Bird’s Nest Bevarage – 25% bird’s nest

Another day in Phnom Penh, and another chance to explore the dark recesses of the human psyche.

Security Prison 21, also known as Tuol Sleng (an apt name that translates as Hill of the Poisonous Trees) was a complex that nearby workers termed “the place where people went in but never came out”. Codenamed S-21, the facility was originally a High School but became the epicentre of a vast and sophisticated network of interrogation and imprisonment. Where once it educated children, from 1975 to 1979 it was peverted to educate its inmates and the cambodian population in terror and obedience.

An estimated 17,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng during the four year reign of the Khmer Rouge. In the early months of the revolution most of the victims were soldiers and government officials from the previous Lon Nol regime or doctors, intellectuals, engineers and monks; bastions of the old society. Later, as paranoia took hold of the party leadership the machinery of state and oppression was turned on its own rank and file and the revolution began to devour itself.
Khmer Rouge members and soldiers viewed by Pol Pot as potential turncoats were accused of espionage, arrested and forced to accept fictitious confessions which accused their friends and family; so the prison population was replenished and the ranks of those liquidated increased.

The most important prisoners were held in Block A. These former classrooms each contained a rusting iron bedframe and torture instrument. I looked outside through a small window with bars across it. The day was beautiful, and the sun cast long strips of light across the tiled floor. It would have been hard to imagine the horror that took place in these rooms had it not been for the black and white photograph in each room showing the space as it was found by the liberating Vietnamese. Moving closer to each picture the abstract black and grey forms came into focus – the mutilated, swollen face and body of an inmate, chained to the bed and killed by his fleeing captors only hours before the prison was captured.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.