A chilling history

This morning I visited the Choeung Ek Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng/S-21 museum. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a little history. In 1975 the Khmer Rouge, an extreme communist group took control of Cambodia. They pretty much wanted to send their control back to the middle ages, kicking everyone out of the city to make them work on farms, and destroying any sign of intellectualism/moderism including schools, hospitals, courts, technology. People starved as the Khmer Rouge did not feed the workers enough, and they killed anyone who was suspected of disobeying their rule, or anyone from the previous upperclass. This includes everyone from doctors to lawyers to peasants, along with their families, including children. In their 4 year genocide 3 million people were killed, and the UN backed trial for the war crimes are only getting under way now.

Tuol Sleng was a high school, but during the Khmer Rouge's rule, it became one of the biggest and most famous jails. People sent here had their mug shot taken, were interrogated and tortured (by electrocution, beatings, drowning, and many other gruesome ways) until they admitted to whatever crimes they were accused of. Children, women, men, elderly, young, no one was spared and everyone who was sent here was later killed, minus the few people who were alive when the building was discovered by the invading Vietnamese. Now it is a museum and the old classrooms are clearly cells. The beds have been left in some, with their shackles and photos on the wall of the gruesomely beaten and dead inmates that were found there. Also in the museum are thousands of the photos taken of the prisoners. There are rows and rows of them and the expressions are all different. Some people looked frightened, others angry and defiant. A few were grimly smiling.

After interrogations at S-21, people were brought to the CHoeng Ek killing fields to be killed - again by brutal methods. Sometimes they were shot, but often they were beaten with everything from garden hoes to bamboo stalks, all while blindfolded with their hands tied. Some were buried alive and then covered with chemicals to kill them. They were then buried in mass graves - the largest with 450 bodies. 20 000 in total were killed and buried here in total. There was a tree on the grounds called the killing tree where children were beaten against to kill them. One grave was found to have only headless bodies, another naked women and children. Of the over 100 graves, 86 have since been exhumed and now their skulls and clothing sit in a huge memorial on the site in a glass case. It was chilling to see the thousands of skulls lined up. As you walked around the grounds you could see all of the sunken areas where graves were and beneath your feet bits of clothing and bone were everywhere sticking up through the ground. It actually made me sick to look at and ting about.

It was a very creepy and disturbing view into what humans can be capable of doing to each other. As it was so recent, it is even more chilling to know that many of the people I see on the street lived through this themselves. When I was in Kampot, in southern Cambodia I did a tour on Bokor Hill which is an old abandoned French casino and resort type place from the 50s (also taken over and used by the Khmer Rouge for nastiness in the 70s). Our guide told us his personal history which including being forced to work on the Khmer Rouge farms, watching his sister and parents be killed, then escaping to hide in the forest for 2 years before joining the Vietnamese to fight the Khmer Rouge. It definitely put a face to all of the history I've been reading and learning about. It is definitely still fresh in the minds of the Cambodians who lived through it, I'm sure.