Day 85

Tuesday 25^th January 2011

Cue the most depressing day of the honeymoon. I knew the killing fields weren’t going to all be sunshine and lollipops but I had no idea how harrowing the day would be.

I guess people are wondering why we would do this on our trip but I believe if you are privileged enough to be able to travel the world then sometimes it is important to understand how the lives of the people you meet have been influenced by what has gone before. The more people who come to Cambodia and see first hand the atrocities that were committed here just 30 years ago the less chance there is of this happening again, here or in any other country.

Since arriving in Cambodia we have seen numerous amputees who are land mine victims. Some are just begging by the side of the road. Some are trying to make a living selling books to travellers. Others had formed a band and were busking. What is particularly poignant is that they have flocked to the cities to try and get money to send home as the majority also have wives and children back in their native villages. These land mines were planted largely by the Khmer Rouge as they fled back into the countryside after they were overthrown by the Vietnamese in 1979.

We got up and breakfasted in the hotel before arranging a tuk tuk driver for the day at reception. The first stop was Choueng Ek, better known as the killing fields. This is one of many such killing fields used by the Khmer Rouge during their time in power from 1975 to 1979. It is the most accessible as it is only 17km from the centre of Phnom Penh and hence is also the most famous and the most visited.

On first arrival the first impression is what a peaceful site this now is. A stupa has been erected as a memorial to all those who lost their lives here. The stupa is filled with the bones of those victims that have been exhumed from the mass graves.

Truckloads of victims were brought here from prisons such as S-21 in Phnom Penh. It is estimated that at the peak of the regime as many as 300 people per day could have been executed here  – mostly Cambodian and Vietnamese although the remains of a few Europeans have also been found. The communist Khmer rouge undertook ethnic cleansing against their own people. They supported only true Khmer Cambodians – typically with dark skin and wide eyes as compared with the more yellow skin and slanted eyes of the Chinese or Vietnamese Cambodians. They believed that they could rebuild the whole country using only labourers and country people. On April 17^th 1975 after a bitter civil war they took control of Phnom Penh and ordered all the city dwellers out into the countryside to work, to farm, to build irrigation channels and dams to further increase rice production. Phnom Penh was left as a ghost town. These people were forced to live in large camps and settlements. They were not free to cook for themselves instead they were fed from common kitchens – watery rice soup twice per day that was not sufficient to live on. Thousands of people died from malnutrition or diseases like dysentery and malaria. The Khmer Rouge believed the country could be completely self sufficient as farmers – there was to be no schools, no religion, no banks, no hospitals not even any money. They therefore did not see the need for teachers, lawyers, doctors or any professional people. Any such people were slaughtered as were the upper classes and soldiers or the relatives of soldiers who had fought in the civil war against them. You were thought to be intellectual just for wearing glasses – this enough reason to be killed. In later years Khmer Rouge soldiers were also killed due to suspicions that they had defected or were not trustworthy.

At the Choeung Ek site 85 of 129 mass graves have been excavated since 1980 when the site was discovered. These graves our now pits filled with grass.

However, when the rains come bones and clothing are still mobilised and come up to the surface. Underfoot scraps of clothing and bits of femur can be seen protruding from the earth. It is estimated that 14 000 people may have been buried here. Only 8985 bodies have actually been exhumed. The largest mass grave was found to contain the bodies of 450 people. One grave contained only women and babies who were all naked. The babies were slaughtered infront of the mothers by swinging them by the ankles against a tree to break their skulls or by tossing them into the air and catching them on the bayonet before casting the body into the pit. A further grave contained the remains of 166 headless bodies. All these people were innocent. The soldiers used chemicals such as DDT partly to mask the smell at the site and partly to ensure the death of anyone who was buried alive.

As you can imagine it was a sobering morning wandering around the site in the Cambodian sunshine. It is impossible to imagine the atrocities that were performed their by Cambodians against their own people.

