The Killing Fields

Somber just doesn’t describe it. I had seen the movie and I had read the history but it just fails to impart the true horror that Cambodian people inflicted on themselves. Sure there were some Westerners who were victims, even one Aussie, but by far the greatest number of those who suffered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge were Cambodians themselves. Pretty well everyone was suspect. If you had a university degree, if you were a monk, if you had an administrative role, even if you wore glasses you were rounded up and tortured until you confessed and once you confessed you were sent off to be executed in the most cost effective manner possible. Your place of execution was the killing fields. 

There are 20,000 mass graves across Cambodia as result of the Khmer Rouge. The UN estimates that 1,386,734 victims were murdered. Total loss of life attributed to the Khmer Rouge and their policies, including starvation, is between 2 to 2.5 million. The population at the time was 8 million. The North Vietnamese invaded in 1979 effectively ending the reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Remember that America had only just lost the Vietnam War, no one wanted to see the North Vietnamese as the liberating heros so the exiled government of Pol Pot was still recognised as legitimate for many years after. 

Cambodia has had a terrible time of it. They were effectively a French colony from 1863 to 1953 with three years of Japanese rule thrown into the mix during WWII. They then had independence from 1953 until 1970 but the government and the United States dragged them into the Vietnam conflict and because some of the Ho Chi Minh trail ran through Cambodia they were bombed by an extraordinary amount of ordinance. In fact there were more than 2,700,000 tons of bombs dropped on Cambodia, about 1,000,000 more than Japan received in WWII.

Anyway, back to the Killing Fields. The Choeung Ek killing field is 17 kilometres out of Phnom Penh. We jumped a tuk tuk and headed through the horrendous traffic, the rotting sewers and the incredible industry that surrounds you in Cambodia, with factories backing on to rice fields. You alight at a quite inauspicious site and pay your $6US and receive an audio guide in your chosen language and set off on a hour of horror as the banal story unfolds and you walk around a site where 20,000 people were murdered. 

You see the bone and clothing fragments pushing up through the ditches, once five metres deep, from where the bodies were disinterred. There is a tree were they smashed babies heads to kill them. The weapons used to carry out the killing are also on display. Bullets weren’t used as they were too expensive so poison, spades or sharpened bamboo sticks. Inside the Buddhist Memorial Stupa at Choeung Ek, there is evidence of bayonets, knives, wooden clubs, hoes for farming and curved scythe all used as implements of genocide. Humanity at its very worst, showcased in what was an old orchard and Buddhist burial ground. 

There is a Buddhist Stupa, what the catholics would call a reliquary, containing the bones of many of the victims. It is adorned with the traditional symbols of the Napa and the Garuda, these are normally mortal enemies, when they are shown together they are a symbol of peace. 

Just to make sure we were thoroughly depressed we went from there to S - 21 the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. It was a former High School that was re purposed as a torture centre, one of 196 that were scattered around the country. About 20,000 people passed through it. The unmarked graves of the last 14 victims are here, the implements of torture are here, the cells are here and the photos are here, thousands of photos, many of them unidentified, the carefully recorded but now anonymous victims of this one torture centre.

Quite frankly it was all a little too much. We headed back to hotel and tried to wash off the sickening feeling in the pit of our stomachs from viewing such horror. Oui jumped into the shower, I had took to the pool, neither of us really felt like lunch. I headed out to check out the Royal Palace, it was incredibly impressive but it was hard to forget the horror of the morning and quite frankly I shouldn’t.

Tomorrow we fly out to Hong Kong.