The Master of Confessions (22 page)

The septuagenarian historian lets a moment of silence pass.

“C'est tout,”
he says in French, with a sad smile.

P
HNOM PENH COMMEMORATES ITS LIBERATION TWICE A YEAR,
though on neither date was the city actually liberated. On April 17, Phnom Penhers remember the city's liberation from the yokes of imperialism, feudalism, and military dictatorship: it was on this day in 1975 that Cambodia's Communists entered the city almost unopposed. Alas, that liberation quickly led to a nation of slaves and martyrs. Barely had Phnom Penh been liberated when she was begging to be liberated from her liberators, which is what her citizens celebrate on January 7: the day the Vietnamese army entered the city in 1979, meeting little resistance as they freed Phnom Penh from Pol Pot's terror. The price of that liberation was occupation by a much-loathed neighbor, one that many Cambodians have long suspected of wanting to annex their nation. So Phnom Penh was liberated, but still not free. Ten years later, on September 26, 1989, the Vietnamese officially withdrew from the capital, and Phnom Penh was liberated for the third time in a decade and a half. This third liberation is the only one that didn't happen by force, and the only one that didn't immediately create the need to rid the city of its liberators. It's the only one that isn't commemorated today.

Phnom Penh is a city that gives herself without reservation, that lets herself be abused without flinching. She abandons herself to those who possess her just as she does to those who inhabit her, and she regrets it too late. She is a small town grown big, still curiously sweet and kind despite the devastations she has suffered. Discreet, vulnerable, radiant, Phnom Penh is a city that, despite her haunting past, continues to embody her citizens' finest qualities.

IT WAS THE VIETNAMESE ARMY
that, during the second liberation of Phnom Penh, discovered first S-21 and then the killing field at Choeung Ek. Both sites quickly became the principal memorials to the crimes committed in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. S-21 was rapidly turned into a “genocide museum,” while a massive Buddhist memorial, or
stupa
, consisting of hundreds of skulls sitting on shelves behind glass in a column, was raised on the edge of the graves of Choeung Ek.

Today, at S-21, in the two square courtyards on either side of Building E, in which the painters Bou Meng and Vann Nath were locked up and ordered to paint Brother Number One, there are paths crisscrossing four rectangular lawns lined with frangipani, palm, and mango trees. I was resting on a bench there one day when three Cambodian students from the Royal University approached me and asked me to participate in a survey. Their question was: should the nation continue to use the U.S. dollar alongside its own currency, or should the riel be the only legal tender?

Disconcerted, I stammered: “Isn't it a bit peculiar to carry out this study here?”

“Yes, it is,” said one of the students, impeccably polite. “But we chose it because you meet foreigners here.”

They're not wrong. Nowadays, most tourists who visit the Cambodian capital visit four places: the Royal Palace and the National Museum on the one hand, and S-21 and Choeung Ek on the other. In Cambodia, perhaps more than anywhere else, mass tourism has taken on mass murder.

Paradoxically, the place is a bit of a mess. The level of maintenance at S-21 is perfunctory at best, which gives it a crude, unvarnished atmosphere. Part of the brutality of the experience of visiting S-21, of feeling it in your body, comes from the stains on the walls and floors and the rings caused by moisture; from the dusty, forgotten corners underneath the staircases cluttered with old signs, liquor bottles, barbed wire, and worn boards; from the relics of previous exhibitions now falling into decay, such as the plaster puppet that once hung from the portico in the courtyard; and from the objects left over from the crime itself, such as the old, accordion-bellows camera on its tripod, or the two boxes filled with rags, bones, and skulls.

S-21 draws much of its grim power from its shabby maintenance, even if it is a little unseemly at times. The ceilings in Building A, where the most important prisoners were kept, are dangerously close to collapse, and have been hastily propped up with provisional wooden shoring. In Building B, the ceilings are actually collapsing. A deep crack spans the load-bearing wall beneath the main staircase in Building C. In mid-2010, the museum's director told me he could foresee one day having to close the old prison cells to the public to avoid accidents. Rubbish, piles of broken bricks, the carcasses of various objects, and wild banana trees litter the empty lots behind the buildings.

The former cells and interrogation rooms, their yellow-and-white-tiled floors turning brown and their distempered walls scarred with haunting abrasions, feel frozen in time. In these rooms, where torture was carried out until the very last day, large photographs of the swollen bodies found tied to metal bed frames are so faded that their horror seems to have surrendered to the modesty instilled by the passage of time. The buildings' façades, shutters, and balconies have all acquired the weathered, dusty colors of disuse. The clouds of bats that have colonized the complex sleep peacefully under its more remote roofs, and splatter the ground beneath them with their droppings. Nothing is really filthy and yet everywhere feels dirty.

One room, kept in particularly good condition, is forbidden to visitors and permanently air-conditioned. It is the room where the incalculably valuable S-21 archives are kept: 6,147 photos, of which 5,382 are of prisoners; 4,186 write-ups of interrogations; 6,226 biographies. Duch's treasure trove.

