year zero

I will never forget most harrowing site in Phnom Penh - the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. This is housed in what must once have been a model Corbusian style school, which was converted by the Khmer Rouge in ’Year Zero’ to a prison, torture centre and death camp. The contrast is stark between the innocent feel of the school as it must have been, and the crudely hacked and constructed cells, designed to intimidate and demoralise. It is reckoned that 20,000 people died after passing through this place, and the rooms are lined with photographs of them take as they arrived, often bloody and beaten, their expressions confused, lost. Old, young, small children, mothers with newborn babies, all were taken here. They were tortured until they provided the confessions demanded; then in most cases bludgeoned to death. It is hard to comprehend how quickly people can descend to medieval barbarity when the veneer of civilization slips for a moment. Possibly the most scandalous thing is that the west and the UN supported the Pol Pot regime for so long after the liberation by Viet Nam in 1979, on the basis that regime change was meddling in the internal affairs of a country. How ironic this seems now. Pol Pot is dead but many of the senior perpetrators are alive and at liberty and still untried. At the time of writing there is yet another attempt to put a trial procedure in place but this appears to be about to collapse.