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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PHNOM PENH – “TO KEEP YOU IS NO BENEFIT, TO DESTROY YOU IS NO LOSS”
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It is impossible to visit Cambodia and begin to understand or get a feel for the country, its history, present, and people without visiting the most infamous site of the Cambodian genocide. So, from the high of the night before, partying in Heart of Darkness, to the depressing low of the Killing Fields. Phnom Penh charms and chills in (un)equal measure.

We hired a taxi to take us through the traffic-clogged streets of the city and out into the countryside along a dusty dirt track. We arrived 17km later with those who had sat in the boot (door wide open) covered in a layer of orange dirt. We paid a small entry fee to the site which was once a former orchard.

Choueng Ek is a picturesque and tranquil area of fields, lakes and trees that belies its tragic past as a burial ground for those murdered during the long nightmare of the Khmer Rouge.

Enemies of the regime were arrested, tortured and then shipped out of the capital at night by truck, many still blindfolded and told not to be scared, they were going to a new home.

The site holds 129 mass graves where an estimated 17,000 men, women and children were executed by the Khmer Rouge on pretexts such as resistance to the regime, counter revolutionary tendencies or religious belief. If you were from the ‘wrong’ background such as a wealthy family, you were at risk. If you had the ‘wrong job’, such as an engineer or a doctor, you were at risk. If you wore spectacles (a clear sign of intellectualism according to the Khmer Rouge) you were at risk. If you knew how to read or open a car door, if you had a white mark on your wrist suggesting you had worn a watch, if your hands did not display signs of manual labour, you were at risk. Anything that suggested you belonged to the middle, upper or professional classes, lived in a town or city, or were tainted by westernisation threatened to attract the party’s unwanted attention.

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