The killing fields

Deciding to push on to Cambodia, we bought a ticket to Phnom Penh. Our bus dropped us off at the border, and we lugged our bags in the mid-day heat from one border post to another, sweat dripping from our faces onto our paperwork. Fortunately, buying the Cambodian visa on arrival all went smoothly, and then it was just a matter of finding the right bus waiting for us on the other side.

This proved to be more difficult than expected, and after assuming the worst (that our bus had left half of us behind and we would now have to buy a new ticket on another bus), a bus driver magically produced a name list with us on it, and we jumped on board. Unfortunately, the air-conditioning was no match for the heat and my key-ring thermometer peaked at 37'C (103'F) with all the windows closed.



We sat in a dazed stupor all the way to Phnom Penh, only getting out once when the bus caught a ferry across a river.



Phnom Penh is a city of 1 million. The street of our guest house was lined with 4 storey buildings but the road was dirt and rubble.



Unlike Vietnam, where most of the hostilities ended in the mid-seventies, in Cambodia the strife continued intermittently for another 15 years. Even as an outsider, I felt the shadow of it all around me.

In 1975 the Khmer Rouge ousted the U.S. backed government and began what they thought of as an accelerated communist conversion program, that essentially involved emptying the cities and instituing forced labor in the country. Vast numbers of the middle-class, that were considered idealogically out of place in the new regime, and anyone else with reservations about the Khmer Rouge were quickly liquidated. As time went on the leaders got more and more paranoid and the killings increased while the country spiralled into chaos and people started starving to death. Finally, in 1978, Vietnam responded to Khmer Rouge aggression on the border and invaded in full force. The Khmer Rouge leadership retreated to the mountains near Thailand along with hundreds of thousands of refugees. It is estimated that about 3 million people died during 3 years of Khmer Rouge rule.

Unfortunately, it proved difficult to eliminate the Khmer Rouge as a guerrilla force in the mountains as they could disappear into the refugee camps in Thailand when pressed. Thailand (and the international community) had a vested interested in maintaining this status quo, since it provided a buffer against the communist Vietnamese who were now at their border.

In Phnom Penh, we visited the S-21 security prison used by the Khmer Rouge for torturing and interrogating over 20,000 people.



It is now a museum, and I should warn readers that the following photos and descriptions are truly horrific. I was almost physically sick while I was there.



Prisoners were kept for 2-6 months, repeatedly interrogated. Of the 20,000 prisoners that arrived at S-21 only 7 survived.





The Khmer Rouge kept detailed records. The most horrific photo was this tableau. On the right of each row are 6 photos of prisoners when they arrived. On the left, are the same six prisoners after they had been tortured to death.



Those that survived their interrogation were trucked out to what are now called the Killing Fields, about 15km out of town. There, they were clubbed to death and thrown into mass graves. The site is now a museum, and 8000 of the bodies have been disinterred to try to understand what happened.





The skulls of men, women and children from the graves form an enormous column in a memorial shrine.





With a very heavy heart we returned to our guest-house, and the next day we caught a bus up to Siem Reap where we hoped to revive our spirits by visiting Angkor Wat.