The Genocide

We’ve arrived in Phnom Penh , and the city is one of those strange and contradictory places. Not if you walk in and know nothing – then it’s just a typical Southeast Asian city – great food, loud, lively, dirty, and often garish. But the life, the neon, the noise, and the bustle are all juxtaposed against what we come to see as tourists.

Tuol Sleng, a torture center for the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979 is perfectly unobtrusive except for the barb wire perimeter. It’s an old high school converted to a prison camp, and so it is smack in the middle of an old residential neighbourhood. Which makes it so much more jarring to go from the hordes of touts, beggars, and cabbies all clamoring for your money and walk into a pit of horrors.

Jenna and I were both shaken. This is a “fresh” genocide – the cab drivers and waiters and shop owners are either old enough to have lived through it, or to be the equivalent of our parents generation – born right after the Holocaust. And the questions I want to ask of strangers but don’t dare are almost overwhelming. They are the same questions that I have pondered since I was young and first learned what the Holocaust was. But here there are different questions too – there is no consistent Other in the Cambodian genocide, which complicates the normal dichotomies.

I don’t want to write too much about Tuol Sleng, or about the killing fields at Chouen-Ek. We’ve seen the mass graves, the piles of skulls. We walked on paths with scraps of clothing and white bone erupting through the dirt at our feet. It took a very long time to get through Tuol Sleng because we stopped and looked at every picture. I couldn’t do otherwise, it was the least we owed these people. There were thousands of pictures.