After two days in Phnom Penh preparing for a job interview, and doing the interview, today it was time to do some more sightseeing. Next to Angkor, the two places I visited today were on the top priority list for my visit to Cambodia - but unfortunately, they were no happy places. Instead, they told the history of one of Cambodia's darkest periods: the Pol Pot era.
Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia for less than four years from 1975 to 1979. Within three days after they came to power in 1975, the Khmer Rouge drove all people out of the cities and forced them to work on collective farms in the countryside. This was motivated by a basic belief the Khmer Rouge held: farmers as the "base" people were the only worthy ones, while the "new people" - city dwellers, educated people and people with money - were all dangerous, potential traitors and enemies.
Consequently, the Khmer Rouge also banned personal possessions, money, and religion. In addition, they closed schools, and reduced the curricula to basic literacy and communist indoctrination.
During the rule of the Khmer Rouge, approximately 2 million people died - out of a population of 8 million. Many people were executed for political reasons. Pol Pot seemed to have been highly paranoid: the main target of his genocide were skilled people of all kinds: teachers, doctors, craftsmen, monks, intellectuals. Many others fell victim to starvation and illnesses. This also affected "new" people disproportionately because they were forced to do the hardest labor while their rice rations were the lowest.
Just imagine what a devastating blow this is to a country's future when there is nobody left to educate the next generation!
Choeung Ek - also known as the Killing Fields - was a place outside of Phnom Penh where inmates from the Tuol Sleng prison (see further down for details) were brought to be executed.
The prisoners were told that they would be relocated to a new house to keep them quiet during the transport. When they arrived at Choeung Ek, they were perched in a dark house with a single room and then taken away one by one to be executed. People were not shot to death - bullets, as the audio guide explained, were expensive. No, they were forced to kneel in front of their graves and were then hacked to death with whatever agricultural tools were available.
From the prisoners' arrival at Choeung Ek to the execution of the last one, a diesel generator was roaring and loudspeakers blasted communist propaganda. This was done to make sure the prisoners didn't hear the others scream during their executions. Roaring generators and communist propaganda was the last thing the victims ever heard...
More than 100 mass graves have been found at Choeung Ek. The one in this picture was a particularly gruesome one: it contained the bodies of more than 100 women and children.
Right next to this mass grave stood a tree - the killing tree. When this tree was found in 1979, it was covered with blood, human hair, and bits of bone. As it turned out, the executioners used to grab babies by their feet and bash their heads and upper bodies against the tree until they were dead.
All of this was in perfect agreement with two of Pol Pot's proverbs: The first stated that it was better to kill an innocent by mistake than to leave an enemy alive by mistake. The second one said that in order to prevent future revenge, a traitor's entire family had to be eliminated.
Just from these two statements, you can see immediately what a sick regime the Khmer Rouge were. I think that many regimes - especially the ones that end up committing genocide - act upon the same principles, even if they don't state them as explicitly. Wikipedia has a long list of genocides in history - I had not realized that there were so many!
To commemorate the nearly 9.000 bodies exhumed from about 80 of the mass graves, a stupa was erected at Choeung Ek.
Inside the stupa, seven levels of glass cabinets display the skulls of the exhumed. On many of the skulls, you can see holes and cracks where they have been smashed by mostly blunt instruments.
The second site I visited was the former Tuol Sleng prison which has been turned into a genocide museum. The prison was housed in a former high school in Phnom Penh. Prisoners would be held here and interrogated here for a few months, and then, after having given full confessions of their "crimes", be transported to Choeung Ek for execution.
The open parts of the buildings were covered with barbed wire to keep the prisoners from committing suicide.
The Khmer Rouge were obsessed with documentation - gotta keep track of all the enemies successfully eliminated - and so they took pictures of all the prisoners being brought to Tuol Sleng. Many of these pictures are now displayed in the museum. There are thousands of faces looking out at the visitors - men, women, and children alike, scared, angry, and confused. They all died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge - out of several thousand prisoners, only a handful survived Tuol Sleng.
The confessions that the Khmer Rouge wanted to obtain from the prisoners included details of their connections to various secret services such as the CIA or the KGB, and the names of other traitorous people that the prisoners knew about. Since the vast majority of the prisoners was innocent and didn't know any traitors, they were tortured - often to the point of unconsciousness. After weeks and months of torture, prisoners would finally start to invent all the details that the interrogators wanted to know, including lengthy lists of names (who probably ended up being the next set of inmates in Tuol Sleng).
When the Vietnamese came in 1979 to put an end to the Khmer Rouge, they found the bodies of bound and tortured prisoners, killed when the Khmer Rouge hastily abandoned the prison a few hours prior. This is what they found in one of the cells:
This cell was one of the bigger ones - reserved for Khmer Rouge cadre who became suspect. The other prisoners had tiny 1x2 meter cells without beds, toilets, or access to drinking water. This is one of the classrooms, outfitted with about 20 poorly constructed prison cells:
Unfortunately, nobody seems to have a really great idea as to how to prevent future atrocities of this kind. There is some research on genocide prevention - for example, have a look at Ervin Staub's website - but this same research also lists how the different ideas for prevention are often undermined by the economic and political interests of bystanders. Will humanity ever learn from their past mistakes?
