Cambodia's Killing Fields

(Flashback: This post takes place AFTER the Angkor Wat post, BEFORE the Christmas post). As some of you may know, Cambodia has both a rich and beautiful history – evidenced in Angkor Wat – and a dark and nightmarish one: the Killing Fields.

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia after a 5 year civil war. This civil war has been caused mostly by the Americans bombing the countryside during the Vietnam War, trying to root out the North Vietnamese forces that were using parts of Cambodia to travel through and hide in. President Nixon told the world that America was not bombing Cambodia to save face. As a result of these secret and illegal bombings, many displaced and desperate Cambodian farmers looked for a savior. They found it, or so they thought, in the Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Rouge were a communist political party in Cambodia, backed by China. They would go on to share similarities with Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. Immediately after taking control of the country in 1975, the Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated all the population, including the elderly and the sick, into the countryside. Once there, everyone, including children, was made to grow rice as farmers with very little food to sustain them. Religion was abolished, as was the right to own property. Anyone who was educated -- for instance: doctors, lawyers, people who spoke more than two languages, even people who wore glasses -- were killed. The Khmer Rouge were trying to transform their country into a purely agrarian one, uninfluenced by foreigners, technology or education. They wanted Cambodia to be great again: even changing the name of the country to Democratic Kampuchea. (Why is it that countries which aren’t democratic always throw ‘Democratic’ into their title? I’m looking at you ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,’ aka North Korea). As a result of all of this, 3 million of the 8 million people in Cambodia died either through overwork, starvation or execution.

In 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia forcing the Khmer Rouge from power and ending their 4 year run of genocidal insanity. The war crimes trials for the Khmer Rouge leaders are still ongoing; though the leader Pol Pot escaped justice by dying of cancer.

In the capital Phnom Penh, Megan and I visited S-21 at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum: a sort of Cambodian Auschwitz. An old schoolhouse had been converted into a seedy prison by the Khmer Rouge where mostly innocent inmates were tortured and eventually murdered. To walk the halls, seeing the rusty metallic beds that inmates slept on, or the cells shabbily constructed out of brick, one cannot easily describe the oppressive haunting feeling. 

Outside the city, we visited The Killing Fields, which is actually one of many fields in the country where people were executed and buried in mass graves. The Khmer Rouge didn’t want to waste bullets because they were expensive, so they used hoes, sickles, clubs, instead to murder.

There is a tree here that cannot be easily described. All the babies that were murdered were violently bashed against this tree and thrown into a giant hole in the ground. Now, on this tree, there hang thousands of armbands placed there by the visitors to this museum. The tiny armbands act as reminders of all the innocent infants killed here. At the centre of the fields, apart of the museum, is a tower (Stupa) constructed to hold all the skulls found buried under the ground. There are thousands of skulls inside, visible. Some still lie buried in the fields which are now covered in water: a chilling feeling as one walks by knowing what is buried underneath.

Nearby the fields, there is now a school – a real school – where one can now hear children playing and laughing. A strange juxtaposition to this tortured area.

The film ‘The Killing Fields’ (1984), which details much of this, is highly recommended viewing. It tells the true story of Dith Pran, a Cambodian correspondent and translator to New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg. Pran survived 4 years in Democratic Kampuchea pretending to be uneducated so the Khmer Rouge wouldn’t kill him. He eventually escaped to Thailand. He was played by Cambodian actor Dr. Haing Ngor (winner of 1984’s Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Pran) whose life during the Khmer Rouge was eerily similar to the character that he played: he survived the 1975-1979 period by pretending not to be a doctor. Killing Fields Link Also recommended is the book ‘First they Killed my Father’ by Loung Ung: an autobiographical story of the near destruction of the author’s family during this time. First They Killed My Father Link Megan and I both read the book and watched the film before we arrived in Phnom Penh. I hope you will check out both of these.

Cambodia is a beautiful country. Nevertheless, it’s terrifying past can’t, and shouldn’t, be forgotten.