Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER TWO
The Second Revolution
The invading troops entered a ghost city. By January 7, 1979, just 20,000 Khmer Rouge
soldiers and workers remained in Phnom Penh—a small fraction of the prewar population.
Elizabeth Becker, visiting the capital days before the invasion, later described a cityscape
in an eerie state of suspended animation:
Government buildings were freshly painted; the railway station was a muted coral colour, the old
ministry of information a soft yellow. The parks were immaculate, the lawns reseeded and mowed,
the flower beds weeded and in bloom. There was no litter on the streets, no trash, no dirt. But then
there were no people either, no bicycles or buses and very few automobiles.
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Behind this showcase facade, four years of neglect had taken their toll. Backstreets were
strewn with trash and vegetation sprouted from cracked pavements. The empty Central
Market, a domed Art Deco gem from the French era, was surrounded by overgrown palms.
Nearby, the old National Bank lay in ruins, blown up by Khmer Rouge soldiers in April
1975. Cars, furniture, clothes, and consumer goods stood everywhere in rusting heaps, the
decaying relics of a submerged era of wealth and middle-class prosperity. Parts of the city
were strangely untouched by the upheavals of the past four years. Many survivors recalled
finding their family possessions right where they had left them in 1975, troubled only by
the patter of rodents and the encroachments of the tropical climate.
At Tuol Sleng in the city's south, two Vietnamese journalists stumbled across a three-
story concrete school building ringed with barbed wire. Like many government offices,
S-21 had been abandoned during the hurried evacuation of the capital. In their haste, the
prison's staff, including its chief, Comrade Duch, had no time to cover up the evidence
of their grisly work. In the tiled classrooms, torture victims, recently executed, remained
strapped to metal bed frames. Elsewhere, the Vietnamese eventually found thousands of
prisoner confessions and eerie monochrome snapshots of the prison's victims, each bear-
ing witness to the horror and paranoia that had consumed Democratic Kampuchea until its
final days.
