Once we arrived at the bus station in Phnom Penh things really got interesting. As the bus pulled in to let us off, we saw a crowd of young men literally running towards the bus shouting. These guys turned out to be the local tuk-tuk driver’s welcoming committee. They stand at the door and basically block the exit, maps in hand, shouting at you offering to take you anywhere you need to go. Once off the bus you have to push through them while they surround you all talking and shouting at once. I couldn’t even hear Kate to ask her what we should do as the tuk-tuk drivers were so noisy. We had never experienced a welcome like this anywhere and one of the drivers next to me told me that the longer we stand there trying to discuss what to do the worse it will get so just pick one of them and the rest will move onto their next target. This seemed a pretty fair comment and he had an honest face so I said ‘righto, you’ll do, let’s get out of here!’ Sure enough the others all ran away to try to get a fare from another passenger and it was off in the tuk-tuk we went.
Our only reason for staying in Phnom Penh was to visit the ‘Killing fields’ and have a bit of a look around the city. The city itself is a bit of a mixture, it has some really nice wide tree-lined boulevards but it is also home to a lot of very poor people and it’s not always the nicest feeling being out in the streets after dark. As you will no doubt be aware Cambodia has a very bloody recent history with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge leaving a lasting scar on the nation’s psyche through their reign of tyranny from 1975-1979. Two million people were killed during this period out of a population of some six million. That’s a mind-boggling figure whichever way you look at it and it’s hard to believe that most of you reading this would have been alive during the time this human tragedy occurred. As we had arranged for a tuk-tuk driver to take us to a Killing field outside of Phnom Penh and the infamous ‘S-21’ prison in the south of the city we had both done a little reading to get some background as to how the Khmer Rouge were able to inflict this kind of suffering on their own people and why.
If you’re not familiar with the subject then here is Cambodian history 101 in a nutshell. The Khmer Rouge, with Pol Pot as its leader overthrew the previous unpopular regime led by a bloke named Lon Nol on the 17th of April 1975. They then set about turning Cambodian society completely on its head with possibly the most drastic socialist experiment of all time. The Khmer Rouge ordered all the people in the cities to evacuate their homes and go and live in the countryside. They then set about putting the entire population to work in the production of rice. The peasants who already lived in the countryside were regarded as being ‘old people’ and were revered by the Khmer Rouge and were left to live in relative peace. The residents from the cities, former soldiers of the old regime, teachers, professionals, the educated and anyone else who wasn’t formerly a peasant was regarded as a ‘new person’ and these were the people who were basically exterminated and used as ‘fertilizer for the revolution’. The Khmer Rouge thought that anyone who wasn’t a true peasant or working class person was an enemy and rather than wasting time to ‘re-educate’ them they simply killed them and thereby removed them from society altogether. They also thought that if you killed someone’s parents then the children will grow up hating you and would eventually seek revenge. Their way around that was to kill the entire family, problem solved. The killing field that we visited was in reality only one of hundreds of execution and mass grave sites scattered around the Cambodian countryside that the Khmer Rouge used in their program of extermination of anyone they considered an enemy of their revolution.
S-21 prison was used by the Khmer Rouge as a detention and torture facility for people they accused of being members of the middle or upper classes and former soldiers or sympathizers of the old regime. It is now a genocide museum and we visited this place before we drove out to the killing fields as these two places were used in tandem to dispose of people that the Khmer rouge wanted to be rid of. It worked like this; if you were arrested then you were taken to a place like S-21 for ‘interrogation’. The building was actually a secondary school that had been converted into a prison complete with cells for detaining large number of prisoners and individual rooms used for extracting ‘confessions’. The methods used to get these confessions were pretty grim and the old wire beds that the prisoners were tortured on are still there in the rooms complete with the torture devices and even photos of those unlucky enough to have been subjected to the interrogations. The Khmer Rouge were extremely meticulous in their record keeping and they photographed each person that they held in S-21 and these photos of the inmates now line the walls of the rooms staring back at you as you make your way through the cells. It is hard to imagine the sort of suffering these people endured in this place.
The photos of the Khmer Rouge cadres who carried out these atrocities are also displayed and the thing that struck me was how young they all were. These young men and women had been brainwashed and filled with political fervour to the extent where they were able to carry out unspeakable acts against other human beings in a systematic and ruthlessly efficient manner.