The precious confessions are filed in dozens of black boxes lined up on the shelves of five large, old, wooden bookcases. Little seems to have changed in the layout of the archive room in at least fifteen years, and there's something particularly admirable about the staff preserving it in this way. On the day I visited with a journalist friend, I watched one of the archivists patiently remove the rusted old staples holding the sheets of paper together. Her attention to the fragility of the archives was moving: first, she covered the staple holes with a small square of adhesive tape; then, she replaced the staples with plastic paperclips, making sure to slip a small piece of paper between the file and the clip. The fragility of those documents, as thin as Bible paper, sent a chill down my spine. On the interrogation summary she was holding, I read:
NEOU PHEAP, 27/4/76, SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD.

These confessions were the core of the concentration-camp machine. Yet none are publicly displayed and their importance isn't explained to visitors, who never get to see the meticulous margin notes made by Duch, his superiors, or his subordinates. There's no public exhibit of what produced this hellhole before it destroyed people, nor does the public get to see the death lists handed to the drivers who transported the victims to Choeung Ek. The museum draws its strength from the fact that it offers visitors not just sights but feelings. What's on display isn't necessarily a representation of what it was like, and what it was like isn't clearly explained.

In one of the interior courtyards are some “educational” information panels written in the language of pro-Vietnamese Communist propaganda, strewn with dated and embarrassing turns of phrase denouncing the “Pol Pot–Ieng Sary clique.” No tourist can resist taking photos of the famous text, writ large on one of the panels, of the ten commandments regulating the prison's “security agents” (the French version is hardly less crude than the English):

Yet these commandments didn't actually exist, at least not in the form in which they're presented: no instance of them can be found in S-21's voluminous archives. This text, which makes such an impression on visitors, and in front of which tourists never fail to cluster, is a reconstitution based on a number of testimonies. The rules are similar to those imposed on the victims of S-21. But nonetheless they constitute a false truth in a place where, at its height, a false confession meant a death sentence. The construction of collective memory doesn't trouble itself with scruples.

Likewise, the torture instruments on show were collected during the Vietnamese occupation, and while some of the objects and tools are from S-21, others are not. A chilling rectangular wooden bathtub, for example, to the bottom of which prisoners were attached by the feet, was recovered from elsewhere.

In the exhibition rooms, photos drawn from different archives have long been juxtaposed in the greatest possible disorder, devoid of captions or any chronological or thematic arrangement. For years, visitors have been viewing them without the slightest idea of what they were looking at. Lost in the middle of it all is a photo taken in 1981 of the seven people then known to have survived S-21. Among them are the painters Vann Nath and Bou Meng, as well as the mechanic Chum Mey, who continues to come to the museum three times a week to earn a small income as a guide. Some tourists, if they are accompanied by an interpreter, are privileged enough to visit S-21 in the company of one of its three surviving ex-prisoners. One day, two months prior to the start of Duch's trial, I found Chum Mey standing in front of the glass board in which his uncaptioned photo sits next to equally anonymous photos of his torturers. The survivor with the lustrous white hair was trying to make three American tourists understand that that was him standing there in the photo; that he was Chum Mey. When their good fortune dawned on one of the Americans, he quickly made his friends stand next to Chum Mey and the thirty-year-old photo of him.

Say cheese. And then they left.

Under a staircase in Building C, in a corner hidden from view, there's a crumbling plaster wall on which tourists have marked their “thoughts,” reminders of their important visit to S-21. All the absurdity of the modern tourist is revealed in their graffiti:

At the corner inside S-21 where tourists reach the end of their visit, a souvenir shop sells “Pol Pot sandals”—simple soles cut from tires and fitted with black rubber straps—as well as sunglasses, silverware, stamps, counterfeit bills, and pirated copies of books and DVDs. Their connection with the history of the Khmer Rouge is weak, at best. But today's Cambodia, for better or worse, is open for business.

Two weeks after the verdict is handed down in Duch's trial, I spend an afternoon taking two friends visiting from overseas around S-21. In the courtyard, in the shade of the frangipani trees, their yellow-and-white flowers quietly beautiful despite their empty hearts, Bou Meng and Chum Mey sit on a bench, talking and waiting. Chum Mey is hoping to earn a few dollars from tourists. Bou Meng and his devoted young wife are planning to sell copies of the autobiography he has just written. Tourists walk past without paying them any attention. The two survivors watch, unable to communicate. Bou Meng is going on a trip to a Scandinavian country soon, and is pleased about it; he proudly shows me the little UNESCO badge he wears on his belt. The museum is now a World Heritage site. Major renovation work has begun. The main entrance is being moved, so tourists will no longer enter through the victims' gate. The roof of Building A is being restored. The rear of Buildings B and C has been cleared of the banana trees and rubbish.

Shops also fill the ground around the entrance through the perimeter fence protecting Choeung Ek. A journalist friend of mine described the skulls and skeletons in the memorial here as “simple evidence of a complicated horror.” The thousands of bones found in the killing field are exhibited over seventeen floors in the sixty-two-meter-high glass-and-marble tower, and constitute a perfect visual feast for
homo touristicus
, who remembers not what he sees but what he photographs.