Tour guide relives war horrors daily

Phnom Penh — The income is good by Cambodian standards, $25 a day in tips, ten times the average daily wage. But the job can be numbing for English-language tour guide Phalla Pen, 54. Her tours are inside the Genocide Museum, once a prison where 20,000 inmates were tortured to death. Here Pen has to recall everyday her own family’s ordeal in the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

Pen was a 17-year-old mother when the communist Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. The new leader Pol Pot banished this city’s educated class on foot to the countryside for farm work. Stubborn holdouts, officials of the fallen government, and dissenters were rounded up and thrown into makeshift prisons. One of these was Security Compound-21, formerly Tuol Sleng primary school, now Pen’s museum-workplace. S-21’s administrator was the dreaded Kang Keck Iev, alias Duch, only recently sentenced by the UN for war crimes.

Pen, her seven-month-old baby and 22-year-old husband, obediently had trekked to the countryside with family members for “reeducation”. The new rulers detested bourgeois professionals and intellectuals. One by one Pen’s kinsmen were picked out and executed: her pilot-father and teacher-mother, two navy men-brothers, two doctor-uncles. The rest disbanded and headed for the Thai border. There, Pen’s husband died of disease, and her infant of starvation. She lost touch with five siblings.

In 1979 an uprising toppled the Khmer Rouge. (The Salvation Front for the Liberation of Cambodia celebrated its 32nd anniversary last week.) Pen returned to this city and found her only remaining sibling, a sister, newly appointed curator of the new Cambodians-only museum. (It would open to foreigners four years later.) At first Pen hesitated to serve as tour guide. But someone with first-hand knowledge of Khmer Rouge atrocities needed to tell the story.

So everyday Pen walks visitors through the three school buildings that served as torture chambers and prison cells. On display are Duch and comrades’ tools of the trade: bayonets, spades and tongs; shackles for individuals or rows of ten prisoners; lashes, electrocution gadgets and waterboarding tubs. Actual photographs and drawings show how these were used: the first set for knifing inmates’ infants, disfiguring faces, and ripping off nipples; the second to break newcomers, including detainees in their early teens; the third for final confession and inevitable execution. Ground floor classrooms were divided and bricked up into cells three-by-seven feet small for “VIPs”; those of the second and third served as prison dorms. Rats, cockroaches and snakes infested the buildings. Dense barbed wire fences surrounded the compound, preventing escape and, ironically, attempted suicides. To muffle tortured cries, Duch had the windows and doors paneled with glass.

In what was once the students’ playground is a chinning bar, with which Duch devised a new torture. Interrogators, some as young as 12 to 18 years old, would rope the prisoner’s hands in the back and suspend him upside down until he lost consciousness. At which point they would instantly revive him by dunking his head in a jar of water with fertilizer dung, for further torturing. Nearby was written Duch’s house rules, crudely translated on a wooden board:

”(1) You must answer accordingly my questions; do not turn away. (2) Do not try to hide facts by making pretexts. You are strictly prohibited to contest me. (3) Do not be a fool, for you dare to thwart the revolution. (4) You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect. (5) Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution. (6) While being lashed or electrocuted you must not cry at all. (7) Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting. (8) Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or treason. (9) If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many lashes or electric wire. (10) If you disobey any point of my regulations, you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.”

The other buildings served as Duch and staff’s offices. They dutifully kept records of their daily activities, and confessions of their detainees. It all depended on the latter, it seemed, how long they wanted to suffer before admitting to anything the tormentors demanded. The gardens became graveyards, two-dozen corpses to a hole. Those with eyeglasses or soft palms or fair skin were definitely intellectuals or office workers who at once were marked for extermination. S-21 could kill only so many prisoners per day. It and counterparts had to truck tens of thousand others for “more efficient” machine-gunning in the Killing Fields 30 minutes away.

On the day S-21 was liberated 14 corpses, one a female, were found in the torture rooms, freshly murdered. Only seven prisoners, all males, remained alive, plus four toddlers, two girls and two boys. One of the survivors, Bou Meng, sits by the museum gate, selling copies of his autobiography for $10. And Pen manages a smile, profusely thanking the tipping visitors, all of whom leave wondering how all this could have happened in the “modern world”.

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