ONCE AGAIN, WE WANT TO WARN YOU THAT THIS BLOG UPDATE FROM PASTOR MATTHEW IS VERY DIFFICULT TO READ, AND IS NOT APPROPRIATE FOR ALL.

“Toul Sleng”

We are back in Thailand to visit a Love 146 “After Care” partner in Chaing Rai a small city on the northwest of the country. Two days of visits with “Prevention” partners in Cambodia were dark for me and I hesitate to write another dark blog about my time at the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh Cambodia. Hang in there, there are beautiful and funny and joyful things that I have experienced in Chiang Rai to write about soon, but I want you to experience this, as much as possible from 3000+ miles away, as I have. Also it appears to me that a very basic relationship exists between economic injustice, violence, the depravity of those who would exploit a child and the desperation required to allow a child to be exploited … connecting the dots … genocide and trafficking. On its simplest and most brutal level, this is a place where human life has a recent history of being cheap.

Trying to picture hell in the darkest reaches of my imagination … I never pictured anything as horrible as Toul Sleng. Its always hard for me to get my arms around a cosmic struggle between good and evil but the only way to deal with Toul Sleng is to dig deep into the nature of evil. The grounds here and the buildings; the inanimate objects themselves are not evil. People made this place evil and Satan was here with them, and as you walk around Toul Sleng you can still catch glimpses of him.

“And I saw a beast rising out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads. And the beast that I saw was like a leopard; its feet were like a bear’s, and its mouth was like a lions mouth. And to it the dragon gave his power and his throne and his great authority” Revelation 12:1-2

My first clue that this was going to be bad was that Kathy our Love 146 staffer and guide through many difficult things in Cambodia declined to visit Toul Sleng for a second time. In her place we were blessed to have “Daniel” with us. “Daniel” is roughly my age and works as “National Facilitator” with the Love 146 partner network on the ground in Cambodia. He travels Cambodia navigating land mines and tigers (true story) to teach people how to prevent their children from being trafficked. Traffickers have been known to be run out of town after his visits. I say he is roughly my age because when I asked him his age he said “about 38″ and then cackled with uncomfortable laughter. The laughter often manifests itself when he speaks of uncomfortable things … his own built in defense mechanism that adds an element of awkwardness until you get used to it. As a child he narrowly escaped a massacre of children from his village by the Khmer Rouge, only to be removed from his family at age 15, for seven years, to be a child soldier in the regime that followed the Khmer Rouge. He told us of stepping on a land mine activated by the removal of his weight from the bomb and that he prayed to a God he did not know assuming he was dead, and was amazed when the mine failed to explode and he miraculously escaped. Later in Christ, he recognized his savior from the mine field … he cackles endearingly. He also mentions that he was forced to kill “many people” but then pulls it back and says “one or two people” … and then he pulls that back and says “a few” … and he cackles. I look to Kathy and she nods and shrugs. I get the sense that people who have not been forced to kill other people in this place are the exception and not the rule. When Daniel is not protecting children he pastors a local Church … we are both bi-vocational pastors and he smiles broadly when on our last day together I call him “pastor” and tell him that I am honored to have spent time with him. It was incredible to have Daniel to guide us and translate much of it as one who experienced the Khmer Rouge as a child.

Toul Sleng was a school before Pol Pot himself turned it into his own center for torture and murder. Having even a little bit of education was just one of the many things that ensured you were going to get killed by the Khmer Rouge so it would only make sense that they would turn a school into a concentration camp where people were tortured until they signed “confession” documents and then executed. Four three story buildings surround a grassy court yard and are surrounded themselves by a concrete wall topped with a razor wire fence. In the courtyard the gallows remain, along with fourteen graves; some of the last of the 1.3 million people killed by the Khmer Rouge. That is the low estimate so pause and consider that number for a second in comparison with the worst genocides of our time. Remember images from Rwanda? The death toll there was just over 600,000.

