Reading about the devastation that occurred in Cambodia in the recent past, can’t possibly make the impression that witnessing the places where it really happened does. It is hard to imagine that people can be so brutal, cruel and heartless. These types of mass killings are part of human history. We have read about the Nazi death camps, the genocide in Rwanda, but to look at the victims in the face, row after row, room after room, of faces…is a painful reality. It was incredibly emotional and difficult to see, to take photos of, to view the documentation of senseless killing. It’s frightening that this happened in our lifetime.
In April 1975, screaming soldiers armed with AK47’s entered government buildings, offices and homes in Phnom Penh and ordered everybody out. They told them they could come back in 3 days, as the Americans were planning to bomb the city. They then marched them in a mass exodus to the countryside, where for the next four years they were forced into slave labor to meet Pol Pot’s revolutionary dream.
Pol Pot had devised a plan of turning the country into an agrarian utopia through an ultra-Maoist regime. He scratched the calendar and began at year zero. The name of the country was changed under his fanatical rule to the Democratic Kampuchea. Books, music, arts and religion were all abolished. Any person who was educated was instantly executed. It is believed that over 1.7 million people died during this time. Families were separated and those who survived were subjected to starvation and torture.
The Khmer Rouge gathered over 17,000 people over four years, to what was called Security 21 (S21), a former school in Phnom Penh. It is now called the Genocide Museum. The killers who detained the victims would first photograph each as they entered and again as they tortured and ultimately killed them. These photos are on display in the rooms of the prison. The faces are haunting, women and babies, children, men, even a few foreigners. It didn’t matter to them how old or young the people were that they brutalized. Pure evil existed in this place. The prisoners were kept in metal shackles, starved and tortured daily for an average of two to four months for peasants and six to seven months for politicians or the educated, before they were executed.
A few quotes from Cambodian’s who survived the Khmer Rouge, taken from a book we picked up, “Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields”:
“They told us we were VOID. We were less than a grain of rice in a large pile. Our lives had no significance to their great Communist nation, and they said, “to keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.”
“Before people were butchered they were forced to dig small pits. None of us had the energy to fight back, because we didn’t have enough food to eat. After the pit was ready, the soldiers tied our arms and ordered us to kneel near the edge of the pit. Then the soldiers hit us with heavy hoes, bamboo sticks or axes. There were shouts of pain and moaning. Blood ran from our nostrils, ears, mouths as the objects crushed the backs of heads. Some did not die when pushed into the pit, so they were shot in the head and covered with dirt.”
These pits became known as The Killing Fields.
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