S21/Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a Discussion

A quick expansion on Amy's comments about the atrocities that occurred in Laos during the 1970s. These are not isolated incidents. These are not distant past. These are more common than we would like to think or than we are taught to believe - the Armenian Genocide during World War I, USSR in the 30s, the Holocaust during World War II, Mao's Cultural Revolution in the 60s, Somalia, Serbia, Rwanda, Congo, Sudan. The list goes on along the dual axes of magnitude and history. The horror and sadness, however, clearly not linear, are in fact immeasurable. But if there's no yardstick, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a former middle school converted into the S21 prison in which 20,000 men, women, and children died, does its best to capture these elements.

I won't go into gory details about S21, but the Khmer Rouge was fastidious in its documentation and record-keeping. So one of the most powerful displays is the collection of pictures of a fraction of those murdered by their own people. It is important, often difficult, and always heartbreaking to look into the eyes of these men, women, and children. Faces show visceral emotions, at times combinations, at times isolated - confusion, sadness, an inability to understand. Some bear fear, some terror, some hatred. Some, mostly children, smile, a cruel irony in retrospect. Various backgrounds frame the faces in the fore - the cold metal contraption used to hold the head forward, the slight woman reaching up to hold the white sheet behind, the undernourished baby in the mother's arms, the indifferent companions looking on vacantly. There seems little discrimination - children, grandparents, mothers, fathers, men, women, able, unable.


Phnom Penh in April 1975, a city of a million, a ghost town within days. These were the faces of those forced out, of yet another in a seemingly global and historical tradition of irrational, insane, inexplicable acts. At Angkor Wat, I hesitantly waded into a delicate conversation with a tuk tuk driver about the genocide. "The hardest part for us to understand was why somebody would do this to his own people," he reflected. I bit my tongue before attempting to get into a discussion of explanations. Foreign interference? The economics of supporting people in a failing Socialist state? Maintaining false international appearances? Common extreme idealism? Simple greed? Insanity? It's impossibly dangerous and perhaps offensive to rationalize. Inevitably, these atrocities cannot be explained, and they above all stand as a chilling reminder that the extent of man's potential for inhumanity is unfathomable.