Killing Fields

On my recent visit to Phnom Penh I met up with a very friendly Rickshaw Driver. Never caught his name, but he was a very happy go lucky bloke who had no time for any highway rules there may have been.

He took me too a sight just outside of Phnom Penh. It was the sight of one of the elimination camps that the Khmer Rouge set up in the 70’s.

A quick overview of events is like this;

1975 Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge take over Cambodia and rename Kampuchea.

All dates start from Year Zero and the mass evacuations of urban areas begin.

1976 Forced Labour camps are opened to imprison the Teachers, Artists, Middle Class and Landowners.

Kills them All!

1977/78 For no conceivable reason he then begins to exterminate 2 million of his people. Young, old, men and women. Rape centres were started for the military. The atrocities equal the second world on the same time scale.

1979 Vietnam invades Cambodia and the full scale of the killings is now in the open. Pol pot fights rear guard action for the next five years till he is caught.

This site only had 9000 deaths! At first they were shot, but when they ran out of ammo, the inmates were butchered with machetes. When they were blunted plastic bags were used to suffocate them. Children were the easiest to get rid of. They were just picked up by there feet and smashed into a tree.
I’m not renowned for my deep thinking, but what the fuck got into these people. At the start of the war there were only 13,000,000 people anyway. Kill 2,000,000 off and you’ve got a population crisis. It beggars belief that the guards could do it anyway. When I think back to the reports at the end of the 70’s about the Cambodians starving. I never gave it a second thought. I only remember some of the jokes!

There is now a shrine that is dedicated to all the dead; it contains all the skulls from the site. Some have bullet wounds; others have deep gashes from axes. A mad place, it opened my eyes. When you walk round the site there are still loads of bones and old clothes lying around.