heart of darkness

Phnom Penn, the capital of Cambodia, was interesting. It's the only capital city I've ever visited which remains largely unpaved. The main streets are clogged with motorbikes and intimidating to cross, especially considering that you still have to look both ways when crossing each part of a divided busy road. Yes, even a divided road is still only a suggestion of which direction you should be going even when the majority of traffic is only going one way.

We went to two memorials/museums dedicated to remembering those individuals killed by the Khmer Rouge during the Pol Pot regime. The first one was the Killing Fields, just one of many mass grave sites throughout Cambodia. About 8000 bodies have been recovered from this site but it is still being excavated. Skulls are laid out in a tower in a temple as a memorial. Most of the graves were the size of a hotel bathroom or smaller. A few of them were marked off and had painted wooden signs that said "Mass grave, 83 people", "Mass grave, 108 women and children, all naked", Mass grave, 115 people without heads". Another sign marked a tree as "Execution tree where soldiers beat children".

The most disorienting thing about the place was that it was totally peaceful, as if we'd gone for a walk in the local park. I had expected to feel immense amounts of energy in the space, most of it negative, or heavy, or sad. But there was nothing but a lightness, and serenity, to the place. Which contrasted so sharply with the feelings I had internally.

Later, we went to Tuol Sleng, a prior high school converted into a prison during the Pol Pot regime. Over 12,000 people died there between 1975 and 1979; only 7 survived. People were tortured to extract confessions in this site, and we walked through room after room, viewing the cells, the mass torture rooms, and, perhaps worst of all, the large rooms downstairs reserved for more "important" prisoners - and usually involving more brutal forms of torture. When the prison was liberated by the Vietnamese, they took photographs of the remaining victims in the rooms. Today, one stark, giant black and white photo hangs on the wall, documenting the corpses, covered in their own blood and sitting on the beds which still remain in the rooms (cleaned, of course).

Equally heart-rending was walking through room after room with thousands of black and white pictures of all the prisoners. Each prisoner had a mug shot taken when they were admitted. There were a few pictures of people after torture or clearly sufferng from starvation, but most were simply individuals upon arrival. Some smiled; others looked afraid for their lives. There were boys too young to attend school, grandmothers and grandfathers, mothers holding infant children.

Two million dead. And the masterminds, like Pol Pot? Most escaped with no jail time. Even Pol Pot, finally sentenced in a mass trial in 1999, died four months later in relative peace.