Phnom Penh: Tuol Sleng

It's too easy in Vietnam and Cambodia to be aware only of the present time; the recent prosperity (for some), the relative invisibility of the poor (the majority); the similarities to our own 'home' environments with the local twist. It's too easy to let slip away an appreciation of how recent these things are, and a recognition that these societies were in very different circumstances not so long ago.

Tuol Sleng Museum - Security Prison-21 in the Pol Pot/Khmer Rouge regime - is a difficult place to visit. It's quietness and ordinariness don't prepare you at all.

You arrive with only an academic understanding of the horrors that took place here. But within minutes of glancing, even walking into the detention rooms of Building A you feel heavy with the souls of the tortured and dead. This feeling stays and stays... as you look bleakly at the rooms and rooms of photographs of inmates or contemplate the schoolrooms turned into tiny, dark cells.

Perhaps this was not the best place to start a holiday, and it certainly is not a place to consider visiting lightly, but I think, however dark its history and presence, that what Tuol Sleng Museum preserves is necessary for an awareness of what people have been capable of doing to each other. The personal recollections of a Danish man who visited Democratic Kampuchea between 1975 and 1979 as well as his later reflections on what he believed he was being shown and the photographic record, are a strong lesson about the dangers of political idealism detached from social conscience.