The Killing Fields, Phnom Penh Cambodia

In 1975 when the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia the population was 8.5 million.

From that point until being driven out of power in 1979, the terror regime of the Khmer Rouge killed 2 million people.

In four years they killed almost 25% of their country’s population.

The mass graves that have been discovered, and are still being discovered, are known as The Killing Fields.

Several of these Killing fields are just outside of Phnom Penh. Some of the Killing Fields have been excavated and the bones have been interred in memorials. Other fields the bones on have been piled up in the open for viewing. And still other fields have remained untouched to show how they were found with some bones and skulls on the surface and thousands buried beneath.

We opted not to take the girls out to the fields, and traveling without a travel buddy was not an option for us in this country, so we did not make it out to the mass graves of the Killing Fields.

Instead we decided to go to the Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, which was the scene for 20,000 murders from 1975-1979.

The Khmer Rouge was a communist regime that came to power with the support of money and weapons from China. China felt that a Chinese-communist Cambodia would be a counterweight to a Russian-communist Vietnam on its south border.

The Genocide Museum was Tuol Sleng “Security Prison 21”(S-21) during the Khmer Rouge’s regime, which a high school that was modified into a torture prison in April, 1975.

The Khmer Rouge promoted the idea of peasants leading the country and persecuted anybody who was considered to have an education. As a result, technicians, engineers, teachers, doctors, monks, ministers, university students, member of the previous Cambodian government, ethnic Chinese, Laotian and Vietnamese and foreigners, and their families, were exterminated here.

These people were tortured in S-21 to reveal names of family members, friends and colleagues so they, too, could be found in order to exterminate the entire educated network in the country. The prison held 1,500 victims who on average were tortured for 90 days before being killed.

The buildings of the school were enclosed in electrified barbed wire, the classrooms converted into tiny prison and torture chambers, and all windows were covered with iron bars and barbed wire to prevent escapes and to prevent suicides.

S-21 was discovered in 1979 after Cambodian aggression prompted an invasion by Vietnam. Upon the Vietnamese capturing Phnom Penh, the torturers, interrogators and guards that worked at S-21, and at other detention facilities, fled leaving their victims, and torture tools behind. There were 10 survivors recovered at S-21.

The entrance to the Genocide Museum

One of the five buildings Most of the victim's were transported to one of the Killing Fields either after they were killed or to be killed.

When the invading Vietnamese came upon this site they found 14 recently-executed victims. Those 14 people were buried in the courtyard to be remembered.Morgan and I separately entered each of the 14 torture rooms where these 14 victims had been killed. In each room there was a picture that the Vietnamese had taken showing the scene that was found as they found it: "Then the Khmer Rouge soldiers beat them to death with iron bars and hoes or buried them alive. A Khmer Rouge extermination prison directive ordered, Bullets are not to be wasted.'"

The rules of the prison:The outside of another building:
One of the floors had been modified for individual holding cells:

"The Khmer Rouge leadership boasted over the state-controlled radio that only one or two million people were needed to build the new agrarian communist utopia. As for the others, as their proverb put it, 'To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.'"

Bones that were found here at S-21Picture of one the nearby Killing Fields

The paintings in this part of the museum were all painted by one of the survivors of S-21. He was kept alive because of his ability to paint and was used by the Khmer Rouge to paint for them. He painted scenes of their captivity and torture methods.

A fascinating part of the museum has the words of a person from Sweden, who visited Cambodia from August 12-26, 1978. He was part of an organization called "The Sweden-Cambodia Friendship Association" as the first foreign visitors to visit Cambodia since 1975.

The display shows where the Khmer Rouge took them and what they were shown. As a result of this trip, the Khmer Rouge gained legitimacy as these four Swedish visitors claimed to see a happy, fully-functioning egalitarian utopia.

In his words:

"At that time I was a supporter of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia). Today, knowing better, I look back 30 years and try to understand how that was possible. They way I see it today, the trip should not have been made, since it became part of the Khmer Rouge propaganda.

For my part in this I am deeply sorry."

"I had worked in the movement against the war in Cambodia and Vietnam during the 1970s. In the Khmer Rouge we thought we saw a pure movement that took no orders from the superpowers.

I, and many of my generation in Sweden, were sympathetic toward the Chinese Revolution and Mao Zedong. When we read about the Cambodia Revolution we thought we had found something even better; a real egalitarian state, with no oppression, free of slavery and trying to avoid all of the mistakes of the other communist revolutions."

"Today I realize that even before my visit, there was proof enough that the truth about the Cambodian revolution was a story of murder, killings, torture and oppression. We did not want to believe that."

"My experience has taught me that there are fundamental human rights that are not negotiable:

- the freedom of thought and expression

- the freedom of expressing any religious belief and practising it

- the freedom of movement"

"For those still appalled by my support of the Khmer Rouge at the time, and especially those who suffered personally under that regime, I can only say I am sorry and ask for your forgiveness."

"In 1978 I was 27 years old and had two children. I was politically active in the movement against the war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia for many years. The movement was strong in Sweden, the strongest in the Western world.

Thousands of young people devoted all their time to protest the US war. I was one of those young persons. My whole youth was dominated by this.

Later I, as many others, became attracted to Maoist communism. We believed that the Soviet Union was corrupt and thought China was different. Some of us got interested in the Cambodia Revolution which we thought was new and free from corruption.

I was a member of that Maoist party until 1979 when I left and at the same time publicly rejected my old views on the Khmer Rouge, realizing we had been wrong all the time."

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Cambodia's population is now 12 million. As a result of the mass murders from 1975-1979, the country's average age is quite young with a median age of 20.6 and more than 50% of the population under the age of 25. In the over 65 population, the female:male ratio is 1.6:1.

The development of the country has been set back by at least a couple of generations as almost all educated Cambodians had been killed by 1979. If the adult population is uneducated, who will teach the children and what will they teach them? This is a huge problem that the country faces today.

Two movies detail events of 1975-1979:

"The Killing Fields," which follows the true story of a Cambodia reporter's experience of being captured, tortured, his discovery (and naming) of the Killing Fields, and his escape from his Khmer Rouge captors.

S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a documentary that brought together four of the survivors, as well as guards and interrogators who worked at S-21 and let them discuss events and feelings from that time. One of the survivors in the documentary is the artist mentioned above. The film won six awards at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. I can only imagine how powerful of a film this must be.

Every person who came through S-21 was photographed and a file was created for them. Their pictures are on display.

Morgan and I have been to Dachau, one of the Nazi concentration camps. This was somehow different. Some of these kids were born when I was. It just made it a bit more personal.