Published: April 26th 2018
Woolly says – We’d had a couple of days enforced rest, day one for Zoe to finish preparing and researching for her master’s interview, followed by day two of a day long skype interview. Happily, due to my diligence and help she was successful and was offered a place, which meant we could finally start investigating our newest country. Cambodia was formally known as Kampuchea and is a sovereign state located in the southern portion of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. The capital and largest city is Phnom Penh, and our base for the week. The kingdom is an elective constitutional monarchy with Norodom Sihamoni, a monarch chosen by the Royal Throne Council, as head of state. It is a country which is perhaps known more for the Khmer Rouge and genocide rather than anything else, it’s history however goes back to 802 AD when the country was one of wealth and influence in South East Asia. Like it’s neighbours Vietnam they had fought for independence from the French and achieved it in 1953 and during the Vietnam war had been heavily bombed. It wasn’t until 1970 when things really took a turn for the worse and following a coup by the Khmer Rouge who emerged as a major power, taking Phnom Penh in 1975 and later carrying out the Cambodian Genocide from 1975 until 1979. The UN stepped in and governed the country until 1997 when elections took place and power was placed back into the Cambodian people’s hands.
Kampuchea had become headlines in my childhood when Blue Peter (a British children’s programme that launched a yearly appeal to send aid to other countries) broadcast an appeal to help the children of Kampuchea, although at the time I had no idea why they needed any help I did a lot of baking to raise money for the appeal.
Woolly says – Having made a deal with a tuk tuk driver (boy have I missed tuk tuks), we chugged our way through the rapidly expanding city of Phnom Penh, I had expected it be more run down and possibly without much of an infrastructure, but the city was thriving with new buildings gracing the skylines. As we started to drive into the more rural areas poverty was much more evident and rubbish and poor living conditions made it seem like some parts of India. The roads became potholed and there were more cows in use than motorised vehicles. Our starting point for the day was known globally as the Killing Fields, the Choeung EK Genocidal Centre was opened in 2005 in remembrance of the millions killed under the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot.
Pol Pot (19th May 1925 to 15th April 1998) was a Cambodian revolutionary and politician who served as the Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976 to 1979. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist and Khmer nationalist, he led the Khmer Rouge group from 1963 until 1997. Born Saloth Sar to a prosperous farmer in Prek Sbauv the French part of Cambodia, Pol Pot was educated at some of Cambodia’s elite schools. In the 1940s, in a similar manner to Ho Chi Minh he moved to Paris where he joined the French Communist Party. Pol Pot returned to Phnom Penh and worked as a teacher while remaining a central member of the Cambodian Marxist–Leninist movement. In 1959, he helped to convert the movement into the Kampuchean Labour Party and in 1960 took control of it as party secretary. Renaming the country the Democratic of Kampuchea and seeking to create an agrarian socialist society, Pol Pot’s government forcibly relocated the urban population to the countryside to work on collective farms. Those regarded as enemies of the new government were killed, in fact anyone who didn’t fit into Pol Pot’s tick boxes were killed including those that wore glasses (that’s Jo and Zoe gone), those with soft hands, any one with an education and those that couldn’t meet the new quotas on farming laid down by the government were also gone. As we pulled up at the site I clambered down with a heavy heart.
Having collected our tickets and audio guides we sat under a shady tree and listened to the start of the commentary.
Woolly says – The speaker told us that Pol Pot had forced an evacuation of Phon Phen making it obligatory for the cities peoples to walk to this site where they were killed, eleven kilometres in the hot sun and then death. We walked to the next point which was where the trucks would have stopped filled with civilians who thought they were merely moving to a new house and didn’t know the fate that was about to befall them. I sat staring out at the green trees and shrubs surrounded by mass graves of those that had died for no reason, the commentary described how one of the trees had provided a killing tool with it’s sharp bark and that thousands had had there throats cut by using it, before we moved towards a mass grave were over 450 victims had died. It was harrowing to listen to but nothing in comparison to what the people arriving at that period of time had faced.
As we stood listening to some of the survivor’s stories we could see pieces of cloth and bone in the earth around us, during the rainy season more remains surface and are cleaned and put safely into the monument to all those that perished.
Woolly says – The killing tree where babies had been slaughtered had a small teddy beside it, each of the mass graves had bracelets hanging over the posts in remembrance of those that had gone, it was heart breaking. As we passed glass boxes containing clothes from those that had died and bones that have been retrieved over the years I failed to understand how anyone could do this to a country. Our final part led us into the memorial stupa which has hundreds of thousands of skulls some with bullet holes, some with machete marks and many with huge dents made in the final moments of life. We sat for a while in the shade unable to say much.
I wondered if our second destination might be a bit much, but having talked it through we decided to continue with our plan.
Woolly says – We sat silently in the back of the tuk tuk as it bounced its way back into the city towards the Tuol Sleng Museum better known as S21. The site is a former high school which was used as Security Prison by the Khmer Rouge regime from its rise to power in 1975 to its fall in 1979. Tuol Sleng means “Hill of the Poisonous Trees” or “Strychnine Hill” which didn’t bode well for its inmates. Tuol Sleng was just one of at least 150 execution centres established by the Khmer Rouge. As we entered the tree filled courtyard it seemed such an innocent place but once the audio guide started to explain it sent chills down my spine. Right in front of us were fourteen white graves of the bodies found in 1979 when the prison was taken, buried there as a memorial to all those that had died under the torturous regime that had been in place. Split into four blocks our tour took us into Block A where the torture rooms had been, each large former school room had nothing in but a metal bed in the centre and a picture of one of the many victims on the wall. The tiled floors still showed stains from those that had suffered, the spoken guide told us of what they had undergone and how most prisoners ended up admitting to crimes regardless of there innocence. Over twenty thousand people had died and been tortured, it just didn’t bear thinking about.
The second block showed us photographs of those that had spent time in the prison, children as young as five had been arrested as well as whole families of intellectuals and completely innocent people. We were told the story of New Zealander Kerry Hamill who was sent to Tuol Sleng in 1978 at the age of 26. He had been captured when his 28-foot yacht, Foxy Lady, was blown off course in a storm and ended up near Koh Tang island in the Gulf of Thailand. He like so many had committed no crime and died for no reason at all.
Woolly says – Block C was possibly the worst for us, having been left exactly as it had been found after the Khmer Rouge had departed, with barbed wire covering the open walkways to prevent anyone from trying to escape the inside showed us how terrible the conditions had been. The ground floor school rooms had been changed into small brick built cells with hardly room for me let alone two men, whilst the first floor had wooden cells along the whole of the floor, stains on the floors and little light made it horrible on a bright sunny day let alone having to spend months in there knowing that they only route out was by death.
The last block showed us images of victims of the torture inflicted and photographs of those that had died in their place of death, it wasn’t pleasant viewing. We headed to a shaded bench and sat for a while, it was something that was so difficult to comprehend, how hadn’t Pol Pot been stopped? Why didn’t the world know what was going on? As we listened to the last of the audio guide he referred to other countries that had faced genocide and that by opening places like this and the Killing Fields to the public was not just as a memorial to those that had lost everything but as a reminder that this cannot happen again, sadly it will and quite possibly is currently, life shouldn’t be like that for anyone and no one should ever have to go through a life where genocide is involved, it takes a lot of brave people to step in and stop these atrocities from happening and thankfully for the Cambodian people that happened.