Killing Fields

*Warning* – Don’t read this if you don’t want to know the gritty truth of how people can treat each other.

Cambodia has a cruel and gruesome past that I don’t think many people in the western world are aware of. In 1975 Pol Pots Khmer Rouge regime came to power and during their 4 year reine they managed to completely destroy the country and nearly 2 million people died as a result of starvation or execution by their government.

On their first day in power the Khmer Rouge completely evacuated the capital of Phnom Penh, telling the people that the Americans were going to bomb the city and they needed to go for their own safety. Millions of people were displaced and taken to work in the fields as the new administration tried to turn Cambodia into a self sufficient county in a forceful way. The borders were closed along with all schools and hospitals and it was said that these things were making the country week. No medicine existed for thousands of people died from treatable diseases.

Along with the thousands who died from famine and disease, thousands more were executed by the government as spys, working for the CIA. Most of these people had never even heard of the CIA before they were arrested and night and taken from their homes to one of the many schools that had now been converted into a prison. The most notorious of these facilities is Phnom Penh’s Security Office 21 (S-21) also now known as Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

Out of 20,000 people who were arrested and taken to S-21 only 7 survived when the prison was liberated by the Vietnamese. The conditions that people were kept in was horrific, often crammed into rooms, chained up next to each other on the floor, only allowed to move when they were taken to be interrogated and tortured in a gruesome way.

I will not go into the detail but the ways people were tortured   is enough to make you sick and what is even worse is when you realise that it was not just grown men in this place, women and children were also arrested and imprisoned in S-21. Pol Pot’s idea was to arrest a whole family if they were accused of being a spy in order to make sure there was never any repercussion from from their family members when they got older. These crimes against humanity were carried out daily to a point where it became inefficient for them to keep killing people in the prison and lead to the construction of the Killing Fields.

There were over 300 killing fields in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge’s rule with the main one in Phnom Penn being about 15km outside of the city centre. Prisoners would be taken there at night and slaughtered on mass. A loud speaker was hung from a tree known as the Magic Tree and would blast out music all night long to muffle the noise of what was happening there. The bodies would also be covered in chemicals to stop the smell of the decay.

Probably the worst thing about the Killing fields wasn’t that they were killing people on mass, it was how they killed them. There was no specific way that people would be executed and it seemed to just be whatever the guard wanted to do at the time. Often this was by hitting the victim in the head with a metal pipe or garden hoe, or by stabbing them with a bayonet. Sometimes they would even just break a leaf off of a palm tree and use the tough serrated edge of the leaf to slit the victims throats. Babies were also killed here by holding them by their feet and them hitting them against a tree to kill them before throwing them into a pit.

When we arrived at the killing fields it was quite late and about 40 mins before closing time, however this seemed to work out well for us as the place was empty and we were able to get a discount price on a guide to show us around. Our guide had worked at the site for over 30 years since the first mass graves were opened and had managed to flee Phnom Penn when things first got back, however the rest of his family were not as lucky and he had lost nearly everyone he knew to the vicious dictatorship. As you walked around the site you could quickly see how basic it was and how shallow the graves had been dug. As the heavy rains start they begin to wash away the fine level of top soil and expose the bones buried just below the surface. The more you walk around the site, the more leg bones and ribs you see popping up from the surface, exposed to the elements to get walked on if people are not too careful. When the bones are high enough out of the ground the are then removed and placed into special storage units for the victims but as soon as you are aware of this your vision becomes more acute and you can see how many are all over the place. In addition to this rags of cloth are protruding from the surface that were once the victims clothings and the little pieces of cloth that they were wearing when they were executed.

The whole place is so grim when you realise the number of people who actually died there and quite ominous when you consider that the whole world was oblivious to what happened at the time, with no one even believing the reports of the refugees that managed to escape the carnage. Certainly sobering information that left our ride home the quietest journey we have ever had.

On a positive note when we had dinner we were joined by a kitten and kittens always brighten the day!