The Other Side of Things

A day at the Genocide museums. The Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng, a torture centre under the Pol Pot regime. . .

It's always astonishing how much you don't know about these enormous wantonly cruel events that upturn millions of people's worlds; how easy it is to read about them and forget as statistics; how recent it all is; how the West and UN went on supporting the regime for so long - and of course how much was bound up in global politics.

At the Killing Fields museum you're handed headphones and wander alone among green trees and a lake listening to tails of brutality, blood and noise, your attention drawn to a bit of skull here, or a tree used for bashing babies' brains out over there. Over 8,000 people's bones peer down from the memorial. The old questions: What is humanity capable of? Who executed (literally) the commands? (As usual, apparently alienated youth. . .) How did people let it happen? What would I have done?

Tuol Sleng is bare: concrete blocks, a school in the middle of town. A 60's construction like in any town. No fancy museum, just the bare bedsteads where they found the remains of the last victims, and room after room of school notice boards of black and white photos of baleful, definiant, scared, incredulous or just very human staring out. And mad confessions. That weird habit of brutality to record minute details.

Not a great place to get Congo out the system. A reminder of all the unfound, uncounted and meaningless dead and the daily torture we really don't know much about. And questions about how people move on, how trust grows again, and what are the responsibilities of outsiders. An unwelcome reminder of the bloodiness of central Africa I'm wilfully doing my best to obliviate.

Alan Bennet's Hector in The History Boys: They go on school trips nowadays, don't they? Auschwitz. Dachau. What has always concerned me is where do they eat their sandwiches? Drink their coke?

We spent the evening with cocktails at the Foreign Correspondents' Club and the imagined glamour that experience (think Coco's or Doga's) belies. It's fantastically stylish (maybe they just do things better here?) with an open bar overlooking the river, and low wooden fans gently clacking. Not a thought of Genocide.