Heart of Darkness

Today we took a field trip to the notorious Tuol Sleng or S-21 prison. Formerly the main interrogation center for the Khmer Rouge, where as many as 20,000 prisoners questioned and tortured before either dying on site or being shipped to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, Tuol Sleng has been converted into a genocide museum.

  This was my second trip to the museum and it was as chilling the second time as the first. Today, Tuol Sleng remains very much a work in progress. As Jeff Gritchen and I toured the grounds, we found abandoned in a stairwell what looked like an abandoned moldering pile of clothes that appeared left from when the facility was being used for its evil purposes.

Seeing those clothes, looking as if they had been dropped off yesterday, reminded me in some ways how, even 33 years after the atrocities began, the Cambodian genocide remains barely beneath the surface. Like the bones that still filter up from the shallow graves in places like Cheoung Ek, there remains an immediacy, or perhaps a timelessness, to the horrors that exists to this day.

A Cambodian woman served as our tour guide and told us about her experience, being marched from Phnom Penh to Battambang province in the far western stretches of the country. She and her family walked for months before reaching their destination, passing the dead and dying along the road. Those were among the 1.7 million estimated to have died between 1975 and 1979, when Vietnam ousted Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. After surviving the forced march, our guide said her father and older brother were taken away and killed anyway.

    Prisoners at Tuol Sleng were forced to admit they were CIA or KGB operatives, though it is unlikely any ever were. They also were forced to implicate friends, family and loved ones who were likely to become victims as well.

  Several years ago, I had the chance to talk to one of the interrogators at Tuol Sleng who admitted the guard knew victims were lying. But in a way the interrogators, many of them only young teenagers, were victims too – forced to inflict pain and report findings or become among those being tortured. It was a perfect circle of evil from which none escaped unscathed.

  The Khmer Rouge has an obsession with picturing their victims and their own. But for the identifying hats the KR guards wore, they were virtually indistinguishable from many of their victims. Many wore faint smiles, looks the teetered on disbelief.

  There is a new display at the museum that was interesting. In pictures and text, it details elements of the lives of many Khmer Rouge cadre leaders and combatants. It is a touching display because it reminds us that in many ways they too were swept up in history and sent down a path they could never imagine.

  I don't know that there are any epiphanies to be had from touring Tuol Sleng, just an overpowering sadness that comes with the realization of what hides in the dark corners of the human soul.

--- Greg