Mike Yardley: Horror and hope in Phnom Penh - Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

Lusciously located at the confluence of the mighty Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers, the very name Phnom Penh conjures up an image of the exotic. I recently visited Cambodia’s capital with Emerald Cruises on their magnificent week-long float from Ho Chi Minh City. From the fluttering saffron robes of passing monks to the glimmering spires of the Royal Palace, Phnom Penh struts its Buddhist stripes at every turn. But the Cambodian capital’s shine was egregiously tarnished by the ravages of the Khmer Rouge regime. Forty years on, Phnom Penh aspires to be as electric as Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh City, with swanky new developments and the hip, edgy design boom revving up the city centre’s allure, and eye-catching skyscrapers extravagantly reframing the skyline. Come nightfall, there is no question that Phnom Penh is one of the most illuminated cities in Asia, radiantly aglow in the city’s insatiable obsession with playful, escapist light shows. The city is lit!

But the shameful shadow of Pol Pot and his abominable regime is a stain that cannot be airbrushed away – or joyfully dressed up in fairy lights. The past bastardry is still central to the city narrative. Remarkably, when the Khmer Rouge grabbed power, it forced most of its three million residents into the countryside, apart of its grand vision for a classless agrarian society. Today, Phnom Penh resembles a city of startling contrasts, from extreme poverty to ostentatious wealth. It’s a city gripped by entrenched state corruption and the reaffirming kindness of locals you meet. Virtually everyone I chatted to was scathing of Cambodia’s slavish dependence on China. Nearly 50% of their public debt is owed to China, with more “debt trap” loans in the works. Phnom Penh is a city where the streets have no name – merely numbers. The legacy of the Khmer Rouge looms large as one of the central reasons to visit the city and to reflect on history’s epic horrors, dipping into the darkest corners of the country's traumatised past. It’s an unvarnished, gut-wrenching experience.

My first shore excursion with Emerald Cruises was to one of Cambodia’s biggest Killing Fields. Under Pol Pot's maniacal rule from 1975 to 1979, roughly a quarter of Cambodia’s population was murdered, the genocide of roughly 2 million people. Tens of thousands of Khmer Rouge prisoners who had been tortured at the infamous S-21 prison were then taken just out of town to the Choeung Ek extermination camp, which was previously a Chinese cemetery and longan orchard. Prisoners would arrive blind-folded unaware of the brutality that was about to unfold. Our guide pointed out the tree named the Killing Tree, which is where children would be beaten to death. Another tree has been named the Music Tree. The Khmer Rouge executioners would hang speakers from the tree and blast out loud music to drown out the screams of people being bludgeoned to death, so that those awaiting their fate remained oblivious to the evil about to be unleashed.

The Killing Tree. Photo / Mike Yardley

My guide soberly remarked that most people were viciously bludgeoned to death by farm implements, because the Khmer Rouge didn’t want to waste precious money on bullets. The most sickening spectacle at this site are the shards of bones and clothing sticking up from the vast mounds of dirt that mark the mass graves. Every time it rains, the earth reveals more and more of its sinister secrets, lurking beneath the surface. Most mass graves have been left untouched. Today the camp is a memorial site. A monumental 17-storey glass stupa, built 25 years ago, rises up from the centre, filled with 8,000 skulls, exhumed from the mass graves nearby. It's a harrowing spectacle – steel yourself. Many of the skulls, which are grouped according to age and sex, bear the holes and slices from the blows that killed them.

Photo / Mike Yardley

Back in town, we visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, another horrific reminder of the cruelty humans are capable of inflicting. Once a neighbourhood high school, the building was seized by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and turned into a prison and interrogation centre, the dreaded S-21. During the prison's four years of operation, an estimated 20,000 Cambodians were tortured here before being transferred to the Killing Fields for execution. Initially it was the previous governments officials, academics, doctors, teachers, students, factory workers, monks and engineers that were imprisoned.

The regime was paranoid about educated Cambodians becoming CIA spies and went to outrageous lengths to interrogate inmates and force out confessions – many of which were false confessions. Prisoners were routinely beaten and tortured with electric shocks, searing hot metal instruments and hanging. Some were cut with knives or suffocated with plastic bags. Other methods for generating confessions included pulling out fingernails while pouring alcohol on the wounds a