On April 17, 1975 the lives of the Cambodian people were changed forever. A man by the name of Sa lat Sur (alias Pol Pot) ordered the evacuation of the city of Phnom Penh as he began his rule of what came to be known as "Democratic Kampuchea" (aka Communist-run Cambodia) for the next three and a half years. What followed after the evacuation of Phnom Penh was a mass genocide....Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge army executed over 2 million Cambodians during this time, which was over 25% of the country's population.
There were many political tensions leading up to the genocide and the new army was out to kill anyone and everyone who had potential to overturn the new government (therefore, anyone who was thought to be intelligent, anyone professional: doctors, nurses, lawyers, former government employees....basically anyone who wasn't a peasant). Katy and I spent Saturday learning about all of this by visiting Choeung Ek, which was 1 of over 100 killing fields in Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rogue, and Tuol Sleng, a former high school turned torture prison by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 when the genocide started.
Super brief-twosentence-history if you don't already know this information......I mentioned there were political tensions leading up to the genocide. The simplest and most relevant information to give you is that Cambodia was fighting a civil war (Cambodian national army vs. Communist Khmer Rouge), stimulated by the overspilling of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. As I am not an encyclopedia and you do not want to read 100 pages, please google if you want more details :)
Now as for what Katy and I saw.....the next bit is quite depressing and at times really disturbing but I would encourage everyone to keep reading if they want to learn.
There was an audio tour offered at Choeung Ek, which we obviously bought- and it was phenomenal. Taking the recommendation of a fellow traveler, we got there first thing in the morning so that it would be quieter and so that we could really get a feel for the place. The fields are now just a collection of mass graves with a narrow path winding throughout. Signs now stand describing where buildings used to be, and a memorial stupa has been built to commemorate the victims. This event is so recent that every month workers have to collect bones that have surfaced and put them somewhere safe. In the rainy season especially, teeth, parts of leg and arm bones, and occassionally clothes still make their way to the surface and are collected and preserved by the people at Tuol Sleng.
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Where the building that housed chemicals to decompose the bodies (or kill live victims) used to be.
The Khmer Rouge would bring prisoners here from work camps located all throughout the countryside, in the middle of the night, blindfolded and often naked. Most prisoners would be executed immediately. |
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| Obviously, this building used to stand here |
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| Victims' clothes that have been collected as they surfaced....as well as a tooth |
The descriptions of what happened to these innocent people will literally make you sick to your stomach. There was one tree in particular (appropriately named the Killing Tree)- and don't read this sentence if you don't think you can handle it- that they used to execute babies and children. The soldiers would pick up young babies and children by their feet, slam their heads against the tree, and then throw them into the nearby mass grave. Both the tree and the grave remain there today and in a documentary that we watched, one of the men who found the killing fields after Pol Pot's regime was over said that when he arrived at the fields (I believe it was in 1980), the tree trunk was still covered in blood, hair, and brain matter.
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| The sign in the background reads "Mass grave of more than 100 victims: children and women whose majority were naked" |
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| Memorial stupa |
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| The stupa is 17 stories....all filled with bones of victims. I believe the first 9 floors are skulls, divided by sex and age. The remaining 8 floors are long bones |
Tuol Sleng, which we visited after, was referred to as S-21 during Pol Pot's reign and was used as a torture prison for political prisoners and anyone who went against the new government. This place still looks as it did upon liberation in 1979, with the exception of 14 graves out front....for the 14 prisoners that were found dead here upon discovery. Their cells haven't been changed since the genocide, only cleaned up to be used as a museum in an effort to educate and prevent this type of thing from happening again. There are pictures of how each corpse was found in their actual cell....so as you stand in the cell you are able to see what was there when all the evidence was collected.
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| Cemetery that was created once the remaining 14 victims were found |
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| The prison looks very similar to what it did in the 70s. |
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| A typical room and the depiction on the wall of what was found in 1979. |
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| View down the side of the "B" prison, where large numbers of prisoners were squeezed into one room. |
There is much more that goes into all of this but these blog posts are too long already.....If you want to learn more about the history behind the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, I would recommend the movie "The Killing Fields," which I am sure most of you have heard of, or the book, "First they Killed my Father." There are tons of movies and books out there that depict what happened during the genocide but these are two of the most recommended (I am in the middle of the book right now). Thanks for reading :)
