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Published: November 2nd 2006
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Killing fields.
As soon as I woke up I frantically began to finish the book 'First They Killed My Father' - this was the day we'd been reading this book for. I fortunately managed to get to the end just as our tour guide Vasner began talking to us about the Pol Pot regime and the genocide that happened in Cambodia. Vasner began talking about what happened to his family during this time. He ended by telling us that he never used to be able to talk about these things with-out crying, it being only recently that he could keep composed and we all nodded in understanding with wet eyes and in shocked disbelief. The horrors that I had been reading about in my book, the systematic starvation of families, the brutal murders that happened to anyone who was educated through to those who raised any objection to the regime- happened to someone talking to us today and he was only two years older than me!
One of the things that scared me most about the Pol Pot genocide was that it was happening in the year I was born, and to civilized people, people who had the same
values, same kind of life as any European, American or British family alive in the late 70's. Yet nobody did anything to help them.
After crossing some ridiculously rocky terrain to get to the killing fields, we arrived. As I got off the bus I was immediately annoyed by the hugest lack of tact displayed by a coach of Chinese tourists having there picture taken next to the Killing Fields sign, jumping about and putting their thumbs up. After getting over this we followed Vasner around the site. It was a beautiful day which made it even harder to take in the utter horrors he then spoke about. He showed us the mass graves which held up to 100's corpses. Some of the largest pits are signposted: 'mass grave of more than 100 victims, children and women', 'mass grave of 166 victims without heads', and 'mass grave of 450 victims'.
8985 victims were unearthed at this site. 1.7 million Victims are estimated to have died in total during the period of 1975-78.
What was particularly terrible was when Vasner asked us to look down at our feet and slowly I could make out bits of bone,
and teeth in the dirt. We were literally standing on bits of people that died here. The most upsetting part of the whole trip, which had every one of us in tears, was when we reached a large tree. I suddenly realised what Vasner was saying: he'd explained that the dark red stain running down the trunk of the tree is the result of where babies and small children were held by their feet and their heads smashed against the tree before being flung into an open pit. Weirdly as I stood there I noticed the hundreds of butterflies that hovered around the grass and wild flowers in this particular area. I kind of felt that they might have some something to do with the lost soles of innocent, young lives that were lost in this particular place.
After we let the horror of this particular place drain away a little we headed for the Watt that held the bones, skulls and clothes of some of the victims. As I walked around this glass walled place I could easily see the injuries sustained by the victims- from holes in the head, often made my hammers. If they were lucky,
the holes were made by a bullet but as ammunition was expensive and more often than not the Khmer Rouge were sadistic and enjoyed the process of killing - torture was part of death. I felt that seeing the clothes of these people was a truly poignant thing. These clothes were like any clothes from the 1970's. They belonged to women and men and children like you or me.
Before we left the Killing fields I had to ask Vasner a question regarding the Khmer Rouge soldiers. I said that surely they all couldn't have been sadistic and enjoyed killing people. He managed to qualify this by saying, no, not all of them possibly, but because the Khmer Rouge were selected from uneducated families that worked on the land, they were easily groomed and moulded into these kinds of killers.
Instead of the day getting a bit brighter after leaving the filling fields I'm afraid it got lots worse as we headed to the Tuol Sleng Prison, now the genocide museum, which was the nerve centre of the Khmer Rouge's secret police. Here Upon arrival at the prison, prisoners were photographed and made to give information about themselves.
We walked by hundreds of mug shots of people, including: men, women and children - heart wrenchingly some of the faces staring back at us were even smiling for the camera- clearly unaware of their predicament. I could see my own friends and family in some of their faces and expressions. To imagine the fear and pain they must have felt was the second most upsetting part of this whole experience
If you would like more info then please click on the bellow link to read about the genocide in Cambodia.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/pol-pot.htm
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