11.16.06 kulturnatib

The high school

As our jetliner was taxiing through the tarmac from the runway where we had just made a bumpy landing, we were informed of the local time. I looked at my watch. It was now advanced. I set it back by an hour in accordance with the time advisory from the airplane crew.

I had known from mostly second or third-hand sources that a visit to Cambodia is not just a step back in time -- and not just an hour but even to as far back before our own calendar when the great Ankor Wat complex in Siem Reap was built – but it is a step back beyond time when man existentially confronts his most contradictory instincts and where the triumph of brutality makes mockery of his proud claim – always clothed in the loftiest of rhetoric -- to be above the animal kingdom.

It looks like an ordinary high school campus with multi-story buildings, spacious rooms, wide corridors and staircases and ample playing fields. Yet, it is a high school campus with an extraordinary history; a burden imposed directly and indirectly by those who fervently believed history to be putty in their hands.

It was built in 1962 and named Ponhea Yat High School, after a Royal ancestor of King Norodom Sihanouk. In the 1970, during the regime the of the American encouraged Lon Nol, a general who came into power through a coup de e'tat in 1969 it was renamed Tuol Svay Prey High School.

It wasn't until 1976 that this campus was turned into the widely suspected and universally feared security facility of the Toul Sleng, the most secret security department of the Khmer Rouge regime who overthrew the Lon Nol government in December of 1974. This department was responsible for the systematic if arbitrary slaughter of millions of Cambodians who were dumped into shallow and hastily dug mass graves across the country, thereafter named the killing fields.

With the facility itself statistics vary with the high estimate of 22,000 detained and tortured there with as little as a dozen surviving. The official Documentation Center of Cambodia put the numbers of detainees at 10,499, though, it says, this does not include the number of children and babies detained there along with their families. After their torture and detention in Toul Sleng, these were herded mostly to and killed in Choeung Ek just outside Phnom Pehn, where an official memorial now stands.

Following a Vietnamese offensive, Phnom Pehn was captured in 1979. The Khmer Rouge were deposed though they continued a guerrilla struggle until the death of its leader, Pol Pot, in 1998 that signaled the collapse of the Khmer Rouge movement.
In 1980, the Toul Sleng Historical Museum of Genocide opened in the same premises that had been vacated and left almost intact by the retreating Khmer Rouge, including thousands of pictures they meticulously took of every prisoner that was interred there. Among these are of mothers and their infants, teenagers, girls, nondescript Cambodians from all walks with fear or resignation stamped on their eyes, one or two, incredibly, smiling, a caucasian with an Elvis hairdo and others.

The first visitors to the museum were ordinary Cambodians searching for information about their relatives that were lost or were feared to have been victims of the genocide. There were also attempts at forensic examination of the heaps of bones that were uncovered.

With the withdrawal of the Vietnamese expeditionary force in 1989, the signing of the international peace agreement in 1991 and the elections and reestablishment of the Kingdom of Cambodia in 1993, the country opened up to more foreign investors and tourists.

Now, this once nondescript high school campus is a tourist attraction, a must-visit in Phnom Pehn, the center of the grim, sobering and often stomach-churling reminder of the the unspeakable evils that man is capable of. And, sadly, that we will often allow him or her, as we did on countless occasions in the past and presently, on a large scale, in Darfur and the various wars on terrorism, and on a smaller scale, the vigilante killings in Cebu, Davao and the political killings all over the country.