Genocide and a Complete Lack of Puns

As soon as I realised that every bus from Saigon heading into Cambodia ended in Phnom Penh, I knew I could not avoid the graceless capital, and therefore could not avoid revisiting The Killing Fields and S21 Genocide Museum. I booked a tour through my hotel as soon as I woke up, which further cemented me to this course of action.

The next morning I was picked up in a minibus and drove downtown to pick up the other client, a Frenchman called Thomas. On our way to the Killing Fields, our guide gave us a solid background in the political realities that led to Pol Pot seizing power. I will not attempt to recount that here, but invite my gentle readers to research this themselves if they wish.

The Cheung Ek Genocidal Center is in the poorer outskirts of the city. It was before the regime, an orchard and a Chinese cemetery. Truckloads of prisoners were unloaded, and slaughtered using common agricultural tools, in addition to other improvised methods, to save using bullets that would have to be bought from China. The central point of the Killing Fields is a Stupa, containing a multistorey display case, containing over eight thousand skulls, less than half the souls who met their end here.

Many of the Chinese graves were destroyed in the process, and only a handful of the headstones still visable, all broken.

Due to the barbaric nature of the executions, the moans and screams of the victims was masked by playing audio through a speaker strung up on a tree branch, to not disturb the later victims.

Children, tragically, were also victims here. often killed right in front of their mothers, who were also sorely used by the soldiers. The children were killed using a method straight out of the old testament, that I cannot bring myself to type here.

A modest shrine of bracelets, and baby bottles and toys has grown, unplanned on the tree. I added one of my own.

Not all of the mass graves have been excavated, and everyday clothes and bone fragments are brought to the surface in a horrifying display of erosion.

Even the supporters were not immune. one of the mass graves contained over a hundred soldiers, who having returned from Vietnam, became victims of Pol Pot’s paranoia, they were buried without their heads.

DDT, the now universally banned herbicide, was used to speed up the decomposition of bodies and to mask the smell. I could not help but think about Holy Innocents Cemetery in Paris, how so many bodies were buried that the ground lost the ability to decompose the bodies. The the comparison is apt, but equally stomach-turning.

It might be possible to exaggerate the numbers, but not the sheer horror, and the famous Kiling Fields are only one of the sites with mass graves.

We moved on to the S21 Genocide Museum, a lesser-known, but equally heartbreaking site. A former school, it was converted into a prison for those awaiting transport elsewhere, and those awaiting interrogation. Cells varied, some for “VIPs”, the size of the original classrooms, others subdivided with rough brick walls. All prisoners were chained to the floor, with or without beds, with an old ammo box as a toilet. Rarely were prisoners bathed, by a guard holding a hose through a window.

Despite the years of cleaning and the opinion of our guide, you can still detect a hint of the horrible smell. I don’t think it will ever leave.

I won’t describe the torture. Imagine the most painful, the most extreme removal of human dignity, triple it and you may come close to the realities endured, and not endured by the prisoners.

Prisoners were forced to confess to crimes, regardless of how illogical they were. A fact demonstrated somewhat gleefully by our guide, who told us the story of the New Zealander adventurer Kerry Hamill, who confessed under torture that his CIA handler was Colonial Saunders, of KFC fame. He was nothing but a tourist, but this mattered little to the regime.

The regime kept excellent records. Every prisoner was photgraphed and measured on their entry to S21. Some of these photos are on display. The eyes stare back at us, most not angry or afraid, simply resigned to their fate.

“Everything belongs to the regime, including our lives”

I couldn’t help but think on the drive back to my hotel that quite a few Kymers make at least part of their living from these horrific sites. Gardners, cleaners, ticket sellers, maintenance workers and probably a dozen other professions unknown to me. They all show up to these nightmarish blights on Cambodian history. It must take an extraordinary level of emotional control, or severe dissonance. The lovely lady working reception at my hotel, who like me was not alive during the Kymer Rouge, said she had visited the Killing Fields once, and nothing would convince her to ever visit ever again.