The Killing Fields and S-21

The following day our tuk tuk driver, whom we've arranged to meet us, takes us out of the city to see the Killing Fields, the infamous mass grave where thousands of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge victims were executed and buried heaped together. We're presented by an impressive stupa dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives here and,on closer inspection we see that the inner glass casing is full of rows of skulls and a pile of victims' clothes rests underneath. There are 8000 skulls in the stupa.

A whole side of the area has not yet been excavated. Many of the bodies unearthed had been decapitated and many were women and children. It's possible to notice more remnants of clothes poking out through the soil as we walk around the edges of the graves. We're the only ones there at this early time of the morning and the fact that the clothes of the victims remain so intact and some of the buildings in the complex are original and used by the Khmer Rouges brings it home that this mass tragedy took place only a generation ago and many people still living in Cambodia would have lived through it and have many sore memories. It was on April 17th 1975 that the Khmer Rouges soldiers entered Phnom Penh to overthrow Lon Nol's government and instil their new system of extreme Maoist communism. Their plight had begun in the jungles of northern Cambodia when some semi intellectual students and their counterparts were disillusioned by the ways in which the present government were failing to award good employment opportunities for all and there was corruption at every level. Many local hill tribes people joined the movement aimed at making Cambodia a more prosperous place from the ground up. They believed everything had to be washed away, the slate wiped clean and a new country borne out of the hard work of the common people would bloom and become a success. The problems came when, once they'd begun their takeover they no longer trusted the very people they were supposed to rever. They became paranoid and started to think that the people of the country and those around them were turning against them and becoming traitors to the cause. Pol pot, as he was then known, was educated to degree level in Paris and, while in France, fraternised with the Peoples Communist Party learning of the ideals of the movement. He was a teacher in Cambodia and studied Buddhism. He also came from an upper class family who had royal connections through his sister being one of the king's favourite concubines. These facts seem incredulous when you consider that he loathed what he deemed as the 'new people', anyone who'd been at all educated, who had any connections to the aristocracy and he abolished all forms of religion under his regime. His first step was to empty all the country's cities, including Phnom Penh, whose population had swelled with refugees from the endless civil wars, of their inhabitants and force them to move back to their home villages and work on the land. They were to give up their entire lives, there was to be no education or health service and if anyone spoke against this they would be shot. He was suspicious of anyone who had a career other than being a peasant farm work and, terribly, many innocent people were interrogated, tortured and executed at prisons around the country including the biggest, S-21 in a suburb of Phnom Penh.

We visit that next and it's a very harrowing experience. During the four years of the Khmer Rouges regime 20,000 innocent Cambodians were murdered at S-21. It was a former high school converted into a torture camp almost immediately after the Khmer Rouges took power. There were four blocks, A, B, C and D and the classrooms were either divided into brick and wooden cells or left as they were so that they could become rooms of torture. We walk through each and every classroom cum torture chamber in building A which are furnished merely with the steel beds which the victims lay on and the metal bars which were used to fasten their hands to them.

Above fourteen of the beds are harrowing photos of the last victims the Khmer Rouges hadn't quite managed to finish off when they were ousted from power in 1979. The photos show the victims with their heads bashed in, sometimes arms removed and all lying in pools of their own blood. They now rest in peace in specially dug graves in the former playground of the school. An exhibition of the mug shots the Khmer Rouges soldiers took of each and every one of their victims shows hundreds of little girls, with their hair cut in the same bob style as would've been compulsory at the time, small boys and men and women of all ages including the elderly.

Some look scared but most stare blankly at the camera, their souls already lost to the knowledge of their eventual demise. Again it brings it home how recent this all was when you see, in some of the pictures, the girls have modern makeup on, allbeit it's streamed across their face through tears, and men who are trendily dressed in wide collared patterned 70s style shirts. These people were rounded up and brought here because they'd displayed some kind of association with the new people or city life. Even if you wore spectacles you were deemed to be an intellectual. We saw the tiny makeshift cells they were kept in and this building B made me feel nauseous and terrified of what I was seeing.

The spaces were only big enough to lie in and there were dried red pools of blood still visible on the tiled floor. We saw bullet holes in the walls and the numbers above the cells doors, crudely painted, corresponded to the numbers on the tags around the prisoners' necks in the photographs.Driving through the Cambodian countryside, past the stilt houses of farm workers who still don't have running water and perhaps electricity, their kids not attending school and having to work very hard just to feed their family, it's a tremendous tragedy what happened to the Cambodian people and the legacy it's had. People were split from their families, forced to work as slaves and brainwashed into the cult of following the Angkar (Khmer Rouges). The children were used as idolistic examples of the truth of the revolution, having been easily brainwashed because of their innocence and effectively used for seeking out so-called traitors. We wonder how these people are now. Can they live with themselves after they tortured and butchered their kin? In most cases they feared for their own life, knowing that if they didn't commit the atrocities they were ordered to they would suffer the same fate. Over 30% (1.7 million) of Cambodia's population was lost to the Khmer Rouges and in the subsequent years, when the Vietnamese stepped in to fight them off and formed a new socialist government, over 600,000 people dies in the famines that spread across the country in the chaos of families trying to find their way home and crops being lost because of all the bad agricultural practices of the Khmer Rouges. Western countries, in a position to help, criminally left Cambodia on it's own for the next 16 years. They were too involved in the pursuit of bringing down any threat of communist takeover and a Vietnamese government signified just that, so they even provided sanctuary for the Khmer Rouges, siding with them internationally.