The Killing Fields

I have been putting it off, and putting it off, and putting it off, but tomorrow I leave Phnom Phen, so today I finally went to the Killing fields of Choeung Ek. I don't have a LP Cambodia, so I didn't know what to expect. I did not expect to start crying the moment I walked through the gate, and I didn't expect to be unable to stop crying the entire time I was there, but I did.

If Angkor is a place of spiritual peace and beauty, the Killing Fields is a place of eternal unrest and horror, in a tranquil location.8000 skulls, that I could reach out and touch, men, women and children. 126 mass graves. Babies thrown in the air for target practice. I could literally still hear the screams. As I walked along the path, I was walking on human bones poking up through the dirt.

2 million executed in 4 years, hundreds of thousands of others died of starvation. Nearly half the population of Cambodia. He used young, poor men and woment as torturers. Intellectuals were executed, love was banned! Monks were sent to work in the field as labourers and their temples were used as prisons. Disabled people were burned alive. Torture was an art form.

I was reading The Hungry Caterpillar at kindergarten.

So what did I do to relieve the sorrow? I shot an AK-47. For US$200 I could have launched an anti-aircraft missile. Apparently that had been very popular the day before.

It wasn't so great, and it wasn't so difficult. Bill's rifle used to have more kick. Then I went to the Genocide Museum here in Phnom Phen and saw photos of boys with the same guns.

The Genocide Museum, Toul Seng is an old high school that Pol Pot used as a prison. Fourteen thousand people were incarcarated there (and photos taken of nearly every one) and only 12 ever lived.

For the first time ever I hired a guide, she had walked to Vietnam in 1975 to escape the Khmer Rouge, her brother, sister and father died. She'd been working at the museum since it opened 11 years ago and started out washing the blood off the floors. Her mother would still not come in to the place, and she was still very angry and emotional, even after giving the same tour so many times.

I've attached some pics, but they are not pretty, think twice before you scroll down, photos were my way of working through the sadness.

20 shelves dispalying 8000 skulls found on the filed


Photos of prisoners taken to make it easier to catch escapees, but no-one ever escaped from Toul Seng, although some did from the killing fields.


Look closey at this photo and you can see fragemts of human bone in the dirt


Human bones casually piled beside the path that snakes past 126 mass grave sites.