When we arrive in Cambodia I knew literally nothing about this country. There is a lot of information out there in the world. History and geography are not my strong points. That is one reason that this trip we are taking is of interest to me; the life long learner.
One thing that I had picked up was that there was something called the Killing Fields in Cambodia and visiting them was the main reason for visiting the capitol city of Phnom Penh and not just skipping to the ancient ruins in Siem Reap. I’m not a fan of war or killing so I was not particularly looking forward to visiting a place call the Killing Fields but onwards we went. We are here to learn and experience.
The tuk-tuk driver who ended up taking us was the aggressive one who took us from the bus station to our hostel the day before. Here he is with James. I really just wanted a picture of the tuk-tuk but it ended up like this.
On our way, our day is set to include both the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek village as well as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum or S-21 short for Security Prison 21. Mentally I’m bracing myself. Having been through the War Remnants Museum in Saigon I’m doing my best to prepare myself.
The site of monks wandering the streets has a calming effect. Just beautiful. This photo doesn’t do it justice but then few of the photos we have shared conveys what we actually saw.
We made a quick stop at the local petrol station.
Yes it is a lady on the side of the road with bottles of petrol. We’ve seen the same everywhere scooters are prevalent and poverty is high.
Back on the road we sped past the Independence Monument.
Traffic is crazy, its rush hour. We have a lot of evil to learn about so we decided to start early.
As in many capitol cities there is a lot of construction. I can’t remember the exact details but obviously there is foreign investment involved. A note about the poverty levels: where Vietnam felt industrious Cambodia feels poor. Little kids follow us down the streets at night begging and being cheeky to try to get into our pockets. In short the difference between Cambodia and Vietnam seems to comes down to political ties, histories and cultures.
Traffic is still bad as we head out of the other side of town.
Our driver had mentioned a stop before the Killing Fields but we couldn’t understand him. It sounded a bit like ‘happy farm.’ When in Rome and all… he took a small dirt road off the larger dirt road.
The scenery is lovely but we are starting to seriously wonder where we are going.
It turns out that our first stop was a firing range where we could shoot any and all weapons from a laundry list that was provided. This struck both James and I as very strange. Who would stop to fire a few rounds of a semi-automatic machine gun just before visiting a place call the Killing Fields! Not us I guess is the answer. Our driver was openly disappointed as he was likely to receive commission from whatever we spent there. Sorry Dude!
So we hopped back into the tuk-tuk and went a short way to the entrance of the Killing Fields.
Inside we were given headsets for an audio tour. We followed the path to our first stop.
Listened to the accompanying audio and then onto the next…
and the next….
and the next…
and the next….
All of these stops were the former locations for the prisoner drop off points and various buildings no longer standing. They were torn down when the Khmer Rouge was overthrown and the genocide that occurred here was abandoned.
The lack of building didn’t create a lack of emotion as the audio guide included descriptions enough to fill the imagination with the horrific things that happened there.
Then the path took us to the first mass grave site. The picture above is of what the Killing Fields looked like when they were first discovered. The place was not a tidy set of graves or even mass graves, It was littered with human remains.
Another mass grave..
tributes left by visitors on the fences surrounding the grave.
Let me back up a minute. Do you know who Pol Pot was? Do know what the Khmer Rouge is? Did you know that the US, the UK, the UN and other Western Countries funded the Khmer Rouge? I didn’t.
Sorry, I’ve been hasty. The ‘Killing Fields’ we visited is only one of the 373 killing fields that have been discovered……that has been discovered….that were the result of Pol Pot’s regime. Pot Pot was privileged Cambodian Paris University drop out who returned home to Cambodia to led the communist group the Khmer Rouge; Khmer is the name of the native peoples of Cambodia and red is the main colour associated with communism. They came into rule when they won the Civil War. Which would seem like a happy occasion, except three hours after achieving this victory all civilians living in the city of Phnom Penh were shipped out to the countryside to engage in a sort of cultural cleansing. Think Chinese Cultural Revolution Cambodian style. You wear glasses, they take them away, you are obviously against the regime. You know a foreign language, you are an educator, you are an intellectual, you are from a wealthy family…….this has happened before. What shocked me was this happened in the 1970’s. Did I mention that the US Government helped fund Pol Pot? From what I have read the US was so focused on their battle with Vietnam that they overlooked the fact that they were not only supporting a neighbouring communist regime but it was one who was carrying out a genocide. This knowledge floors me and makes me feel ashamed. But lets not talk politics or semantics of direct or indirect support…
Instead I’ll give a definition of what a ‘Killing Field’ is: a location in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge took political prisoners/citizens and killed them on mass and dumped them. From the images we saw of this ‘Field’s’ discovery the bodies were literally all over the place. The fenced areas I mentioned above seem to have been the large pit areas where a majority of bodies were disposed of.