During the 4 years that the Khmer Rouge were in power it is estimated that between 2 to 3 million people died. The population of Cambodia at that time was only 7 million so between a quarter to a half of the population was wiped out.

After wandering around the site and learning about the regime in the museum where we watched a short film we were happy to leave. However, I did not know that the worst was yet to come at the genocide museum back in the centre of town.

Tuol Sleng was a school. On April 17^th 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took control of Phnom Penh and evacuated all of its residents the school was converted to office 21 or known as S-21. It was designed for the detention, interrogation, inhuman torture and killing after confession of the detainees. The arrival of every prisoner was documented. They were given a number and photographs taken both on arrival and if they died during torture. Those who did not die would eventually be sent to the killing fields for their final execution. It is estimated that 20 000 people spent time at S-21 during the regime. Only 7 people survived. Of these 4 are alive today. Imprisonment typically lasted from 2 to 4 months although political prisoners such those accused of leading the uprising against Pol Pot were detained for 6 to 8 months and subjected to more torture.

On January 7^th 1979 the Vietnamese arrived in Phnom Penh and found the prison. They found photographs of the victims and negatives and prisoner confessions. People were forced under torture to either confess to crimes that they had not committed, to being professional people or from the military or to crimes that were not permitted under the regime such as cooking your own meals.

In 1979 there were 14 prisoners remaining in the torture rooms, one of whom was female. It seemed they were undergoing interrogation and torture when the Khmer Rouge heard that the Vietnamese had overthrown their army and they fled, leaving the prisoners as they were. The prisoners all died before the Vietnamese arrived and were so badly beaten and decomposed that they could not be identified. These 14 corpses were buried by the Vietnamese infront of building A and now 14 white stone coffins remain in their memoriam.

The Vietnamese took photographs as they found these 14 prisoners and these photographs are on display in the same rooms as the torture took place. They were not for the faint hearted. The iron beds and shackles were still in the rooms as were some of the boxes the prisoners used to contain their bodily wastes and the tools that the Khmer Rouge used to torture them – such as shovels. The floor was tiled with the same yellow and white tiles as in the photographs and in the middle of the rooms where the beds were standing the tiles were noticeably stained a darker colour from the blood and faeces of the prisoners. It was truly grim.

Just 8 months after its discovery on the 19^th of August 1979 the prison was opened as the Tuol Sleng genocide museum. The school comprised 4 buildings, each 3 storeys tall. The first or A block was where the torture took place. This had glass windows so that the other inmates couldn’t hear the screams. The other three were used to house the prisoners. The men were housed in tiny individual cells only 80 cm wide and less than 2 m long. It would have been permanently dark and dirty and cramped. They could wash twice a month.

Larger rooms housed large numbers of women and children. The front of the buildings were covered in a fishnet of barbed wire to prevent the prisoners committing suicide by jumping from the upper storeys. The third building still had its barbed wire in place for us to see.

The larger cells now housed various artefacts including further torture implements, the chair where inmates were sat for their photographs on arrival and hundred and hundreds of photographs of the Cambodian people who were tortured here. Their petrified eyes bearing down on you from every display board. There were also a number of paintings that have been done from the memory of one of the 7 survivors from S-21 of the sights he saw during his time there.

A wooden pool outside the second building in the yard was once used for physical education at the school. The Khmer Rouge turned this into an interrogation and torture machine. The interrogator tied both hands of the prisoner behind their back and lifted the prisoner upside down. This action was repeated a number of times until the prisoner lost consciousness, then the interrogator dipped the prisoners head into a bucket of filthy water. This shocked the victims back into consciousness so the torturer could continue their questioning.

Our guide at the prison was a Cambodian lady from Phnom Penh who said that she was just 13 years old when the Khmer Rouge took control of the country. She was sent out into the countryside to work. She lived in a long house with children of her own age away from her family and was forced to work long hours in the fields for little or no food for 4 years. In 1980 after the Khmer Rouge were defeated she found her Mother and returned to Phnom Penh. Her Father and Brother had been slaughtered. I struggled to comprehend how she could do the job she did – for a measly $6 or £4 she took us around the prison and explained what had occurred there. I was struggling to come to terms with it and it was so far removed from anything I have ever known but she lived through it and came face to face with it every day as part of her job. That said every single Cambodian has lost numerous friends and family during the Khmer Rouge era. Maybe for them it is sadly a normal part of everyday life.

