Day 2 - Phnom Penh
A great many awful things have been done by a great many people to a great many people over the centuries. The reasons why are rarely novel and we are a species with a barely quenched enthusiasm for killing one another. Yet the further back some atrocity happens the easier it becomes to attribute it to some aspect of the human psyche that is primitive and now banished. But only two years before I was born the Cambodians were killing each other in quantities not seen since the holocaust. One quarter of the population died in four years during a psychopathic attempt to return the country to an idyllic rural existence no more realistic than the picture on a tin of biscuits at Christmas. Near Phnom Penh city centre, hemmed in on all sides by low-rise concrete accommodation blocks lies a prison with the innocuous designation 'S21'. It was a school until 1975 when the Khmer Rouge seized power. Soon after it became a detention centre for enemies of the new regime, which would seemed to have been everyone. The total number of people who passed through the prison, 20,000, is less staggering then the number who survived, 12. Your chances of survival were 0.06%. Purposefully or not S21 has been left largely unchanged from those days. The first accomodation block of four that surround a placid courtyard shaded by coconut and jackfruit trees housed the more senior prisoners. Single rooms on the ground floor each contain a single metal bedstead without mattress but with leg irons. On the wall are photographs taken after the regime was toppled in 1979 and S21 was discovered. Hồ Văn Tây, a combat photographer with the invading Vietnamese army, took the pictures. Hồ and his colleagues followed the stench of rotting corpses to the gates of Tuol Sleng. Each of the photographs shows a single metal bedstead without mattress but with leg irons and in them the last person to use the bed. None of the people in the photographs were one of the 'lucky' 12.The next block has display boards two metres tall by four across with faces on them. Hundreds of people, identified by a numbered tag around their neck, stare back with blank expressions that to me convey the the bafflement at what crime they had committed to end up in this place. There's too many faces to remember and they blur into, as was once coldly yet astutely put, a statistic. Except one. I feel some shame that the only face that stayed with me through the day and truly touched my emotions with the full horror of it all was a white one. John Dawson Dewhirst was a geordie who was captured on a yacht off the Cambodian coast in 1978. Along with another man, Kerry Hamill, he was taken to S21, tortured into falsely saying he worked for the CIA and executed. Why did one white face resonate in a way that a thousand brown faces did not? I'd noticed a change in myself the previous day, an assertive streak had grown within me as soon as I was on Cambodian soil. I have a fierce reluctance to ever challenge a person that wrongs or hoodwinks me. The deepest aversion to awkwardness in a social situation such that I'll flash a yellowed British grin at the most shameless provocation. But not here, and not in India either as I suddenly recalled, where every tuk-tuk driver was an exploitative villain in the making and needed a firm hand. Unconscious bias seems the popular terminology but I fear a low-level, usually dormant racism that undermines the supposed strength of my belief in universal equality. The contradiction chills me the most I think. The contradiction between who I tell myself I am and who I actually am. How do I weed out an abhorrent aspect of my personality of which i'm only dimly aware and cannot traces the roots of? If I look back through memories of my life I have to admit the faces are I see are almost exclusively white, My childhood friends - white, my parent's friends - white, neighbours - white. I don't recall any overt prejudice but growing up in that world may have bred a feeling of 'otherness' towards faces that didn't feature in this bleached middle-class world. Intellectually I know we are all the same but the emotional intelligence of this has some way to go.
There is a very grim feeling coming over me as I realise that I am being driven from the S21 prison to a place known as 'The Killing Fields'. Making the same journey as those thousands of Cambodians did from 1975 to 1979 except they didn't come back. I realised that any Cambodian I saw above the age of about 50 probably has memories of those years. It further emphasises the startling recentness of it. The Khmer Rouge lacked the resources or maybe the drive for efficiency that the Nazis possessed and so settled for large pits and blunt instruments to dispose of their victims. The pits are scattered around the site and for years after its discovery seasonal heavy rains over shallow graves would reveal further areas of atrocity. A wooden walkway weaves between the depressions in the ground into which so much unlived life was poured, 8,895 of them. The walkway passes a tree now attractively decorated with colourful woven threads where once the heads of infants were smashed before being thrown into an adjacent pit, future revolutionaries you see. At the centre of the site there is a stupa and inside a tired glass box that rises over 20 metres to hold 5000 skulls. I lose a little of my faith in humanity when I visit sites like this. Partly because they represent our species at its very lowest, basest, most animalistic...and that comparison is probably unfair on animals. But also in part because of the people you see at these places, fellow visitors. The guy with his selfie stick standing on the holocaust memorial in Berlin. The girls flashing Instagram pouts with the mass grave in the background. Why do they come to these places? Why is it important to them that they are in the scene? What tiny part of these memories of the most tragic events in human history has anything to do with them? This refusal, or worse inability to engage with what these places represent has an unfortunate chime with the inhumanity that created them in the first place.
Our necessarily depressing day was almost done. I think there was great purpose in the immersive relentlessness and following the timeline from the day 1 mugshot of a person to the year 0 skull piled among 4,999 others. Back in Phnom Penh the sun had set and the night market whirred into life. Stalls were piled high with vegetables and meat skewers, diners sat on child-sized plastic stools eating noodle soup, it wasn't apparent how the former became the latter. After a few minutes a young girl at a stall saw through the thin veneer of our 'browsing' and offered a welcome guiding hand. I can't recall what we asked for but what we got were two bowls of delicious noodle soup flavoured by a sneezing chef. And given how these places are usually catnip to the tourist there was barely a whitey in sight which gave a small and entirely undeserved feeling of intrepidness. In stark contrast to most of the day we ended it in uncontrollable laughter. The rooftop bar at out hostel had a menu of drinks, snacks and laughing gas. He k ta he k ta and goodnight.