Are you getting a sense of the place??
We continued around listening to the audio tour.
About half way around we begin to notice just how beautiful this place it. If you didn’t know what had happened here you would think that this was a peaceful little park.
The back of the path followed along the shore of a lake. A tree lined path.
The audio tour at this point included the option to listen to first hand accounts from the height of the Killing Field’s use. We forced ourselves to listen to every one.
We sat on a bench along the path to take in the horror in each of the stories. It is believed that 30% of the population was killed during this time. There is no Cambodia family that didn’t loose at least one member. The country is still recovering from this mass trauma.
We sat quietly for a few moments after the stories ended. It looks as if this spot we chose is next to a pond but the reminders of the killing fields are never far away, this is actually a mass grave that has filled with water.
We continued on with the tour…
Another mass grave..
A display with the scraps of clothing that have been found. There are still scraps laying around as well and bits of bones. The rains surface more bits of fabric, teeth and bones every time it falls.
Another image of what this location looked like when first discovered.
A mass grave for children and sometimes their mothers.
And this tree, beautiful at first site, located next to the children’s grave is what they use to smash the children’s heads against before throwing them in the pit. This was understood not just from witnesses but because their was bits of brain and hair stuck in the bark…to this point we didn’t think it could have been more horrific here. It is.
Every depression in the ground is evidence of a mass grave.
Box to deposit newly found bone fragments.
A spirit house.
At this tree stop we learned that while all the depraved things were happening here the Khmer Rouge played patriotic music to cover the screams of the people being killed. They played a clip of the type of music that would have been played. It was their cover not just for the volume it played but to make anyone nearby thing that they were holding political meetings.
I’m not sure we could have actually walked anywhere that could not have been considered a mass grave. Even so we stuck to the path.
The tour ends at a large Buddhist memorial for the victims of this Field.
This memorial is one that you walk around the outside of after taking your shoes off at the base of the stairs. The height if the structure is filled with the organised skulls that have been found at this location. Scientists have done studies on each of them to determine age and genetic indicators. They have learned a lot about the people whose lives were taken here and the remains are organised in the temple display by age and origin.
There is also a small museum on the site which displays more images.
As well as the types of instruments that were used to kill. This is one of the sickest things. The victims here did not have the quick death of a gun as I had taken for granted they would. They were beaten with gardening tools.
Still stunned by what we has seen an heard at the Killing Fields of Phnom Pen, we headed for our last stop of the day P-21 short for Security Prison 21 or the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
This Genocide Museum is also one of the most infamous security prisons use during the Khmer Rouge’s time in power.
The site of the former high school it’s rooms were turned from places of learning into cells for torture.
What happened in these rooms is horrific and the museum does it’s best convey this with signs, photographs and the rooms set up as they where during P-21 height. Most rooms are simply empty or as the image above shows accurately set up with merely one bed in it. As photographs posted around the museum show this one bed would have had a starved prisoner chained to it.
We made our way around the different buildings. Following the flow of other visitors and finding ourselves at times walking up stairwells to blocked off floors and rows and rows of empty rooms.
Some of the most impactful rooms were those filled with blown up images of all of the prisoners that were held or processed here.
Their photographs were taken when they arrived so there is an accurate document of them all.
Here as well there are displays with the remnants of their clothes.
Another building housed the hastily built concrete cells that were built to isolate prisoners. Walking through these rooms is eerie. A doorway to the next room filled with the same soul destroying structures has been broken through the wall with similar skill to the construction of the cells.
Outside the last building is a small bookstore selling literature about the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. To our surprise as well was one of the three survivors of P-21, who was a child at the time the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia in 1979, selling his memoir and signing copies. It is surreal.
This Museum is an interesting place to visit but in comparison with the Killing Fields we had visited earlier that day the impact and level of learning doesn’t compare. This museum needs help to organise itself to better convey its powerful messages. We learned later from the owner of our hostel that the disparity between the two is that the Killing Fields is a privately owned company and P-21 is a government owned enterprise. At the Killing Fields you basically were walking around what at most times looked like parkland and were moved to tears at every turn by the audio guide. At P-21 there is a confusion about where to go. How to navigate the place. Then when you do find a room with any information many times it is repeated from a room that you had previously seen, lessening the impact of those images and information. Running into dead ends on stairwells could be accepted as a metaphorical reading of the place but it simply distracted from the experience. If you are reading this and you are museums studies graduate or good at raising funding for cultural museums, this place needs your help.
The Adventures of Mr and Mrs Page 