The first two thirds of the bus ride were uneventful. The road was paved (a new development in Cambodian overland travel), and the bus reasonably air-conditioned. Unfortunately, about 4 hours into the 6 hour run, the air con froze up. A little cool air still trickled from the vents, but nearly enough to counter the full load of warm bodies crammed inside. The last two hours were pretty sweaty, and not enhanced by the carsick toddler in the row behind us. Luckily he had only eaten banana and rice, so it didn't smell much or go anywhere but on himself and his poor mom's lap.
We expected our arrival in Phnom Penh to feel much like our arrival in Delhi - hot, crowded, hassly, and full of touts. There were some fairly aggressive tuk-tuk drivers, but we were able to negotiate a fair deal to our guest house fairly easily. The guest house proved better than expected, with our own immaculate bathroom, towels, and even air conditioning. I did some laundry, and we basked for a while in our cool cocoon before deciding to walk to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
The museum is housed in S-21, or Security Office 21 of the Khmer Rouge. In a previous life, it had been a high school. When the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, they divided the classrooms into cells and interrogation rooms. Even the playground exercise equipment was converted for use as torture devices. The frame of the swing set still stands, which in Khmer Rouge times was a place where prisoners would be hoisted up by their wrists and abused until they lost consciousness. Of the approximately 14,000 people imprisoned there from 1975-1979, only 7 survived. Most of the high-ranking officials have evaded trial and justice in a political and legal morass. More horrifying still are the hundreds of children trained as guards and torturers. Most Cambodians agree not to prosecute these children, believing that had they not become child soldiers, they too would have died, and that have punished themselves enough in their own minds. 
Today, S-21 is a strangely peaceful place. When arrived at 4PM, the late afternoon sun slanted through windows and across the courtyard giving the yellow walls a warm glow. Birds twittered in the flowerings trees of the courtyard, and two Khmer children chased each other on bicycles, shrieking and laughing, incongruous sounds to come in through the window of room still containing the iron bed and shackles of its last, doomed inhabitant. The first building is a stark reminder of the atrocities carried out here. Each classroom contains the bed and shackles of its last resident. A single, mercifully grainy, black and white photo in each room shows that bed and room as they were found, with the broken body of the prisoner still chained in place.
The first floor of the next building contains hundreds of mug shots of victims as they were brought into S21. Entire families were brought in for 'reeducation', from infants to grandparents. In no photo is anyone crying, not even the babies. Everyone stares at the camera with faces registering shock, fear, defiance, confusion -a whole range of emotion, but all contained. Perhaps most striking are the old men and ladies who face the camera with chins up, eyes straight ahead. They perhaps know best what is to come, but somehow manage to preserver their dignity. In another photo, a little boy of about ten pulls away from a guard just visible to the side, cocks his hip, and smirks at the camera with all his youthful bravado. In yet another picture a young woman stares straight ahead with sad eyes, her arms wrapped gently around the new baby sleeping in her lap. Near her picture, a toddler purses her lips and peers coyly out of the frame, looking for all the world like PI (Cz's niece in the Philippines) posing for a family photo. Further down the line, a college-age girl poses in a souvenir t-shirt from Miami Beach, Florida. It is impossible to remember every face, no matter how hard one tries, but as a group, they represent the brightest of Phnom Penh, and the hope for a solid future snuffed out. Individually, they are the mothers, sisters, brothers, fathers, husbands, whole families whose stories will never be known because the Khmer Rouge saw to it that there no one was left to bear witness.
The final group of buildings remain divided into cells. The cells are about 3 feet wide by seven feet long, built with red bricks in former classrooms. The lucky inmates had most a of a window in their cells. The less fortunate received only the barest sliver of daylight. Everyone was chained at the ankle and regularly tortured. Even now, the rooms are dark and musty, and smell faintly of dust and rot.Other floors of each section contain exhibits dedicated to the memories of those who were interrogated at S21 before being executed at the killing fields. The exhibits range from amateur paintings showing prison life to photos and stories from surviving family members, to shelves of skulls and torture devices.
It is a sobering place, made more so because it is not softened by many years of history. The events of S-21 happened within most of our lifetimes. The Khmer Rouge only fell in 1979. Cambodia was only fully opened to Western visitors in 1996. To this day, there is debate over the extent of the atrocities committed under Pol Pot, and over whether the perpetrators will be or should brought to justice nearly 30 years too late. The US does not have clean hands in the matter. Our involvement in Vietnam, and later carpet bombing and invasion of eastern Cambodia caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths directly, and hundreds of thousands more to turn to the Khmer Rouge, who would later execute them. Among the many facts which remain hazy are exact numbers of people killed. The most recent study indicates it is probably 2, but perhaps as much as 3 million. In a small country of 14 million, that potentially represents nearly quarter of the population. 
I am amazed that the events here do not get more press. In school, we all read The Diary of Anne Frank and learn about the Nazi's, but of SE Asia, most of us only learn about Vietnam with a glancing look at Pol Pot. No one seems to want to hear the stories of families fleeing into Thailand across mine-infested forests, or of children forced to work as executioners. Perhaps we hear less about them because in this case we were not the liberating heroes, as we were in Europe. Perhaps, even more cynically, we do not hear about it because the victims were not white people in a place where Westerners regularly visit. Perhaps it is a case of history already repeating itself in Africa and the Middle East. We failed the first time we got involved, and we are continuing to fail around the world. Rather than face the embarrassment, perhaps the West is preferring to simply sweep events under the rug. I know too little of world politics to offer anything more than observation. I have nothing to offer in the way of opinion of what we could or should do beyond that observation. Perhaps it is enough to bear witness, to tell stories. It is impossible for any one person or country to save the world, and arrogant to try. It is, however, I think the responsibility of each individual to try to make it a little better. And by doing that, perhaps it can be saved.
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