When the majority of us think of fields, we think of wheat fields, corn fields, poppy fields, strawberry fields …Today, I walked through “Killing Fields” in Phnom Phen. In the course of 4 years, two million people were killed, tortured to death or starved during the Pol Pot Regime - from 1975-1979.
Crash course history lesson: According to French records, Saloth Sar (Pol Pot's real name) was born to a peasant family in 1928 in a small village 140 kilometers north of Phnom Phen. He was educated in France on a government scholarship where he first learned about Communism. Upon his return to Cambodia, he joined the Communist party and recruited those of the educated class to the Communist cause. When the time was right, Communism prevailed and Pol Pot (short for Politique Potentielle, French for "potential politician") became the Prime Minister. Similar to Hitler he overtook an entire country by immediately executing all intellectuals as well as those gifted in painting and music, engineers, even those who wore glasses (because they appeared intelligent) … basically ANYONE who was educated as he wanted to obtain control over a people who would not resist him. His goal was to create a rural and agrarian society that would contribute to the hard labor of rice production. The Cambodians starved as all the rice was exported to China in exchange for weapons. To accomplish this, the Khmer Rouge abolished all schools, hospitals, money, free market, religious and government buildings, etc. Some of these buildings were converted to prisons, reeducation camps or granaries.
Needless to say, he succeeded and during the four horrific years, through his subordinates, he managed to have 2 million people killed, tortured to death or starve. In essence, he brainwashed the Cambodians into killing their own kind, a concept they feel very guilty and embarrassed about even today.
This Khmer Killing Fields Memorial is a 17-tier pagoda; the first tier contains a pile of clothes from some of the victims, the 2nd to 9th tiers hold sculls and the rest hold other human bones (femurs, hip bones, ribs, etc).
This close up allows you to see the first few tiers ...
After taking off my shoes and making an offering of incense and flowers, I was the last one in my group to get inside the memorial. The pagoda/memorial houses the bones of some of the two million people who lost their lives by torture, execution, drowning, starvation, draining their blood for transfusions for their own soldiers fighting against the Vietnamese ...
Our guide showed us a few sculls, which were arranged and representative of people from different age groups; they also varied in the ways in which they died. The scull of the person he is holding up clearly died from head trauma.He would hold them up for a while so we could all take pictures and made an effort to turn to the back of the group, slide himself in between the tiers so I, too, could take a photo. With every scull he showed us, he followed the same routine. As the tour went on, one could begin to understand why he did this. He simply wants people to know what happened to them; he wants people to know the horrific acts performed during the Khmer Rouge Regime; he wants people to know all of the people that died and suffered ... "We can forgive, never forget."
Walking from one mass grave to the next was of course moving and shocking – shocking because after people said ... "never again" and erected a Holocaust Memorial in Dachau Germany (with "Never Again" written in five languages) - it was shocking to know that it was done again, this time in Cambodia three decades later! And even though you know about it, to walk through a mass grave and hear the story of a survivor makes it REAL ...
There are teeth still on the ground as well as bones … fragments of what once composed the body of a living human being still on the ground was dreadful. As we walked from one mass grave to the next he would either say, “Pol Pot crazy” or “very, very sad.” Additionally, he would often recall coming back to this particular site, remembering the “very bad-bad smell.” He also talked about corruption in Cambodia too!!!
The infamous Killing Tree
The branches from this palm tree are as sharp as a saw (I felt them myself!) and were used to cut the wrists of some people to either torture them or kill them. Our guide told us that they preferred not to use bullets because they were expensive and wanted to save them when fighting against the Vietnamese!
Here is our guide talking to us about his personal experience during the Khmer Rouge. When one of the fellows asked how he felt about those who were given amnesty for what they had done, he said that as a Buddhist, he believes that they will pay for the cruel acts they have done to others - a.k.a. Karma! In the same breath he also said that those that were killed were repaying their own Karmic debt and that today, both victim and perpetrator go to Temple together. That's just the way it is and he accepts it. Personally, I would have a hard time with this!!! Again, our views all stem from our respective upbringing and religious beliefs. Ben (Ivory Coast) asked him to describe the presence of the Khmer Rouge in a few words. After a two second pause he responded, "no school, no hospital, no money, no market, no love - only work and death."
