever did, and at a much quicker pace.

Today we went to Tuol Sleng Prison Musem (also known as S-21) and the Killing Fields. Before the war, Tuol Sleng was a high school. The Khmer Rouge turned it into their main prison; thousands of Cambodians were tortured and killed there. The bodies were then shipped to the killing fields (about 20 kilometers outside Phnom Penh) and disposed of in mass graves. The prison has been left pretty much as it was in 1979, which is interesting and disturbing at the same time.

The killing fields were more difficult for me to see...there were over 8,000 bodies just dumped into mass graves (now the bones are housed in a temple). I suppose it reminds me quite a bit of the Holocaust, although there's I don't need to relate the horrors of the Khmer Rouge to any other regime in order to feel depressed and disgusted by what they did.