CAMBODIA- PHNOM PEHN
The hairdresser with the best reviews in Phnom Pehn was actually this gay bar/hair salon where you can get a cut and cocktail at the same time. At night they clear the floor and it becomes a mini nightclub.
This is the haunting location of Tuol sleung genoicide museum. The site is a former high school which was converted into the notorious security prison 21 (S-21) by the Khmer rouge regime from it's rise to power in 1975 to its fall in 1979. It estimated that 20,000 people were tortured and killed in this prison in the most horrible ways from waterboarding, to surgeries with no anesthetic, even skinnings. The Khmer rouge and it's leader Pol Pot did these tortures as a means to get prisoners to admit to the crimes they were arrested for. However, these people were mainly being arrested because they were educated, skilled or part of the previous government. Pol Pot wanted to eradicate these "corrupt" city people and turn the country into a nation of peasants that would obey him under his strict, communist regime .
One of the torture rooms where prisoners were starved, beaten and tortured until they admitted to crimes they didn't commit. You gets shivers walking through these rooms thinking about the pain and torment they experienced.
make-shift toilet box and leg chains
Each prisoner was photographed on arrival to the prison. It was sickening to think of how many innocent people were murdered in this place.
Khmer Rouge guards at the prison were uneducated so they didn't know what the symbol of a number represented. Markings on the wall like this helped them keep prisoners in the right cells.
Claustrophobic cells where prisoners spent 2-3 months being tortured before being sent to the killing fields
Old waterboarding torture equipment.
The Killing Fields are a number of sites where collectively over 1 million people were killed and buried by the Khmer rouge regime. This particular site is one of the largest with 139 mass graves containing at least 20,000 bodies (only 43 have been excavated). It is frightening walking around the site imagining what these innocent people would have gone through in the final moments before they were killed. Now people leave wrist bands and objects as a symbol of respect for the victims.
Bones, teeth and clothing that wash up to the surface during heavy rains at the site
I couldn't help but notice the group of giggling children that were playing in the pond just next door to the site with such terrifying history. It was very symbolic of the optimism that the future generation exuded and their willingness to continue on as a nation, despite their past.
