Khmer Rouge et al.

Sunday morning was a downer.  Was up early for a 30-minute moto ride out to Cheoung Ek, aka the ‘Killing Fields’.  I haven’t seen the movie, but I guess this was the inspiration for the 80s movie of the same name.  I can’t really give a full history lesson (mostly because I don’t know it that well, but also because it would take a long time), but in the mid- to late-seventies, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (translated ‘Red Cambodians’) managed to kill somewhere between 700k and 2M Cambodian through a combination of exhaustion, starvation and execution.  In what amounted to an attempt at the most rapid back-to-the-land communist revolution in history, the Khmer Rouge forced the entire population of Phnom Penh and other urban centers back into the farms in the matter of days.  They forced people to resettle in a direction relative to where they were located in the city the day the Khmer Rouge moved in.  If you were in the northern part of the city, you had to go north.  If you were in the east, you were forced to go east.  Etc, etc., with no regard to keeping  families together or allowing people to return to the area of the countryside from where they may have originally come from.  

The population of Phnom Penh dropped from over two million to about 25,000 in three days. Nearly everyone was tasked to grow rice, and a lot of it.  But yields never matched the aggressive quotas, and the rice that was grown was often consumed by the military or exported to China or other military suppliers, so the classless peasantry starved.  All people with ties to the pre-Khmer Rouge government and anyone educated were executed. And any conspirators (whether justified or not) were also executed.  Cheoung Ek, the killing fields, was one of the hundreds of places throughout the country where people were executed and buried in mass graves.  Much of my visit to Cheoung Ek (and the S-21 prison which I’ll get to in a moment) was chillingly reminiscent of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany.  Much less efficient however. Each prisoner taken to the killing fields was forced to kneel down in front of a mass grave pit and then clubbed in the head or back of the neck.  One at a time they filled the graves.  Perhaps the most appalling thing about this relative to the gas chambers was that it happen 30 years ago, not 60.  No more holocausts?  They continue to this day. . .

victims

excavated mass graves

Anyhow, just to finish the depressing part, I went from Cheoung Ek directly to the Tuol Sleng museum which occupies the former site of the S-21 detention center.  This is where conspirators, educated elite and political prisoners were brought to be interrogated before being sent to die.  The instruments of torture were primal—drowning people, pulling out fingernails, burning, dismembering with pickaxes and shovels, blinding people—but the forced confessions poured out and satiated the government.  Regardless, the prisoners never survived.  If I remember correctly, only seven of tens of thousands of prisoners lived through the ordeal.  They were painters and sculptures who were enlisted to record either the prison events or celebrate the Khmer Rouge rulers.   I guess this turned the notion of a struggling artist on its head.

s-21 prison--a former school

wooden cells: about 2m x 0.8m

the rules

And to really finish the downer bit, perhaps all of the Khmer Rouge leaders that lasted to the end of the regime’s end in 1979/80 were allowed to continue living normal lives in spite of their crimes.  Pol Pot lived in relative comfort in Thailand until his death of natural causes in 1998.  Many of the other leaders went on to high-ranking government positions in subsequent administrations.  The UN continued to recognize the political faction of the Khmer Rouge as the administrative body of Cambodia until 1990.  As far as I can tell, it was just last week that the UN decided to proceed in trying some of the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders!!  Getting toilets out there may be important, but this place has some bigger issues.