OUR MEKONG ADVENTURE PART 4

Sailing overnight we arrived into Phnom Penh (‘Hill of Penh or more loosely Penh’s Hill) the capital and largest city of Cambodia. Located on the banks of the Mekong  river, Phnom Penh has been the nationals capital since the French colonized Cambodia, and has grown to become the nation’s centre for economic,industrial, commercial, cultural tourist and historical activities of Cambodia.

Founded in 1434 the city of Phnom Penh is noted for it’s beautiful and historic architecture and attractions. Once known as the ‘Pearl of Asia, it was considered one of the loveliest of French-built cities in Indochina in the 1920’s. today there are are a number of surviving french colonial buildings, such as the Royal Palace, Phsar Thmei, and other French Style buildings along the grand boulevards. The city of Phnom Penh is home to more than 2 million of Cambodia’s population of more than 15 million. It’s the wealthiest and most populous city in Cambodia and is home to the countries political hub.

Again it was an early start, today was our Freedom of Choice sightseeing programme tour, where we could choice our preference of tour. Myself and my wife made the decision of opting to do the Killing Fields & S21 detention centre. Although I knew this was going to be a very moving and a very emotional tour, it was something I wanted to find more about as it was a before my time and something a knew little about.

The transfer bus took us about 30 minutes from the main hub of Phnom Penh to the memorial park at Choeung Ek.  Here and a number of other sites in Cambodia where collectively between 1.4 to 2.2 million people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War.The many dozens of mass graves at  the site are visible above ground, many which have not been excavated yet.  Commonly, bones and clothing can surface after heavy rainfalls due to the large number of bodies still buried in shallow mass graves. You can see trees with markings of where children were tied up and tortured, and a commemorative Stupa filled with the skulls of the victims at the Killing Field.

From here we then made away back in Phnom Penh to visit Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum also known as Security prison 21 (S21). Formerly a high school, the five buildings of the complex were converted in March/April 1976 into a prison and interrogation centre. From 1976 to 1979, an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng (the real number is unknown). At any one time, the prison held between 1,000–1,500 prisoners. They were repeatedly tortured and coerced into naming family members and close associates, who were in turn arrested, tortured and killed.

Most prisoners at S-21 were held there for two to three months, after two or three days after they were brought to S-21, all prisoners were taken for interrogation. The torture system at Tuol Sleng was designed to make prisoners confess to whatever crimes they were charged with by their captors. Prisoners were routinely beaten and tortured with electric shocks, searing hot metal instruments and hanging, as well as through the use of various other devices. Some prisoners were cut with knives or suffocated with plastic bags. Other methods for generating confessions included pulling out fingernails while pouring alcohol on the wounds, holding prisoners’ heads under water, and the use of the waterboarding technique (in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages).

The tour as stated was very emotional and to see these all these graves, human skulls and bones along with the torture devices and what these people were put through, I really can’t put into words.