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Published: April 30th 2006
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After thoroughly enjoying my time in Vietnam, I headed off on an eneventful bus ride to Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia. The city suprised me by being a normal big city, and even more suprising, I learned from the people I was traveling with that there is more American food available in a Cambodian grocery store than in London. However, before I explain the places I visited in Phnom Penh, a brief history lesson on Cambodia might help explain the two main museums.
After a civil war that ended in 1975, Cambodia suffered under the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge regime, which stayed in power until 1979. Under the leadership of the paranoid Pol Pot, the goal of the Khmer Rouge was to "turn the clock back to year zero" and instate a rural utopia consisting of small villages that were filled with peasant farmers. To achieve this goal, immediately after assuming power, the military depopulated every city, by forcing the people to small villages to work on farms. To further achieve this idyllic communist utopia, the Khmer Rouge also banned money, killed all civil servants and slaughtered anybody with an education, as signified by speaking a second language, being a monk or merely wearing glasses. On top of all this, the Khmer Rouge did not hesitate to kill anybody that perceived to be a threat to the regime. After four years under the Khmer Rouge an estimated 2 million Cambodians, or roughly 20% of the population, were dead from: starvation (a number of severe famines spread throughout the country, while the government kept exporting rice to China to purchase weapons), disease (people were starving and all the doctors and nurses had been killed) or killed directly by the government.
The governement slaughtered staggering numbers of people because Pol Pot was terrified of "enemies within" burrowing into the organization/revolution and preventing utopia ideal. Many victimes were killed straight away, but most were processed through various facilities where government officials withdrew confessions, that led to arrests of more people. Often times the confessions were withdrawn through a number of torture sessions, some cycles which lasted 6 weeks. All this resulted in a vicious cycle becuase eventually many people told their captors whatever they could to stop the torture and so Pol Pot constantly felt threatened by networks in the country and also more and more people were brought in for "re-education," after being mentioned in a confession. The largest facility of this type was located in Phnom Penh at the site of a former school and was code named S-21. In 4 years of operation over 14,000 people were processed through S-21, and only 7 of this number survived the experience.
The nightmare in Cambodia came to an end when Vietnam invaded and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. The Vietnamese began the war because Pol Pot wasn't the best neighbor to have and routinely initiated border conflicts, which included raids that resulted in the massacre of several hundred Vietnamese civilians. However, after the Vietnamese invasion, the remenants of the Khmer Rouge fled to the hills and carried on a civil war that lasted until the late 1990s. So, on top of the legacy of suffering under the Khmer Rouge, the country is also an heir to a history that is steeped in conflicted, which results in the unfortunate legacy of land mines littering the countryside.
Both S-21 and the the field in which the executions were carried out, the Killing Fields, have been turned into musems/memorials open to the public. So, I spent the better part of a day getting a mere glimpse as to the operations of the Khmer Rouge. We started at the Killing Fields, soon after S-21 began operations a place had to be found to put the bodies. Eventually, a former Chinese cemetary 9 miles outside of town was chosen. In 1980 this site was diescovered and a number of mass graves were exhumed. A Stupa was built to house the exhumed bones. After examing the Stupa of bones, I made my way through a field that is littered with large holes, all of which are exhumed mass graves. My guide then informed me that very small percentage of the graves have been exhumed and that the majority of the bodies are still in the ground. As we were wandering through the field of mass graves, our guide pointed out that in the path bones were actually poking through the dirt because it had rained the night before. Further bearing witness to the horrors of the site are small piles of bones and clothes scattered throughout the area, that are waiting to be placed in the Stupa.
After this we went to S-21, the former school turned prison. Here there were hundreds of mugshots of victims, but these are only a small percentage of those processed because when the facility was too busy, they didn't take records of people, just drove them straight to the Killing Fields for execution. This pictures included men, women, children and even a number of mothers holding infants in the photo. The facility also has rooms where people where tortured for confessions, these rooms include a photograph of the final occupant who was found when the city was taken over. Also surviving are a number of the implements used to torture people and the cells.
Throughout my limited travels in Cambodia I would occasionally think about the legacy of the Khmer Rouge. Essentially, society was shattered. Families were seperated, with many people still not knowing if their kin survived, furthermore, everybody has a family member that died during the Khmer Rouge's rule. Also, there was no companionship or camradre because everybody was terrified that his or her neighbor would turn them in to the government. To top all this off, all the schools were shut down and destroyed and anybody with any training in any field was killed. It was quite bizarre to sit in a seemingly normal city, knowing all this happened 2 years before I was born, and as our Cambodian guide at the Killing Fields told us, there is nothing to show for all the suffering and no justice has been carried out because the herculean task of putting the former officials or soldiers on trial has never happened.
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