A Difficult Day: The Killing Fields and S21

If you're spending anytime in Cambodia, it is important to take a day and learn about the country's unsettling recent history.  There has been a lot of fighting in the region over the centuries but this situation tends to stand out.  I'll post a link with greater detail than I can provide at the end of this post if you want to know more but I'll do my best to sum it up here.

The rebellion side of a Cambodian civil war in the early 70's won over the ruling government side, in what everyone thought was a very positive time in Cambodian history.  Unfortunately when the political arm of this rebellion (called the Khmer Rouge) came into power a lot of radical changes were made throughout the country.  Most business were closed, banks were closed, temples were ordered closed, and most of the country's population was sent out of the cities to work in the rice fields.  The Khmer Rouge had such a radical plan they feared anyone that did not share their views completely.  This translated to anyone with a decent education (doctors, lawyers, teachers), anyone that spoke more than one language, and as extreme as anyone wearing glasses.  These so called traitors were detained in prisons for questioning and tortured.  The torture part was all put together to force individuals to admitting to, and signing documents agreeing to doing things that essentially labeled them enemies of the state.  These 'confessions' were completely untrue and used only against the population to 'legally' detain more people, and justify punishment.

The S21 museum (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum) was an old school that was turned into one of these detention centres.  As 4 year rule of the Khmer Rouge went on, the number of detainees grew, the cells got smaller and smaller, and the prisoner population got more diverse (read: preteen and younger).  The Khmer Rouge kept extremely accurate records of everything, a good chunk of which is on display for viewing.  This includes pictures taken of each detainee brought into S21.  The museum took about 1.5-2 hours to get through and we really did not feel the need to take pictures.

When the prisons (like S21) were too full, the prisoners were rounded up at night and moved outside of the cities to be executed.  Using the forced confessions attained in the detention centres as a legal and valid basis for executing these innocent people, the executions were brutal and indiscriminate.  Women, children, anyone that arrived at these 'Killing Fields' were not going to return home.  There are several - 20 plus - killing fields all around Cambodia.  The site we visited was one in particular that was turned into a visitation centre just outside Phnom Penh and is called Choeung Ek.  This particular killing field was the final stop for most of the executed detainees from S21.  20,000 people were recorded as entering the S21 detention centre, and when it was liberated by the Vietnamese only 7 people were found alive.  Only 12 bodies were found at the S21 site - rather than the killing field - they appeared to be shackled to their beds and set on fire as the Khmer Rouge guards fled during the final hours.

The country lost about 2 million of its 8 million population under Khmer Rouge rule and was set back in terms of economic and social development.  Afterwards it really began to register when we started looking for old people (50+) in Cambodia.  We didn't see a single one.  In Laos and Vietnam, seeing older people walking around, sitting around doing nothing, or still trying to sell us stuff was pretty common.  But there was none of that in Cambodia.  No grey hair, no 40 pound old ladies hauling around 200 pounds of goods to sell, no wrinkly old men with only one tooth.  Though Christina and I knew a bit of Cambodia's history going into the trip, it was unsettling to see the amount of time and energy put into making sure this killing machine was operating at peak efficiency.

As most educated westerners assume that the Holocaust during World War 2 is one of the most horrific examples of a ruling body systematically attempting to 'cleanse' a large population.  It is frightening to know that his has happened more recently elsewhere in the world and there was no big military push to fix the problem from any other countries.  Reading into the history of Cambodia it doesn't sound like anyone outside of the country really knew this was happening though.  Eventually the Khmer Rouge pissed off everyone in the area during their occupation and the Vietnamese were just the ones that got fed up with it first.   During the fight to push out the Khmer Rouge the Vietnamese unknowingly saved a handful of people from the path to the killing fields, and the rest of the population from forced slave labour in horrible conditions.

http://www.killingfieldsmuseum.com/s21-victims.html  (one of many, feel free to Google more sites)

Stupa monument at the Killing Fields

The above picture was the only one I took all day.  It looks like books on shelves inside the Stupa from this distance.  When we got closer, it actually contains skulls and bone fragments of about 900 of the bodies that they have found at the site.  Many more bodies and bone fragments are being held off site, and there are known to be several unexcavated mass grave locations still in this area.  The killing field area is so concentrated with human remains you can actually see bones half buried in the ground, and patches of clothing, just walking around.  The heavy rains here consistently help bring new remains to the surface over time.

Needless to say, it was a very intense day for the both of us.  Even now, still thinking about what these people went through, only a handful of years ago, is really hard to digest.  What makes them amazing though is how kind and forgiving they all are, to each other and to us, the foreigners.