The Cambodian Genocide

Warning: this is graphic stuff. But an important story to share.

From 1975 to 1979, 1.5-2 million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia - 25% of the country's population. The goal of the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, was to turn the country into a classless "utopia". They emptied out the city of Phnom Penh and sent everybody into the countryside to be farmers. Anybody who was too educated, anybody who resisted, anybody who had the same name as somebody who was educated - and all of their family members along with them, including children - were sent to prison and killed.

There is a lot of history behind this and I don't want to overburden this blog with the information, so please feel free to read more about the genocide here: http://endgenocide.org/learn/past-genocides/the-cambodian-genocide/

As I said in an earlier blog, there is no Cambodian who was not affected by this genocide. Our guide on this day, Sarik, lost two siblings during that 4-year period due to starvation and his uncle was murdered because he had the same name as somebody the Khmer Rouge was looking for. They later apologized, after they killed him and realized he was not the right person.

While staying in Phnom Penh, we visited Choeung Ek - one of the "killing fields", and a prison. Living in Germany, we have been to a number of holocaust museums and concentration camps. You'd think we've seen as bad as it can get and nothing could shock us at this point. But, there's this tree in Choeung Ek. They beat babies against it until they died. They didn't use guns to kill people here because guns were expensive and hard to come by, so they had to improvise and many deaths were slow and every single murder, even the babies, was personally and deliberately carried out by Khmer Rouge members one at a time. Here is the tree, you can read the sign next to it. Many visitors leave their Buddhist blessing wristbands on this tree in hopes to bring the babies some peace.



The killing fields are fields filled with mass graves. Bones are everywhere and they come up especially when it rains. Every depression seen in the pictures below is a mass grave filled with hundreds of bodies. Note most have been exhumed but many bones remain.



And signs warning visitors:



This is the tree where they hung loudspeakers to play music so people in the area wouldn't hear the screams and moans of the dying.



Our guide holding up one of the weapons used to kill people - a palm frond. The Khmer Rouge used anything and everything as weapons. Mostly, they killed people by hitting them with a hoe or iron ox cart axle in the head, pushing them into a mass grave, and then cutting open their throats and chests and covering them with DDT to ensure they'd all die. There are also trees with poisonous fruit here and some people were told they were being brought someplace new to restart their lives, then they were fed this fruit thinking they were being fed and treated well but it killed them.



9,000 skulls have been saved in a memorial in the center of the site. Many are fractured.



After the killing fields, we drove back to Phnom Penh and visited the S-21 prison where people were kept before being taken to the killing fields. It used to be a school and was converted to a prison. Here people were starved and tortured until they gave up somebody else's name, then they were allowed to be killed.



Some cells where prisoners were kept:



Barbed wire everywhere so people couldn't jump from upper floors and commit suicide.



There were a few child survivors of this camp when the prison was found by Vietnamese soldiers in 1979. One of them is at the prison site and you can speak with him. Most of the survivors have written books telling their stories that you can buy.

Amazingly, the Khmer Rouge were never made to pay for their crimes. The Cambodian people simply let them run off or continue living in the country - some even went on to become members of the country's government! Our guide told us that they believe in karma and that members of the Khmer Rouge will get what they deserve at some point. Even Pol Pot himself died of heart failure in 1998, never imprisoned or made to pay for his crimes.