My first day in Cambodia was a heartbreaking one. I went to visit the Tuol Sleng genocide museum and the killing fields of Choeung Ek. The Khmer Rouge was the communist party that ruled from 1975 to 1979 in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge implemented one of the most radical and brutal restructurings of a society ever attempted. The goal was to transform Cambodia into a peasant-dominated agrarian cooperative, untainted by anything that had come before. People were killed just for wearing glasses and being educated. It is estimated that 1.7 million people died, about 1 in every 4 Cambodians. And all this happened less than 40 years ago.
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| Visitors pay homage to the victims |
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| The worst |
The first stop was the killing fields. A portable audio guide walks you through the grounds and describes the brutality that occured in the now peaceful orchard. There are depressions in the ground formed after the excavation of mass graves.
Periodically small pieces of bone and clothing emerge, which are collected by caretakers. It is said that the spirits that reside here are restless, as they are never still.
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| Collected clothing from victims |
What gave me chills was a recording. To drown out the screams of people being killed in the evening, they played the khmer rouge anthem with a desiel engine in the background. The recording gave a small audio clip of what may have been the last sounds these poor people every heard. The speaker was hung on this tree.
At the heart of the killing fields is a massive monument. Within holds the skulls and bones of 8000 people. It was one of the saddest things I have ever seen. I took photos, not to be disrepectful of the dead, but so people could see the atrocities of what happened in Cambodia.
That afternoon I went to the genocide museum. The building was once a high school that was turned into a prison and torture chamber. As many as 100 people were killed a day. The corriders display the faces of all the victims that went into Tuol Sleng and never came out.
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