Listen to our guide, a survivor, as he talks about the rape of women before they were executed as well as the verdict that came out in late July of "Duch." He was the chief of the S-21 prison. Although he's been in prison since 1999, he was given 35 years, a sentence the Cambodian people are not very happy about (as you will hear from him).
These children, in very soft voices, were asking for money as we were walking away from the memorial ... "Mon-nay ... mon-nay ... mon-nay ..."TUOL SLENG PRISON or S-21 (Security 21)
http://www.genofoster.com/Docs/S-21.html
In the afternoon we visited S-21, which was originally a high school (S- stands for security and 21 stands for the camp number as there were 177 dispersed throughout the country). It was also known as the regime's interrogation centre and site of torture and mass murder. Structurally, it’s set up like a quad, much like Oxford or Harvard where the buildings face one another. Each building had a function and housed people (who were incidentally referred to as “elements in the very recently published verdict of case #1) who were detained and tortured.
What use to be a school filled with books, desks, chairs and classrooms full of young people, now hold pictures, artifacts and an eerie energy from a four-year period of hell on earth.
This is a copy of some rules given to the prisoners.Here is another video from a survivor that stated that when the Khmer Rouge took over they told all of the people in Phnom Phen that the Americans would bomb the city in a few days as to have them collectively evacuate the city. Of course, this was not true …
Similar to the Germans, the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous documentation of everything and everyone. Here are pictures of the members of the Khmer Rouge whose "members" were as young as 12 years old!
Here are photos of the victims, each with an identification number.
Here is a picture of the 7 survivors from S-21; only three are alive today, one being Vann Nath (the tallest in the group) a prominent artists whose skills kept him alive at S-21. Mr. Nath's life was spared so that he could be put to work painting portraits of Pol Pot. Each day, he’s known to visit S-21. Unfortunately, my group did not meet him, but one of the other groups did and mentioned that his only request was for them to tell the world what had happened in Cambodia. His book, A Cambodian Prison Portrait, talks about his time at S-21.
The result of man’s inhumanity to man is that today 70% of Cambodian population is under the age of 30 years old. Only up until very recently, the new generation is taught their history as they didn’t know about their parent’s trauma, for a number of reasons: embarrassment, tragic memories, Karma … Because Pol Pot “exterminated” all of the educated, (he even called back those who fled overseas and fooled them into thinking that everything was safe in Cambodia; upon their arrival he sent them straight to the Killing Fields to have them executed), those remaining were not taught critical thinking skills. The result was that Cambodia was left with a society which possessed a high illiteracy rate and no skills.
The United States keeps this part of history under wraps as it holds a huge responsibility in its destruction. In 1972 Nixon decided to carpet bomb Vietnam, as well as Cambodia (a country whose people did absolutely nothing)! In a recorded phone conversation to Kissenger (the national security advisor at the time), Nixon said, "just bomb the hell out of them." Did you know that the U.S. dropped more bombs in Cambodia than it did during the entire period of World War II? These people were left with nothing ...
During the Khmer Rouge babies and small children were taken from their mothers, held by their feet and their heads were smashed against the killing tree pictured above. This is one of several paintings by Vann Nath.
Here is the view from the inside looking out. Only one of the buildings had barbed wire because a female prisoner distracted one of the guards and jumped from the the third floor to commit suicide; she succeeded.
The view from the inside was gloomy and creepy! I was ALONE taking this picture and could hear nothing but my heart beating!! You can see the long hallway that was created by breaking the walls of the old classrooms ... in the forefront are the wooden doors to each cell. The cells on the lower levels did not have doors which didn't matter anyway as the prisoners were shackled and couldn't move.
They were given an ammunition box to do their "business" and a bowl to urinate.
These are the cells on the lower level without doors and made from brick
Here is a cell with a window. My reason for standing in it is for you to see the space, or lack of space, each prisoner had ... They were stifled, restricted, mistreated and humiliated ...
... yet despite the heavy shadow Pol Pot cast over Cambodia, the people appear to persevere, smile, and find the simple joy in life again ... Here is a picture of two youngsters, at S-21, learning about what happened only 35 years ago.
