The Killing Fields (Phnom Penh, Cambodia)Jun 29, 2004
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Sunset in Phnom Penh
Memorial at Killing Fields
Killing Fields
| Phnom Penh was a great city. It wasn't particularily beautiful (in fact, quite the opposite), but it was a city of people who were reserved yet focused. It was a city that wasn't so bustling and the streets so clogged with motorbikes and cars that you got lost in it. The Cambodians weren't as pushy as the Vietnamese, and seemed to see you more than just a person from which they could extract money. I believe that because Vietnam has become such a travel destination within the past decade or two that the Vietnamese see so many tourists that most they see simply at face value: a tourist. It is when you sit down and form a bond with the Vietnamese that you see how beautiful and sweet they are, how much they want to connect and talk with you. The Cambodians, perhaps because tourism is only recently becoming big for them, still give you a warm smile with their dependable and capable service. They want to talk and connect. One of the most interesting aspects of Phnom Penh was the plethora of large SUVs--quite the juxtaposition to the ubiquitous motorbike in Saigon. The true shock, however, was that some cars had their steering wheel on one side, and others had the steering wheel on the other side, and it was perfectly normal. Furthermore, once one got out of the city more, driving on either side of the road seemed to be quite permitted and accepted. It was quite the mix of international driving standards. :) We spent our time in Phnom Penh in a guesthouse on the lake. Each night, we would sit on the expansive decks set out over the water, drink a beer or two, watch amazing sunsets over the water, and have long talks. Cambodian definitely had a warm, relaxing feel to it. I enjoyed it immensely. One night, we stumbled across a DVD movie theatre. You got to pick from an assortment of DVDs and then watch your pick in a private room, complete with air conditioning, two leather couches, free popcorn and ice tea. All for just $6 total. Nice. We picked Shrek 2 and had a blast. It was a great way to escape for an afternoon. The two biggest things we saw in Phnom Penh, however, were both related to the violent and diabolical Khmer Rouge coup that went on for over three years back in the seventies, while the world looked on and did nothing. They wanted to create a completely agrarian society of farming using only the most simple of tools. They said that the year they took over, was the Year Zero--that all of history was to be erased and they were starting anew. Like many overzealous communist revolutions around the world, the educated, the rich and the city folk were all killed or forced into 'reeducation'. It was a horrible time; the stories are almost unbelievable with how morbid, grotesque and evil they are. Everyone starved, and countless Cambodians died from starvation. The stories are even worse than the Holocaust in my mind. These were their own people! They worked them literally 15-16 hours a day in the fields, and then fed them a watery broth with maybe five grains of rice. All day they would tend bountiful fields of rice and corn, but if they were caught stealing some of it, they were killed. It seems a merciless torture. First, we went to the Killing Fields--an area just outside of Phnom Penh, where thousands of people were executed and shoveled into numerous mass graves. There were hundreds of mass grave sites all over Cambodia from the time, but this was the largest. It was mainly just an area of a field on the edge of a sparsly wooded area, but the ground was pocked with numerous large depressions--the remnants of the uncovered mass graves. They were now covered with grass, showing the time that had passed, but the depressions were obvious--illustrating the hundreds of bodies that once filled each grave, leaving behind cavernous empty spaces when they were exumed years later. Around the pits, eerily bits of weathered clothing was matted into the ground here and there--worn pieces half buried, sticking up from the eroded dirt. I don't know whether these were recent or not, but the possibility that these were the clothes of the victims sent shivers down my spine. Pieces of bone (a broken femur, a tibula, etc.), bleached from the sun, were arranged in some places on the edges of mass graves. A sign on one of the trees stated that this tree had been used to kill babies by slamming them against the trunk, again to save bullets. Another sign noted a mass grave that had been completely filled with women and children, all naked. All the skulls from the graves were assembled according to age in a towering Memorial that stood next to the graves. It was eery walking up to the Memorial and seeing so many skulls clustered together, level after level after level after level. This bunch are from teenage girls; this bunch from men older than 60 years; and on and on. Many had holes in them from bullets, but many more evidenced the crude methods the Khmer Rouge used to save precious bullets: hammers, shovels, etc. Sitting there, so many clustered together, you almost forgot the scope of what you were looking at. I had to constantly remind myself that each one of these skulls was a person, and every time I did a new wave of disbelief and remorse would wash over me. I was most surprised about the casual fashion at which the bones and skulls had been arranged. As I mentioned earlier, there were bones lying around out in the elements, and the skulls in the memorial had glass doors on them, of which, some were open, and, if one wished, one could reach in and touch them--even carry one away if they wanted! I was shocked by what I believed to be such carelessness. These were people, and, although they had died horrible deaths and sat in mass graves for years, I believed their remains should have been kept a little more protected. After the Killing Fields, we went to the prison/death camp where many of the people in the mass graves outside of Phnom Penh had spent their last days. It was a school that had been turned into a prison by the Khmer Rouge. The classrooms had been divided into small cells for prisoners; there were no doors on each cell, because each prisoner was chained to floor inside their cell. The rooms on the lowest floor each had a lone chain-link bed within, and picture on the wall of the way the Vietnamese had found the room when they arrived in Phnom Penh. Each picture showed a prisoner chained to the bed, amongst puddles of blood, and dead. These were the officers of the Khmer Rouge who had been threatened with treason, and that is why they had been housed in the relatively large rooms. Outside in the school yard, there was a high arch made up from which they would hang the prisoners from their wrists with their hands tied behind their backs, and, then, when they passed out, they would lower them into buckets of water to revive them. Later on, in another building, we saw numerous torture devices or pictures of the tortures that occured as painted by one of the seven sole survivors of S21 prison. Our guide told us of how they would force inmates to write out a confession that they had betrayed the Khmer Rouge, and then use it against them as their death sentence. In another part of the school, we saw rows and rows and rows of photographs that the Khmer Rouge took when they inmates entered the prison. It was eerie because every single girl had her hair cut in the mandatory page boy cut--so that were no differences between them; they were part of a whole. The whole experience was quite haunting, compounded by the stories that our guide told us about losing her own family and how she and her mother fled Phnom Penh and hid out in a small village in the north. She told us, everyone in Cambodia over thirty has family and/or friends they lost; everyone has their own haunting story since it had just happened less than thirty years ago. I wrote this in my email about Cambodia and Vietnam last September on Semester At Sea, but if you never got that email, I urge you to see the movie "The Killing Fields". It is a haunting look into those horrific years, but extremely educational. I am ashamed that I had never really heard of the atrocities that occured in Cambodia until SAS visited last fall, and I really believe that you all should take a deeper look into it. |
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