Atrocity on display at Museum of Contemporary Photography
Some of the faces show anger, others confusion. Most simply express sheer terror.
Each man, woman, and child in the pictures is condemned to die under a bloody regime that by its end, would be responsible for the deaths of almost two million Cambodian civilians.
The photographs are part of an exhibit at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. Taken from the archives of Tuol Sleng, a prison in Phnom Penh, they are a visual record of the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge against anyone they perceived might oppose the communist doctrine — government officials, educated people, even people who wore glasses.
For most visitors they are moving, poignant images.
But for Ottawa engineer Phyrun Peou, they evoke painful memories.
“When I saw the pictures from Tuol Sleng, I was weeping, crying. I don’t want to think of all that suffering.”
Peou was about 15 when the Khmer Rouge killed his father.
“We were in Thailand,” explains Peou. “My father had friends. He spoke fluent Thai. We weren’t even in Cambodia when the war started. But my father heard news from Phnom Penh that it wasn’t so bad, that there would be peace. So we started walking back into Cambodia. We walked for days and days.”
Peou’s father worked for the national police. When the Khmer Rouge told him he was needed to process the passports of foreigners in order to expel them from the country, he reported for work.
His family never saw him again.
“We heard later that they cut his throat.”
Now in his early 40s, Peou works at Alcatel in Ottawa’s west end. He’s already seen the photos from Tuol Sleng on the Internet. His face lights up as he talks about his life in Canada. “I’m thankful to all Canadians and to the government that I came here. Here we have everything, if we work hard.”
Peou recounts how his mother, brothers and sisters survived the brutal regime. He remembers how he laboured in the fields from six in the morning until midnight seven days a week, stopping only twice each day for meagre handfuls of rice. Many died of starvation and disease. Others were murdered at the slightest provocation.
“I saw them kill a woman in front of a large group. They tore out her intestines as a lesson, and said not to do what she did.”
In 1979, the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia, ending the regime.
A few years later, Peou and his family came to Canada.
Back then, he says, he couldn’t imagine where he would be today.
“I’m in heaven now.”
Peou says he hopes the exhibit will help Canadians understand what happened.
“When I see those pictures, they make my blood boil…I sit and ask myself, ‘Why? How could this happen?’”
The exhibit runs until Jan. 14.