The worst of humanity

---

After not enough sleep the alarm went off and we raised ourselves from bed to catch our ride to see the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek and the Tuol Sleng genocide museum.

We caught a tuk tuk with a german guy and set off to the killing fields first.

For those that don't know already, the Khmer Rouge - a communist group led by Pol Pot - ruled Cambodia for about 3 years in the 70's. During this time they were responsible for a range of atrocities against their own people. Doctors, Nurses, teachers, people who wore glasses, people with soft hands, men, women, children were imprisoned, tortured and executed by the Khmer Rouge.

The Killing Fields at Choeung Ek are an old Chinese cemetery that was place to about 20,000 executions. When you arrive you are greeted by a huge pagoda, inside there are 17 levels filled with human skulls, boned and rags of clothes. There are literally thousands, most of which have cracked and smashed skulls where they had been hit with sharp heavy objects - machetes, farming tools etc.

Also at the killing fields are the sites of several mass graves, some of which still have clothes, teeth and bones remaining on the ground. There are signs around displaying brief descriptions of what happened in each place. There is one particularly disturbing site which is a tree that infants were executed upon by being smashed against them like a bat. The site is horrendous and you spend the whole time walking round with a lump in your throat. This didnt happen thousands of years ago, its been barely 30 years.

After watching a brief video on the killing fields we headed off to the Tuol Sleng (S21) Museum. This is a former school site that was converted by the Khmer Rouge to be a detention centre where detainees were tortured and kept in horrible conditions before being shipped off to the killing fields to be executed. There are several builings, some with articles on the walls, others with photographs of the detainees and dead, and some showing the horrible conditions people were kept in. A single bed and shackles accompanied by a picture depicting the horror that the room once contained is all that adorn many of the rooms in the first building.

I found that seeing the pictures of the detainees the most disturbing, many of them were just children.

Afterwords we went back to our guesthouse to relax a little and now we are updating the blogs before heading off for some grub by the riverside. Not the cheeriest of entries was it?

---