The next stop on our "Fallout" tour, Phnom Penh (nahm-pen), is the sole urban center and capitol of Cambodia. A dense assembly of 1950s European architecture surrounded by otherwise unbroken rural expanses. While the Khmer of the jungle are characterized by their laughter and smiles, you would not get the same impression in Phnom Penh. The overall tone is one of despair, dissatisfaction, and dissillusionment. As if they left the jungle for this and realize they can't go back. Its some sort of 'innocence-lost' thing. Perhaps this is what inspired Pol Pot and his comrades to reset the calendar to "Year Zero"

The city didn't feel as "sketchy" unsafe as it did a year prior, but it was still strongly suggested not to be out after dark. The cops who will rob you under pretense during the day moonlight as armed robbers and kidnappers by night.

We did find a blotch of festivity and color in the middle of all this grey-black. Chinese-New-Year madness seems to never stop. Double Dragon.

tasty offerings...

lame dragon

stuck in the truck

we really wanted to check this cultural collision out, but there was no time for spectator slowing. as you can imagine, we didnt come for cute kids or bowling...

Although they try to push their Palace and Museum, every visitor to Phnom Penh comes here, to this French-built middle school. Down a sidestreet, just off the main road that is "downtown," past the gauntlet of limbless mine victims clamoring for a dollar or anything.

During the four years or so that the Khmer Rouge were in power, this was Tuol Sleng "Security Office 21", or S-21.

This building housed interrogation and torture rooms for VIP detainees.

They were left mostly as they were, with a large photo illustrating how they were found.

This depiction at the foot of each bed welcomed guests to the promise of a new day...

american tax dollars at work

The second building houses the famous photo-lined walls.

There are indeed many of them. Doing more then a cursory scan however shows numerous duplicates. Some are turned upside down scenes of death, somehow rendered more disturbing by inversion. All together, it's pretty campy. While it is certain that brutal ugly things happened here, it would be better to let the facts speak for themselves, instead of playing it up as some sort of titillating Chamber of Horrors that only cheapens the message. All over there is western graffiti "oh why?!" "don't let this happen again!" "no more!" and others along similar lines. I'm sure it's very reaffirming of ones moral supremacy to come here free of context and understanding to offer lectures to the Khmer on this Hallmark Moment in Tyranny. Maybe it is to impress the hippies of the opposite sex.

These proto-cubicles were brick and wooden cells, the deluxe accomodations.

They allege the barbed wire was to prevent suicide attempts.

The budget accomodation/classroom held hundreds shackled together in leg irons.

Leg-irons and poop-tins.

Many of the detainees were former cadre members and KR soldiers - the Revolution eats its own. Perhaps this fellow is appreciating the irony of it all.

The monks were on the list as well. With the Khmer Rouge followed by the Vietnamese, it is only recently that their ranks have begun to grow again.

They have an entire gallery of art, in an entirely distinct genre. "Tormentor Art"

From depictions of camp life

to recreations of torture with an appreciably baroque sense of perspective

the villians always smirking smug avatars of malevolence

and an entire sub-series on baby-torture just to drive home the point of how irredeemably nasty they were.

"Pull!"

Body-Art

The height of kitsch absurdity: The map of bones and blood. Guess they were running out of things to do with all those skulls...