On April 17th, 1975 the Khmer Rouge, a communist guerrilla group led by Pol Pot, took power in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. They forced all city dwellers into the countryside and to labor camps. During their rule, it is estimated that 2 million Cambodians died by starvation, torture or execution. 2 million Cambodians represented approximately 30% of the Cambodian population during that time.
The Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia to year zero. They banned all institutions, including stores, banks, hospitals, schools, religion, and the family. Everyone was forced to work 12 - 14 hours a day, every day. Children were separated from their parents to work in mobile groups or as soldiers. People were fed one watery bowl of soup with a few grains of rice thrown in. Babies, children, adults and the elderly were killed everywhere. The Khmer Rouge killed people if they didn’t like them, if didn’t work hard enough, if they were educated, if they came from different ethnic groups, or if they showed sympathy when their family members were taken away to be killed. All were killed without reason. Everyone had to pledge total allegiance to Angka, the Khmer Rouge government. It was a campaign based on instilling constant fear and keeping their victims off balance.
After the Vietnamese invaded and liberated the Cambodian people from the Khmer Rouge, 600,000 Cambodians fled to Thai border camps. Ten million landmines were left in the ground, one for every person in Cambodia. The United Nations installed the largest peacekeeping mission in the world in Cambodia in 1991 to ensure free and fair elections after the withdrawal of the Vietnamese troops. Cambodia was turned upside down during the Khmer Rouge years and the country has the daunting task of healing physically, mentally and economically.
In the countryside
In the city
A tiger and a three-headed snake
Phnom Penh sunset
Steve and I visited 'The Killing Fields', a fairly small area of land about 10km from Phnom Penh, where mass graves were discovered when the Vietnamese liberated the capital. It is a symbolic place (of course, Cambodians were killed in fields all over the country), somewhere the Cambodian people can come to remember the tragedy that affected them all.
We spent our time there in a kind of daze, failing to comprehend the scale of the tragedy that had taken place here, and in places like it all over Cambodia. It was not an easy day, but for me, the hardest part of it was reading the commemorative plaque, situated in a hut next to the stupa which contained the recovered skulls of thousand Khmer vicitims, recovered from mass graves in the immediate vicinity.
I reprint the text below. The English is bad, but I've chosen not to correct it because I think if I did it's power would be diminished. It certainly affected me most profoundly - after reading it and thinking about the horror of those times, I took myself off into a quiet corner and had myself a little cry. I don't know, maybe you had to be there.
The Most Tragic
Even in this 20th century, on Kampuchean soil the clique of Pol Pot criminals had committed a heinous genocidal act. They massacred the population with atrocity in a large scale. It was more cruel than the genocidal act committed by the Hitler fascists, which the world has never met.
With the commemorative stupa in front of us, we imagine that we are hearing the grievous voice of the victims who were beaten by Pol Pot men with canes, bamboo stumps or heads of hoes. Who were stabbed with knives or swords. We seem to be looking at the horrifying scenes and the panic. Stricken faces of the people who were dying of starvation, forced labour or torture without mercy upon the skinny body, they died without giving the last word to their kith and kin. How hurtful those victims were when they got beaten with canes heads of hoes and stabbed with knives or swords before their last breath went out. How bitter they were when seeing their beloved children, wives, husbands, brothers or sisters were seized and tightly bound before being taken to the mass grave!
While they were waiting for their turn to come and share the same tragic lot.
The method of massacre which the clique of Pol Pot criminals was carried upon the innocent people of Kampuchea cannot be described fully and clearly in words because the invention of this killing method was strangely cruel so it is difficult for us to determine who they are for: they have the human form but their hearts are demon’s hearts, they have got the Khmer face but their activities are purely reactionary. They wanted to transform Campuchean people into a group of persons without reason or a group who knew and understood nothing, who bent their heads to carry out Ankar’s orders blindly. They had educated and transformed young people and the adolescent whose hearts are pure, gentle and modest into odious executioners who dared to kill the innocent and even their own parents, relatives or friends.
They had burnt the market place, abolished monetary system, eliminated books of rules and principals of national culture, destroyed schools, hospitals, pagodas and beautiful monuments such as Angkor Wat temple which is the source of pure national pride and bears the genius, knowledge and intelligence of our nation.
They were trying hard to get rid of Khmer character and transform the soil and waters of Kampuchea into a sea of blood and tears which was deprive of cultural infra-structure, civilisation and national character, became a desert of great destruction that overturned the Kampuchean society and drove it back on the stone age.
Outside the stupa
Inside the stupa
Children behind the wire
Their only headstone
Outside the prison
Inside the prison
As a child during Pol Pot's regime, Steve's driver's fingers were chopped off because he took a banana
The following images are crude depictions of the kind of torture prisoners suffered in Pol Pot's prisons. Perhaps they are not truly shocking, especially out of context. However, they are not very nice either - so, be warned!
Images of torture #1
Images of torture #2
Images of torture #3
Images of torture #4
