Killing Fields/S-21
Fortunately, we don’t have too many days where we know leaving the hotel that it is going to suck (some end up that way, but never by design). Today was one of those days. Phnom Penh is home to the killing fields of Choeung Ek and the infamous high school turned prison, S-21. I don’t think one can experience Cambodia without understanding this part of its history, so after securing the services of a tuk-tuk for the day, we’re off.
People are generally familiar with the genocide that occurred here under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, but it took reading some of the history in our guide book to paint a proper picture. Prior to the ascendance of Pol Pot, Cambodia sustained four years of heavy bombing by the U.S. as part of the Vietnam War (more bombs were dropped on Cambodia during this time than were dropped by all the Allies combined in World War II). As a result, millions of Cambodian refugees fled the countryside for cities including Phnom Penh (which by 1974 accounted for almost 3 million of the 8 million people living in Cambodia).
On April 17, 1975, the city fell to the Khmer Rouge, and within 3 days, virtually the entire population was removed to the countryside and put to work as agricultural laborers. Those with education, including teachers, doctors, lawyers and even monks, were viewed as dangerous to the regime, and often singled out for interrogation and torture at facilities like S-21. By the time the Khmer Rouge were defeated by the Vietnamese in January of 1979, more than 2.5 million people, a third or the population, had been killed or died from starvation or disease.
Our day begins at Choeung Ek, about 15km from Phnom Penh. Unlike S-21, prisoners weren’t kept here, rather they generally arrived and were executed the same day. On rare occasions, when soldiers couldn’t kill them and dispose of the bodies fast enough, they were kept overnight in a small hut, waiting for the sun to rise and the terror to start anew. Because bullets cost more money than their captors deemed their lives were worth, hammers, steel pipes and farm tools were used to bludgeon them to death before dumping the bodies in mass graves.
The remains of almost 9,000 people have been exhumed (about a third of the burial pits have been left untouched), many with twisted wire still binding the arms. Weather, particularly during the rainy season, continually unearths pieces of bones and clothing as a constant reminder of what lies under foot.
Near one of the graves stands a tall tree, covered with bracelets left by visitors like us, because the blessings are needed here most of all. A sign nearby explains how when one person was deemed guilty, their entire family was rounded up an executed so that no one remained alive to seek revenge. That included babies, who soldiers killed by swinging them against this tree by their feet before throwing their bodies into the pit with their mothers.
Choeung Ek was only one of hundreds of “killing fields” in Cambodia.
It isn’t difficult to pick out tourists that are returning from Choeng Ek. Those on their way to the site sit in their tuk-tuks chatting, joking about the lack of traffic rules or rutted roads, while those on their way back, like us, sit in silence, starting straight ahead and trying to make sense of what they just experienced. Of what human beings are capable of doing to one another.
But our day is only half over. We snap back to reality as our driver pulls to a stop at the gate of S-21. This prison was often the first stop for the victims of Choeng Ek, where they could spend months being tortured for the purposes of extracting confessions about treason they have committed against the regime. When not being beaten, shocked, waterboarded, or a host other gruesome treatments, inmates were shackled to the floor, arranged lengthwise like matchsticks, forbidden to talk while they awaited their fate. For many, the trip to Choeng Ek would have been a welcome escape.
All of this we know because, for all of their failures, the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records of who they arrested, tortured, and ultimately killed. The rooms of S-21 are lined with photos that document the lives that passed through these walls. Of the 17,000 souls that entered S-21, only 7 are known to have survived.
S-21 was one of 158 such facilities operated by the Khmer Rouge.