Day 13: The Atrocities of the Khmer Rouge

Phnom Penh - Monday 27/12

Firstly, the blogger(s) in Cambodia would like to thank Wendy Pearce for her extensive comments and weather reports from home - nice to know someone is reading all the blogs, especially the long ones. In fact, Loz was a bit teary while reading the comment ... she is fine though, don't worry Wendy.

Anyway, enough on that, on to more serious business.

Today was certainly the emotionally tough day for our time in Phom Penh as we visited the two key sites related to the activities of the Khmer Rouge when they defeated the Republican Army and took control of the city in 1975 for the next four years before their eviction by the Vietnamese army.

Firstly we travelled out to the "killing fields", now known as the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre. This is the centre where the Khmer Rouge transported all their prisoners from Phnom Penh by truck during the night and executed them during hours of darkness so people in the surrounding villages would not know. The site was a former Chinese cemetery ... but the Khmer Rouge were killing so many people that they began just digging large holes and throwing bodies in as mass graves. Around 9,000 people were transported and killed at Choeung Ek by the Khmer Rouge.

The site is now dominated by a large Buddhist stupa (memorial tower) that contains 17 levels with glass sides filled with skulls and bones exhumed from the mass graves on the site. There are also smaller memorials around the site marking the important points on the site where buildings formerly stood or significant mass graves were discovered.

While all of the graves have been dug up and the bones placed in the memorial, there are sections of the pathways where bones and clothes are clearly visible in the dirt. There were so many people killed here, the actions of the rain in the wet season will continue to uncover bones and clothing for years to come. It's very eerie and sobering to look down and see human bones poking through the dirt under your feet.

Over 5,000 skulls now rest in the tower - many bodies will remain buried forever around the many graves of the killing fields.

We then returned to central Phnom Penh to visit the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum - this is the former school that the Khmer Rouge turned into a torture centre and was known as "S21" (which was the number of the school when it was a school). When people suspected of being "intellectuals" that the Khmer Rouge were trying to wipe out were first arrested, they were bought to S21 to be interrogated and tortured. When they had "confessed" many people were transported to Choeung Ek to be executed.

The Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records about S21, as evidenced by all the photos that are displayed of the victims, who were individually photographed for records. The records show that over 10,000 Cambodians were held at S21, most of whom were killed.

This museum remains living evidence of the genocidal activities of the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot ... and to this day, only one of the many still living Khmer Rouge leaders has been convicted of any crime.

This part of the history of Cambodia and the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge is a long and complex story - if you are interested, the Wiki entry for the Khmer Rouge is worth a read.

After a pretty emotionally draining day, we returned to our hotel for some R&R before heading our for dinner at a Khmer restaurant. Julie had taken groups to this restaurant before with no problem, but several of us seemed to pick dishes that were just so spicy hot we could not even eat them ! Loz chose what seemed like a particularly innocuous dish of morning glory that absolutely burned your lips off.

We then had a stroll along the Mekong river front where many people like to enjoy the cool evenings. But even that can go wrong as evidenced only a few weeks back at the water festival - we rode in our tuk tuk over the bridge where over 400 people died in a crush when the crowd panicked after the bridge started swaying a little. The bridge is still there and looks just like any other bridge - it's amazing to think that is was packed so full of people that when a few people panicked, so many people were just crushed to death.

So after a tough day today, tomorrow will be more cultural with visits to the Royal Palace and the National Museum.

Ed: Added note - I realised after I added this post that when we think about the killing fields at Choeung Ek and the 9,000 people killed there, this sounds like a lot ... but this is only the tip of the iceberg. The Wiki entry for Khmer Rouge states, "Modern research has located thousands of mass graves from the Khmer Rouge era all over Cambodia, containing an estimated 1.39 million bodies. Various studies estimate the death toll most commonly between 1.4 million and 2.2 million, with perhaps half of those deaths being due to executions, and the rest from starvation and disease."