The Killing Fields

In the last entry, I spoke about the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. From there, we moved on to the Killing Fields.

Specifically, we went to Choeung Ek, which is a Buddhist memorial to the terror in the Cambodia Killing Fields. Before I talk about what we saw, maybe a little story telling is in order. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia, led by Pol Pot. Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge set out to convert Cambodia into a completely agrarian state and, in the process, execute all of its political opponents as well as intellectuals and professionals. The current estimates are that the Khmer Rouge between 1.7 million and 2.5 million people out of a population of around 7 million died during this regime through disease, starvation and/or execution. The Killing Fields are where many of these people were brought to dig their own graves and were executed. Many were shot, but because of a shortage of bullets, many more men, women and children were bludgeoned to death. The children had to be executed out of fear that they may seek revenge when they got older.

Of course, there’s a lot more to this story but that’s some of what we heard before we arrived at the Choeung Ek site. The first thing you see at the Choeung Ek site is the memorial to the victims. It’s a Buddhist site and you have to take your shoes off to get close to it. When you do get close to it, what you see are skulls. Hundreds of skulls. Thousands of skulls. They are some of the skulls of the bodies that were excavated at the site beginning in the 1980s.

Following this, tourists are encouraged to walk around the site. I forget the exact numbers, but something like 84 of 126 mass graves located on the site have been unearthed, some of them containing hundreds of bodies. All are chilling, but perhaps the most horrifying is a pit that contained the bodies of approximately 100 naked women and children. Next to this pit is a tree, the Killing Tree, where many of the children, including infants, were held by their feet and slammed against the tree until they were dead, at which point the bodies were tossed into the pit. I apologize if that’s a little over-graphic, but it is very difficult to demonstrate the disgust and sadness that one feels at the site without repeating the graphic descriptions that we had been given. Of all of the places that I have seen in my travels, this is among those that have affected me the most.

The rest of this first day in Phnom Penh doesn’t really come close to matching the Security Prison or the Killing Fields. We got back to the hotel around noon, but our bus out to our homestay wasn’t leaving until 1:30, so we had time for lunch. I went to one of the touristy places up along the Mekong River and had some barbequed pork chops. It wasn’t very Cambodian, but after 24-hours in Cambodia, I still wasn’t sure what exactly qualified as “Cambodian food.” Yeah, that’s my excuse. Anyway, I ate, went back to the hotel and it was on to the rice fields!! I’ll pick up with those stories in the next entry.