S-21: Total Brutality

Alongside Angkor Wat, S-21 Prison and Killing Fields were what I came to Cambodia to see - or rather to revisit, 20 years later, with a more mature head on my shoulders.

Both are stark reminders of what man is capable of doing to other men, women, and children.
Both are stark reminders - in an ever more polarised world - of what happens when you seek the answers in extreme political movements.
Both far left and far right are dangerous - be careful what you wish for.

The Cambodian genocide was very different to what happened in/around Germany.
Hitler and the Nazis were cold and clinical - methodical in everything they did.
Pol Pot's regime was about sheer, blunt brutality - savagery...something almost animalistic.

S-21 was a prison during Pol Pot's and the Khmer Rouge's regime - one of several prisons across Cambodia, but the most famous...or infamous.

It was a school before the Khmer Rouge swept to power, in 1975.

When they did seize power, and entered Phnom Penh, the people celebrated (again, be careful what you wish for), as it brought to an end 5 years (1970 - 1975) of civil war, between those on the side of the Cambodian king and those on the side of Pol Pot.

The people thought good things were coming.

Within 3 hours of the Khmer Rouge arriving, they’d forcefully rounded everyone up, to either send them out to the countryside to work the land, on rice farms, or they took them to prison.

Most never saw each other again. 

 

The children who'd been in that school went to work on farms… or were killed.

My guide on the day was a child herself when the Khmer Rouge arrived. She was forced to work in the far north west of the country, which took 3 months to walk to, with guns pointed at their backs.

She never saw her mother or brother again and has no idea, to this day, what happened to them.

Prisoners were brought to S-21, and other prisons, as 'enemies of the state', without a shred of evidence to back that up - just pure paranoia.
More often than not they were believed to be working with the CIA.

Anyone educated (teachers, doctors, lawyers etc) was brought there...because if you were educated, you were intelligent enough to question the regime and their methods.
Anyone with glasses was also rounded up, as glasses were seen as a sign of intelligence, and, bizarrely, ‘people with soft hands’ were brought in too.

They were tortured so they'd confess to helping the CIA.

If they didn't confess, they were tortured more, until they died of their wounds... or were transported to killing fields, to be executed.

If they did confess, thinking that would stop the torture, exactly the same fate awaited them.

They couldn't win.

The methods of torture were brutal - sadistic.
They included pulling out people's teeth, pulling out their fingernails and toenails then pouring alcohol over the wounds, pulling people's nipples off with pliers, putting people's limbs into boxes containing live scorpions, cutting off ears with machetes, waterboarding, and beatings with anything that came to hand; pick axes, hachets, knotted rope, farming hoes, spades etc.

As mentioned, torture of an individual often went on for days, weeks, or months. And many simply died from the torture, rather than being directly executed.

Those doing the torturing were young uneducated lads - only kids themselves - aged just 12 - 17. They were brought in from impoverished rural areas, and trained to maim and kill.
I still can't get my head round it - torturing grown men and women with pick axes, shovels, bamboo sticks, machetes… at that age.

They were all under the 'guidance' of 'Comrade Duch' (full name: Kang Kek Lew), who ruled the prison, and had 'perfected' his torture methods in other prisons.
He was one of only 4 Khmer Rouge members to ever face justice - tried and convicted of killing over 12,000 Cambodians...although the real figure is thought to be much higher.

Even when the Vietnamese liberated Phnom Penh, in 1979, the Khmer Rouge commandments shot the last prisoners before they ran off, like the cowards they were, so those prisoners couldn’t say anything.

In total, 20,000 prisoners entered S-21, across 4 years.
Only 8 adults and 4 children survived.
Those children are now adults - 2 live in Phnom Penh, 2 live in Germany.

And the reason those 8 adults survived?

They were ‘useful’ to the Khmer Rouge. One was a good typist, so could produce letters for them. One was an artist, so could paint portraits of Pol Pot.

The rest died.

In the end, Pol Pot killed between 2 - 3m of his own people in that time; a quarter of the country’s entire population.
Some of them were killed directly, some simply starved to death.

He never faced justice. He was eventually found, having fled into jungle, and placed under house arrest, but he died of natural causes, in 1998.

Voting for extreme solutions never works. Putting an extremist in charge - a nutter - never works. Communism and fascism are, in my opinion, failed idelologies.

Just the splattered blood on the ceiling of one cell in S21 tells me that.

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A cell at S21, with leg shackles on it and a box for defecating in:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Items used for torture:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pol Pot (top) and Comrade Duch (bottom):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The toturers (all aged 12 - 17):