If you were able to survive the horrendous conditions and barbaric torture meted out in S-21 then, once the Khmer Rouge believed you had no further information to garnish them with, you were taken to an old orchard on the outskirts of Phnom Penh for the final stage of your ‘political re-education’. This is the killing field that we visited after S-21 and it is a mass grave for around twenty thousand unfortunate souls. This place has also been converted into a memorial and has a tower about thirty metres high which contains some seventeen levels of human remains that have been extracted from the surrounding fields. The skulls make up the bottom few levels, piled in on top of one another, and then the other bones are organized into their separate categories in the levels above. The ground around the old orchard still has bones, teeth and even clothing protruding from the dirt as you walk around. Pits are dug all over the place where the bodies were piled in on top of one another, one pit was even found to contain the headless bodies of some four hundred and fifty of the Khmer Rouge’s own soldiers!
As whole families were brought here to be killed this obviously was a big job and the Khmer Rouge didn’t have spare money to waste on the amount of bullets needed to kill this many people. As usual they had a cold-blooded solution to this problem also. The people were made to kneel down and were hit from behind with ice-pick handles or sometimes machetes until they were either dead or unconscious and could be thrown into the pits. This next bit is pretty dark so if you’re a bit squeamish you might want to skip to the next sentence. Babies were a particular nuisance to the Khmer Rouge executioners so they used a tree that was next to a pit to bang their heads against while they held them by the ankle before throwing them in. Unbelievable stuff and yes the tree is still there, as is the pit, and to say it’s hard to imagine how anyone could be so callous would be a bit of an understatement.
One thing that stands out when you’re in Cambodia is the lack of older people. This is a direct result of the scale of killing undertaken by the Khmer Rouge and remains part of their legacy to this day. Thankfully in 1979 the Vietnamese, who had been a long time foe of Cambodia, invaded once again and overthrew the lunatics behind the Khmer Rouge regime. Vietnam naturally took a bit more Cambodian territory for itself but at the time the people saw this as a pretty fair trade-off in order to be rid of the Khmer Rouge and their reign of terror. The Khmer Rouge’s attempts to create a truly socialist, egalitarian state went much further than even the Chinese or Russian communist revolutions had. Although we live in a largely unequal capitalist society, after seeing what trying to make everyone in society ‘equal’ looks like I think I’ll take our system any day!
The rest of our time in Phnom Penh passed relatively uneventfully and we checked out the Royal Palace which was pretty cool but there’s really only so many temples and palaces you can see before they all start to blend into one. It is ironic then that our next destination in Cambodia was to be Siem Riep which is the closest town to Angkor Wat, site of the largest religious complex in the world! As (I think) one of the seven man-made wonders of the world, this place looked like being another all day temple-a-thon that would test our temple viewing patience and our feet as the whole area covers some twenty six square miles. Find out if it was all worth it next time. ‘Til then.
Life in Phnom Penh
Motorbike with his huge load!
Me in front of the King's palace.
Many regulation signs in guesthouses as well as on buildings prohibit weapons! Of course you aren't going to have bombs etc on you!
Street below our guesthouse at night. I didn't feel that safe walking around the city at night. This may have been because the streets don't have any street lights!
Young monks off to monk school.
A monk off to monk school.
Houses.
This photo was taken from the bus while we were waiting for a ferry. Once we crossed the border into Cambodia we immediately saw that Cambodians were considerable poorer than their neighbours.
Lightening storm.
The Killing Fields
The memorial tower which contains thousands of bones that were excavated from the mass graves.
The bottom levels of the tower had skulls.
More skulls.
The holes in the ground were mass graves. The biggest grave site in this killing field had 450 bodies.
This tree is where executors beat children against. Next to this tree was a mass grave of more than 100 naked women and children. The women were naked because executors thought it would be more painful to kill the women without clothes.
There were many tools the executors used to kill their victims - actually they had a whole shed filled with them - shackles, hatchets, knives, digging hoes to name a few. One tool that made me squirm the use of the palm tree branches (they have sharp edges)to slowly cut their victims throat.
S21 Museum
S21. The building in the forefront was filled with photos of Khmer rouge cadres and their victims and the building to the left (which you can't see in this photo) was filled rooms with torture cells.
A room filled with small cells which was used to detain mothers and their children. Everyone was chained to the floor.
Looking into one of the small cells.
A room filled with photos of the detainees and Khmer Rough cadres.
The Khmer Rouge cadres took photos of their detainees/victims. This one stood out because it was a mother and her baby.
Photos of the Khmer Rouge cadres. As you can see many of them were young boys.
The Khmer rouge used this pole as one of their interrogation techniques. The Khmer rough would tie both of hands of the prisoner behind their back by a rope and lift the prisoner upside down. They kept them suspended until they became unconscious then they dipped the prisoner's head into the jar of smelly, filthy water. By doing so, the victim would quickly gain consciousness and then they would cotinue the interrogation technique again.
The S21 regulations. Scary!