Each of the four buildings is brutal in its own way. In the first building each room is empty but for an iron bed with a bamboo mat. Attached to each bed the leg shackles remain where they were left. On the walls of each room is a huge photo of that room as it was found … with a bloated, disfigured, mutilated corpse chained to the bed and a huge puddle of blood on the floor underneath. Incredibly faded blood stains remain on the tile floors today … room after room, twenty or thirty of the similar scenes over and over again. The next building is room after room of photographs. The victims who came through here shortly before they were tortured and killed. Most stare blankly into the camera and our eyes. One in particular sticks with me today … a face of terror in a sea of blank stares. These are photos of people either tortured without mercy and murdered in this place or those lucky enough to photographed and then taken directly to the “Killing Fields”, a short drive away, where they were murdered typically by gun or axe or machete and thrown into mass graves. We did not visit the “Killing Fields” but apparently over 30 years later human bones still litter the ground. There are also pictures of the Khmer Rouge fighters who must also be considered victims on some level, doing what had to be done to stay alive. Daniel tells us that often child soldiers were indoctrinated by being forced to kill a family member… often their own mother. In the third building each room is as it was found, this time further divided using crude brick masonry into 4′x6′ cells, so more people could be jammed into this place. The open balconies on all three floors facing the courtyard are still covered in barbed wire to prevent jumpers from trying to escape or commit suicide. The fourth and the final building is a museum of the instruments of torture and murder used here. On the walls hang crude oil paintings offering a visual of the methods. There is a room with bookcases filled with human skulls. I see a large board set at an angle with leg irons on the top end and arm restraints and the bottom and large empty buckets. I look at the illustration on the wall and am horrified to find Im looking at the instruments of water boarding … I feel sick and ashamed … forced to liken my own government, one I helped vote into power and allowed to stay in power, to the Khmer Rouge.

On the top floor of “Building 4″, they were showing a documentary about the genocide and I sat in the oppressive heat and watched until I felt light headed and claustrophobic. I heard the rumble of thunder outside and moved to the balcony as dark clouds rolled in. Soon other tourists filtered out onto the balcony to watch the storm. Jagged bolts lit up the sky and thunder cracked and rain poured down in magnificent sheets of water. I would be suspicious of any Christian who could walk through this place without deep doubt creeping into heart and soul. How do you reconcile this horrible place with an almighty, sovereign, and loving God? All the rain in the world could not make this place clean. The best I can do is to watch the lighting and hear the thunder and feel the rain on my face and take it as a reminder that He is present now and He was present then … even if at this moment, this place is beyond my own ability to reconcile.

The night before, at dinner in Phnom Penh, a new acquaintance asserted that the western church was misinterpreting sin and satan. He suggested that we put too much emphasis on guilt and shame as a response to sin and too little emphasis on the idea that sin is simply separation from God (which is a true statement, but the context indicated a denial of the doctrine of original sin). I’ve found myself thinking a lot about that conversation the following day as we walked through another Vietnamese slum and toured Toul Sleng. I think I understand what informs this view, and why he said what he said. He has given his life to care for trafficking victims and I admit it is very hard to look in the face of these children and see them as little sinners … “for all have sinned” … really? At the same time I decided, somewhat indignantly that he had it wrong. We do live in a world separated from God, but men with Satan’s encouragement are capable of great evil that goes well beyond simply being separated from God. Guilt and shame are not inappropriate responses for what we are capable of.

Kristian and I were talking about watching Bangkok’s sex tourists in our hotel lobby three nights ago. We were forced to acknowledge that we are really not many steps removed from the perverts … capable of sexual depravity under the cover of anonymity. But the leap from that sin to the kind of evil required to sexually abuse a child requires something that is hard to imagine. Likewise, I’m probably capable of killing another man if I had to. But from that sin to the kind of horrible cruelty perpetrated by one human on another at Toul Sleng requires a similar impossible leap … unless you consider the presence of deep deep evil. Ultimate cosmic victory was won on the cross, but Satan is alive in this world and he inhabits the hearts of men.

Please come Jesus.

“Then I saw heaven open, and behold a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True and in righteousness he judges …” Revelation 19:11