Camodia - Phnom Penh and the killing fields

Our bus trip to Phnom Penh was fine - a bit boring but not too long. The landscape in Cambodia is pretty flat away from it's borders with Thailand, Laos and Vietnam (West, North and East respectively) and in many respects is reminiscent of India. It is evident, though, that there is a lot more money in Cambodia than in Laos just by the fact the rural buildings were made of wood rather than the standard bamboo ones in Laos.

Phnom Penh is a fairly large city, again on the Mekong river, with some French undertones and a low-rise, grid-like landscape. It has a lot of tourist amenities like ethnic tat markets, museums, cafes, etc. plus the ubiquitous Wats at every turn. Nice enough but fairly nondescript. The real reason to come here though, apart from the fact it's on the way to Vietnam, was to visit the Killing Fields. Perhaps a rather macabre reason to visit but nevertheless we felt it was an important part of world history that we should witness.

The history of Cambodia is long and varied, with the peak of its civilization creating Angkor Wat, but in the 1970s the lowest end of the spectrum was achieved. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge Communist regime sent millions of people away from the cities and created two classes - working class (factories) and peasants - and families were split up to work like dogs all over the country. Similiar to the regime under Mao in China, if in any way you were considered posh, rich, intellectual (i.e., wore glasses), spoke a foreign language or educated in any way, chances are you'd end up in a prison, and ultimately die.

One school in Phnom Penh was converted into a major prison, holding up to 1500 people at any time, for up to 4 months, usually before being taking to a field and killed and buried in mass graves (the killing fields). Classrooms were converted into cells, and victims were tortured to "confess" their bourgeois sins in horrific ways. The school is now a museum, complete with cells and torture equipment and is an eerie place to visit, leaving a sense of bewilderment and disbelief.

The one-time school, then converted into Prison S21
On the way to the killing fields, we stopped at the local shooting gallery as Kieran had a fantasy about shooting an AK47 (Kalashnikov). El (me) decided to just take photos and video but after a few shots had to leave the room. It is the closest I hope I'll ever get to a gun and in many ways was a more effective way of sobering me to the experiences of the victims of the Khmer Rouge.

Kieran and an AK47
On then to the killing fields themselves which consist of a large monument holding some of the skulls and clothes of the victims that have since been excavated, plus various dips in the ground which were once mass graves. Over 8,000 bodies have been excavated so far from this site, less than half, and it is even stranger to walk around knowing that so many people's bodies lie perhaps naked or headless just a few metres away under the earth. Meanwhile, on the other side of the compound, there is a school where children can be heard singing and playing while shocked tourists wander round the awful site.

The killing fields
The worst thing about it all though is to read the estimates that in just 4 years up to 3 million people (some people guess as low as 750,000) died either by torture, working to death, malnutrition, or just plain killed for looking wrong. Perhaps not the happiest blog entry but just as Angkor Wat showed what heights and civilization can achieve, so this place shows how low people can fall.