Cambodia: The Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

The Killing Fields are a dismal and raw reminder of the Khmer Rouge's social engineering and rule in Cambodia.  Led by Pol Pot, who envisioned an agrarian-based communist society which devoted its human resources to agricultural output, particularly a massive increase in rice production, the Khmer Rouge carried out a massive genocide mainly between 1975 and 1978.  This was inspired by Pol Pot's ideology of self reliance, similar sounding to the juche philosophy which is idealized by North Korea.  In this new agrarian-based society, individuals educated in any kind of Western or non-agricultural practice, such as the doctors and lawyers in Cambodia at that time, were summarily rounded up and executed at killing fields like Choeung Ek, which I visited outside Phnom Penh.  Many were kept and tortured first in the Tuol Sleng center, now the Genocide museum.

Though today the number killed is debated, most estimates put it somewhere between 1.4 million and 2.2 million, or, as the audio guide we were given at Choeung Ek said: think of your own country, and imagine if one and every five people in it were murdered.


The day I went to the fields was bright and sunny, with a cloudless blue sky.  Insects buzzed in the grass and tranquility seemed to settle over everything.  But the earth at one's feet tells a different story.  There isn't a lot of glitz and showcase at the Killing Fields.  Walking a circuit, there are first signs to indicate where various stations, long burnt down, were located.  Places where trucks of unsuspecting people pulled up and parked.  Where they were let off.  Where they were housed.  Where they had their throats slit and heads bludgeoned in to save money on bullets.  The audio guide encourages you to examine some of the thick shoots on an old palm tree growing off the path.  Their sides are lined by woody growth shaped like that of a saw blade.  These were used to slit throats, and afterward the bodies would be thrown into nearby mass graves.

The mass graves are numerous, cordoned off only a by a short rope so that no one accidentally wanders onto them.  Every year the rains bring up more bones and bits of cloth.  If you look closely, tooth and bone fragments, and shreds of cloth can be seen sticking out of the earth, and more than once I found bits of old clothing, still mostly submerged in the ground, at my feet.  The experience is visceral.  The massacre occurring where I stood had only taken place less than forty years ago.  Further along there are glass cases containing intact clothing and bones already excavated from some of the graves.  There's a tree where babies heads were smashed in before they were thrown into the pits.  The Khmer Rouge murdered the children of anyone they killed as well, so that they couldn't grow up to seek revenge on the regime.  Another large tree was called the "Magic tree."  Magic, because from here speakers were hung high up to blare pro-regime tunes, the height increasing how far the sound would carry in order to drown out the sound of those being slaughtered below and around it.  8,895 bodies were found at Choeung Ek

In the center of the grounds today stands a tower known as the Stupa.  Inside it is filled with over 5000 intact skulls from the recovered bodies.  Visitors are able to enter the lower level and walk around the central column of skulls.  I'm sure there's little I can say about such a sight that you can't imagine for yourself.

After the Killing Fields I visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.  This used to be high school before it was turned into a prison camp, then known as the Tuol Sleng Centre, or S-21.  Here prisoners were taken to be kept like cattle in small cells and tortured for any given reason, before they were sent off to the Killing Fields outside the city.  You can go through the buildings and into the various rooms, once classrooms, where all that remains now are the mattress-less beds, with nothing more than a grid of steel to lie on, where prisoners were prostrated, fastened and then tortured.  Some black and white photos on the wall show dead or dying victims cut up and beaten, their bodies and floor beneath them dark with spilled blood.

In a couple buildings there are boards filled with photos of the prisoners taken upon their arrival at Tuol Sleng.  In the end these were the most difficult things for me to look at, and as I passed room after room it became almost unbearable. Hundreds and hundreds of faces look out at the visitor from across the decades.  People of all ages, men, women and children.  Many of them no doubt knew what was happening, many others probably didn't, especially the children.  The black and white faces, forever frozen, stare out into eternity.  Some eyes are wide and frightened, others have lost the light of hope.  Some eyes stare out in confusion, some have hurt and pain written into them; the eyes of children still shine with waning glimmers of youth and light, soon to be starved and beaten out of them, and then dimmed forever. One boy's face had already been beaten into a bloody mess before his photo was taken.  What were these people thinking, I couldn't help but wonder, as they posed for their photos?  Their faces say so much, looking across the generations at those of us who have come later.  They were being instructed by uniformed men, prepared to torture and send them to die, to look into the lens--taken from their families and friends, screams rising from the other buildings all around.  What do their faces say to us now?  They say please and help, and they beg the question why, to the world and the air between you and all that remains of who they were: photos on a board in Tuol Sleng prison.

In the latter half the 1970s, the same time that much of the world was advancing into a future of technology, possibilities and increased living standards higher than at any time in previous history, The Khmer Rouge's regime set Cambodian society back to the Stone Age.