Unbelievably very few people have been brought to justice for the atrocities here. Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge was never tried. He was held under house arrest until he died in 1998. Pol Pot was a nickname and one of many aliases used by Sa Lut Sor – this one stood for ‘Political Potential’. The leader of the S-21 prison has, however, been brought to justice. His name is Kang Keck Lev, nicknamed Duch. He was arrested in 1999, some 20 years after the Khmer Rouge were defeated. He was then held until trial in 2010. Just last year on the 26^th of July he was found guilty of mass genocide and was sentenced to 35 years in jail. He is 67 and so will live the remainder of his life in prison. I’m not sure that is a fitting sentence for what he was involved in but at least he is no longer a free man. There are just 4 other leaders of the Khmer rouge who are awaiting trial. What is even more galling is that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were intellectuals such as teachers and generally came from well to do families, exactly the people they were slaughtering. 

The Khmer Rouge were so-called because of their uniform. Black like the Chinese communists but with a traditional Cambodian Krama or scarf which was always red,

In contrast the Khmer Rouge army was made up of uneducated teenagers from rural villages who were easily brainwashed when promised a better life. Once indoctrinated into the regime they couldn’t leave. If they didn’t carry out the orders to torture and kill their innocent kinsmen they would surely be killed themselves. However, when the Vietnamese took power of Phnom Penh on the 7^th of January 1979 many of the Khmer Rouge soldiers deserted and ran away. Now they are living out their days amongst the normal people of Cambodia and will never admit their past. I found this quite hard to deal with as anyone we see who is my age or older here is a survivor of this regime and may have been involved in carrying out the horrendous acts that I have seen and heard about today.

After the Khmer Rouge was ousted from power in 1979 Cambodia was then under rule by the Vietnamese and has only been truly free from civil war since 1999. Perhaps this is why little is developed in this country. In some ways it seems to be far behind its neighbours such as Thailand. On our bus journey to Phnom Penh I was amazed to see that life in the countryside has changed little since the way it was described in my book back in the 1950s. Entire families are still living is tiny little wooden huts with palm thatched roofs built on stilts at the edge of the paddy fields, the rice paddies being farmed by men using ploughs pulled by oxen. For many years the aims for Cambodia have been to increase exports of Cambodian rice, to increase the harvest and utilise mechanisation in its production. They were some of the aims of the Khmer Rouge in 1977 – not a bad idea but sadly the Khmer Rouge had a number of ideas and regimes that made this unachievable. Cambodia has only truly been free to develop since 1999 when the civil war ended and the people have a long way to take the little country so ravaged by the wars.

After such a day it was difficult to go back to the city and continue with the honeymoon. We stopped off in a bar for a drink and snack before heading back to the hotel to reflect on the day. I was still reading Survival In the Killing Fields but having seen the site and prison today it was far more real that I could ever have imagined from the pages of the book.

We eventually headed downstairs to our hotel bar for a drink. We were planning on having a couple and then heading down the road for some tea. However, Gordon, the Irish lawyer we’d met the night before popped up to ask about our day. We gave him a brief overview as he was intending to visit the killing fields the following day and then got chatting to him so decided to stay and eat at the hotel. One beer soon turned into 19 again but by 1.45am I was ready for bed. Gordon and Franky were still going strong so I retired and left them to it. Some 3 hours later a very wobbly boy knocked on the hotel room door asking to be let in. He delightedly informed me that he was not at all drunk and would have absolutely no problem getting up and packing in just 6 hours time. He also informed me that they had come to bed because the bar had run out of single malt whiskey which Gordon had been buying. Oh dear!