Crapping on a yak.....overland to the other side of the world and the rest: Day 162

Today I visit the Killing Fields of Choeng Ek, which is a 15km $7 tuk tuk ride from Phnom Penh. The tuk tuk driver also tries to sell us a shooting expedition with the opportunity to fire AK47s and bazookas. It is rumoured that you can shoot a cow with a bazooka for the right price. We are not tempted by this.

Before going to the Killing Fields, we visit the S21 prison in Phnom Penh, a primary school that was converted into a place of torture and murder, although most of the executions took place at the Killing Fields. The S21 stands for ‘Security, Brother #2 (Deputy PM of the Khmer Rouge), and Brother #1 (Pol Pot). The playground apparatus were used as instruments of torture, e.g. hanging people tied up upside down from the pull up bars while being lashed.

This is not the arena to do the story of the Khmer Rouge’s campaign of terror justice, but I will give a brief synopsis. On the 17^th April 1975, the Khmer Rouge ordered the immediate evacuation of Phnom Penh, a city of two or three million people, telling the populace that the US would start bombing in the days to come. No bombs did come, but the Khmer Rouge’s campaign of torture and murder began immediately, escalating severely in 1976 and going on until the Vietnamese Army kicked the Khmer Rouge out in 1979. Overall, it is estimated that up to two million people lost their lives during that period, Cambodia having had a population of about eight million in 1975. Even the Hitler and Stalin regimes didn’t kill such a high proportion of their respective populations.

Today, I hear stories of man’s inhumanity to men, women and children that are gruesome to even write about and too numerous and inexplicable for me to go into much detail. One example though is that babies were killed in the Killing Fields by swinging them by their legs and smashing their heads against trees.

Though it is worth learning about these atrocities, I feel uncomfortable being at the Killing Fields. If this was the site of the murder of some of my family and friends, I don’t think I would be happy about it being turned into a tourist attraction, especially with the centre piece being a tower of skeletal remains of unidentified victims recovered from their places of burial or from the marshes. They estimate that there are still about seven thousand people’s remains lying buried in the marshes here. The remains of victims clothes and some bones still line the paths around the mass graves. This is death tourism and it only happened just over thirty years ago.

It is only now, in January 2010, that the warden of S21, Commander ‘Duch’, is being tried for crimes against humanity. Pol Pot of course escaped justice in his lifetime, with Commander ‘Duch’ still being the only senior member of the KR to have faced trial so far.