Cambodia- Phnom Penh, The Killing Fields

Cambodia is gorgeous.  The scenery is amazing, the people friendly and quick to laugh. Along the hwy from Phnom Penh I saw straw huts on stilts, and huge grey cattle wandered in front if the bus. An American ex pat from Vietnam told me that last year on this route they hit one.


At 8 this morning I went to the killing fields, or at least the memorial at Choeung Ek 15 km south of Phnom Penh.  They show a short clip then there is a photo museum. The players are illustrated, photos of victims, the process of execution and examples of the tools they used are presented in glass cases.

Outside you can see the actual indentations in the land where the mass graves are. Over 8500 bodies.  There is a tree cheerfully named "the killing tree" where guards held children by their ankles and swung them against the tree, dashing their heads and killing them. Many of the captors were barely in their teens themselves.  A glass case holds the clothing from many of the unearthed victims. Another encases the bones, mostly arm and leg bones, of many victims. Most shocking of all is  commemorative stupa at the center of the compound filled with thousands of skulls of the victims at Choeung Ek. The whole thing is shocking.


My next stop was s.21,  Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a security building ordered by Pol Pot. It was a school converted to a detention center in Aug 1975. It is by all accounts a veritable house of horrors. The Khmer rouge regime was build on a fallacy it could never realize. They meant to create a completely independent and self sufficient state. The destroyed the National bank, and took apart the freemarket system. The idea was to create an agriculturally based society. People were forced into slave labour in the fields.  They captured intellectuals, pop stars, monks, politicians, random citizens, and their own party members with reckless abandon. They detained, tortured and killed roughly 20000 who were at some point detained here over it's 4 year existence.


The conditions were incredibly in humane, cells scarcely 3 feet wide by 6 long held up to 2 prisoners. They were given ammunition cases for their waste and subsisted on a rice soup that was mostly water.

They were tortured until they gave up the names of friends and family for any number of imagined crimes. The people named were in turn rounded up and tortured as the morbid cycle continued.  After a 2-6 month stay they were told they were to be taken to better housing, blindfolded and loaded on trucks. At the killing fields loudspeakers blared to cover the sound as one by one they were unloaded, and beaten with a metal pipe at the edge of a mass open grave. Then their throats were slit, or heads removed. Once dead they were cast into the pit and the next victim was brought forth.

It's hard to fathom the atrocities committed at the two sites, and hundreds of others around Cambodia. The lady who we'd hired as a guide had personally lost many family members. It was heartbreaking listening to her tell her story so plainly, as if talking about something so removed as Ancient Egypt or the dark ages. I'm glad that I had come to visit this place, but I don't I'll ever be back.


Images of Choeung Ek

Choeung Ek Genocide Center

Paintings buy a survivor of S.21
Trucks leaving S.21 for the killing fields

Prisoners beaten with a club, then their
throats cut

Thrown into a mass grave

Actual skulls showing the damage
inflicted by different instruments. Mostly
farming implements.

A thatched roof covers a mass grave of roughly 455 victims

Its barely 12 feet by 20

Barbed wire on the walls surrounding the complex
serve as a pointed reminder of the conditions
of the DK regime

The sign here says "Please don't walk on the mass grave"
It struck me funny. 

The Killing Tree

The center of the complex is this 'supa' that
commemorates the victims. Offerings of flowers and inscense
placed at the foot of the steps

From the steps looking in

Inside are shelves behind glass where perhaps thousands
of skulls of victims sit, staring endlessly

About 4 stories of shelves filled with skulls extend up
the monument

S.21 Images

After capture victims were photographed,
forced to give a biography then shackled.

Of the 4 buildings, building C has been left how it
was found. The balconies were covered in barbed wire
to prevent suicides

Victims were shackled together onto pieces of iron rebar
Many died and were left to rot for days amongst the living

On the upper floors of the school, tiny cells were built.
They are roughly 3x6 and housed 2 people. The
ammo box on the floor was for waste.

Prisoners were chained to the floor of their cells.