The Khmer Rouge Terror

This was the first week of a month visiting my friend Anisa, who was living in Phnom Penh. My first night there, Anisa took me out to dinner on a touristy street overlooking the Mekong, where I was amazed to see an elephant walk by on the sidewalk. I was also surprised to see people riding motorcycles and scooters with a face mask to shield their nose and mouth from the road dust, but not bothering with a helmet. This is my first trip to Asia, so everything looks new and different!

After a day to deal with jetlag, Anisa told me to just get all of the horror of Cambodia’s history with the Khmer Rouge over with in one day. It’s something I have to know, if I’m going to be a tourist here. Something that was not taught in any of my history classes.

This meant starting with the killing fields, a place as terrible as it sounds. Anisa’s driver Jim took me to the Choeung Ek killing fields on his scooter, about 15 km south of Phnom Penh. It was a very surreal place. Luckily I was there early so there were no other tourists. It’s not the sort of place I could handle with a group. 

Choeung Ek is where the Khmer Rouge took people to kill and dispose of. I didn't take any photos there. Even with bright morning sunshine and butterflies, the place was just too sinister. 

Not even half of the mass graves have been excavated so far. There are giant pits left where some of the graves have been dug up. The narrow paths between them are hard packed dirt, baked in the heat. I walked between them, in a daze, trying to understand how anybody could do something like this. Looking down at the path I was walking on, I realized with horror that there are bones and teeth embedded in the dirt. Along with the bones are clothes, shreds of fabric, embedded in the path. 

The colors and patterns haven’t faded. It’s that recent. These are the same clothes we wear when we dress up as 70s for Halloween. I can buy these same colors and patterns at any thrift shop. That’s what really drove home for me how recent it all was. It is truly horrific.

I sat under a tree to try to collect my thoughts and I realized that these trees were here when this was taking place. They watched the murders. 

There is a large stupa dedicated to those murdered which is filled with skulls in a glass case, all organized by age and sex. I burned some incense in front of the stupa and sat there, stunned by the whole experience. Besides not being able to take photos, there are things that happened here that I can’t even write down. It’s just too horrible.

The government has done a wonderful job of preserving the evidence and is also doing a good job of honoring those who were killed here. Nevertheless, only two people have been arrested from Pol Pot's clique, and they are still awaiting trial. 

I’m glad that it took about half an hour to get to the next stop. I needed a breather. The next stop was the Toul Sleng "Museum" as it is labeled on the map. It is an old high school which Pol Pot used as a prison and torture facility. I spent much more time at Toul Sleng and even hired a guide, which Lonely Planet had suggested. It was well worth it because she told me so much more than I would have been able to learn from just the signs. What I valued the most was her personal story. She was very little when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in April 1975 and forcefully evacuated everybody to the countryside. Her parents and older brother took her to settle closer to Thailand, in the south. Since her father was a teacher he and his son were killed within a year. It was still early in the regime and they weren't killing women yet, so she and her mother survived. They moved back to Phnom Penh in 1987, which she said was still a ghost town. The Khmer Rouge destroyed everything. 

One other thing that touched me deeply was that Toul Sleng had been built as a typical French high school. I suppose that was the norm during colonial times. It looked just like my school in France. I could still picture the place as classrooms, though all around me were torture devices and pictures of the people tortured there. The photos and documentation were exactly what the Nazis did. How did the world let another country do this to its own people, just thirty years after the Holocaust?

After that I went back to Anisa's apartment and watched the movie she had left in the VCR for me: The Killing Fields. I highly recommend it to anybody interested in what happened here in 1975 and after. It's an 80s movie, but very well done. The actor who plays the main Cambodian character actually lived though the events he portrays, he really was in a Khmer Rouge forced labor camp.

I was mentally exhausted after all that. I needed to do something ordinary. Washing the dishes was calming and then I had to take a shower to try and rid myself of all the terror. It was all just too much. Anisa had recommended that I get it all over in one day, and she was right. I'm glad I did all of it together, but . . . It's just too much for my sheltered middle class American brain to comprehend. It was definitely an overwhelming day.