Phnom Penh and the Killing Fields

After Siem Riep, we hoped a Mekong Express Bus down to Phnom Penh.  A minivan picked us up at our hotel on schedule at 9am and took us to the bus station.  There they gave us tags for our bags, and loaded us into a very nice coach bus complete with LCD tv screens.  We also had a "stewardess"!  I've been on worse flights with Air Canada!  The trip to Phnom Penh was right on schedule and we showed up about 3pm as planned.  Then it was into a couple of tuk tuks (no way one could carry us and our bags) to our hotel right downtown (again around the corner from one of Nancy's Blue Pumpkin Ice Cream shops).

We took another tuk tuk to the mall and enjoyed a night of shopping in relative comfort.  We tried to see a Liam Neilson movie but realized a few minutes in that it definitely was not PG rated and rushed the kids out and called it a night.

A WARNING TO THE SQUEAMISH... YOU PROBABLY DON'T WANT TO SEE THESE PICTURES OR READ ANY FURTHER.  I'LL POST THE REST OF THE DAY ON ANOTHER ENTRY.  IF YOU CAN STOMACH THIS, I WOULD SUGGEST THAT YOU TRY.  THE WORLD REALLY DOES NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED HERE.

The next morning one of the tuk tuk drivers from the bus station took us out to Choeung Ek to see one of the Killing Fields.  For those of you who haven't seen the excellent Academy award winning movieof the same name (filmed in the early 80's), the Killing Fields are the names given to the fields where the Khmer Rouge took the educated, city folks (and anybody they thought might disagree with them - ethnic Thai's, Vietnamese, Christians, Muslims, Chinese and even Buddhist Monks) and killed them by starvation, hacking them to death and other unspeakable atrocities.  Out of 60,000 monks, only 800-1000 survived.  This lasted for 3 years and resulted in the death of at around 3 Million of Cambodia's 8 Million population.  One Cambodian peasant, Heng Chan, whose wife was of Vietnamese descent, lost not only his wife, but also five sons, three daughters, three grandchildren, and sixteen of his wife's relatives. The world stood by as this happened.

Choeung Ek was the site of a former execution camp just outside the city limits of Phnom Penh.  They figure over 17,000 people were executed here.  The executed were buried in mass graves. In order to save ammunition, the executions were often carried out using poison, spades or sharpened bamboo sticks. In some cases the children and infants of adult victims were killed by having their heads bashed against the trunks of trees. The rationale was "to stop them growing up and taking revenge for their parents' deaths."  They have built a large Buddhist stupa (burial house) on the grounds and when you get close, you realize it has thousands and thousands of human skulls in it plainly visible.  It is also the site of mass graves and after rains, bones and clothing fragments still come out of the ground.  We saw lots of it and you couldn't come away from the place without feeling huge sadness (and anger).  It is impossible to understand how such a kind and gentle people as the Cambodians could do this to one another.  It goes to show the power of hatred.

The Stupa at Cheoung Ek - this contains thousands of bone fragments from the mass graves... more are being added  every month

All of the buildings of the camp were torn down immediately after the Khmer Rouge fled the area by local peasants desperate for building materials to survive.  They have erected these little temples to show what was there.  I'll let you read the signs as we saw them.

This palm tree and many like it were used to fashion saws to hack the heads off the prisoners

Can you even imagine trying to cut someone's head off with this - or worse yet, being the subject of that?

The site of only one of many of the mass graves - this one they excavated to count the corpses

Looks like a leg bone... surfaced after the excavation

Another mass grave... one of dozens of them around the small compound.  

Another leg bone sticking out of the side of that grave

This was in a box containing more fragments.  The scary part is that we saw bone and teeth and clothes coming through the surface nearly every where we walked.  It is impossible to imagine the horrors that went on here.

A blindfold fragment coming to the surface (by the bone fragment we saw in the mass grave).  This one was out on the main walking path.

Those hollows and bumps are mass graves... each one containing hundreds of bodies.

They don't even try to dig up the bodies that died in these fields.

I can see Dith Pran (the Cambodian star of the movie the killing fields) making his escape across here.

A tooth fragment I found as I was sitting on a bench contemplating the atrocities... this was on a newly made elevated path.  Clearly, they are using reclaimed soil from the area.

These were Khmer Rouge soldiers who were found in contempt of Pol Pot and his gang of thugs

Look at the purple shorts... they wouldn't fit Rachel

This is the mass grave of the women and children... note the tree in the background

The sign says please do not walk on the mass graves

 But even as you are walking along the paths, you see bone fragments popping through the surface.  I can't tell you how affecting this is.

Every one of those 17 levels of shelves has hundreds of skulls on it.  There are over 5000 in this stupa  alone.

This pot was used to feed the guards/executioners

Note the knife mark in the skull... many of the jaw bones showed crude attempts to decapitate the prisoner

They figure this was a pick axe

A baby's shirt and bindings to hold the prisoners wrists together while they were hacked to death.

Some of the implements used to kill the prisoners as well as the shackles to hold them together as they were killed.

I'm sorry for the gruesome pictures and part of me felt disgusted with myself for taking them but then I realized that this atrocity happened precisely because nobody was paying attention.  The world had an idea what was happening here and did nothing about it.  The US, Canada, UK, Germany even recognized the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government long after they fell to rebel forces (in the late 80's and early 90's) almost 20 years after this happened.  Remember, the movie was RELEASED in 1984.  The atrocities happened from 75 to 78.  This can NEVER happen again... but then look at Kosovo, Rwanda and what's happening right now in Southern Sudan/Ethopia.

The Cambodian people are the mildest, gentlest and most friendly people we've met in SE Asia.  We have heard more laughter and play from them than any other group.  So much that it is infectious and we find ourselves laughing along with them.  When you consider that many of them would have lived through this, it completely rattles your mind.  Anybody my age or 10 years younger would have been either a soldier or at least a victim to this.  Most everyone has lost several or all of their family members.  If such a kind and gentle people can do this to one another in this day and age, how safe are we all?  Pol Pot and his henchmen were not village peasants.  They were educated by the French and held university degrees from Paris even!  (They learned their communism in France).  How the Cambodian people came through this with their minds intact is a complete mystery to me.  We can't forget this.  It really must never happen again.