Tuol Sleng Torture Museum

Cambodia, Pnhom Pehn, Boeng Kak Lake Area,
22-02-2010.

The reign of man's inhumanity against man is unbearable. A small but moving bit of graffity on one of the walls of the Tuol Sleng Torture Museum in Pnhom Pehn...

Walking through the crowded streets and multible alleys of this vibrant city full with human activity it is difficult to imagine that the Pol Pot regime pretty much emptied this three million inhabitants town, marching the population of to the country site, to a certain death by disease, starvation and 12 to 15 hours of hard labour under a glaring hot sun, bad nutrition and no medication, sh*t not even a tooth brush or a bar of soap was allowed for the infortunates...

Coffee houses with a strong French colonial feel to it bring my tested emotions some relieve after my first visit to Tuol Sleng and its strong tangible horrors of the past, faded photographs showing thge stunned visitors the madness of a insane regime, once again convincing me that the Beast within the human race is easily enough released but not so easily restrained...

Chinese flop houses give the city a feeling of what it must have been during French colonisation, no high rise buildings like Bangkok where the sky train runs on top of a three storey highways full with congested motorised traffic, instead I walk through a maze of small alleys bordered by four floor high Chinese flop houses so common in Yaowarat in Krung Thep, or the Chinese districts of Singapore or Penang where the usual mode of transport is the inevitable motorbike, where every house has its own little Chinese temple, incense burning and a bowl of food offerings to please to spirits of the ancestors - one never knows what a displeased spirit might be up to after all, reminding me of my own little Thai Phra Phum temple back in my house in Amsterdam...

Countless visits to these Asian superstitutious countries, long and difficult conversations with the locals and numerous unexplained spiritul happenings in my own Farang life have convinced me not to take the concept of Asian spirituality too lightly...though one has to open up once mind before it can take root, especially so when the mind is western trained, educated to ridecule anything else but the Cristian/Protestant faith as heathen and therefore bad...

Well, the spirits calling out for revenge at the Tuol Sleng Museum were real enough...in my mind anyway!!!