Chueung Ek: The Killing Fields

Originally I had thought that I would leave this post as the only one to let the pictures do the talking. However, one must first understand the background to fully appreciate the magnitude of this memorial. In 1974, history repeated itself in Cambodia. Led by Pol Pot, the communist Khmer Rouge rolled into Phnom Penh to begin what is defined as a genocide with up to 3 million Cambodians dying under the regime. The formula was simple - everyone needed to work, everyone needed to work in the fields, the educated were a western threat and needed to be eliminated. And so began the mass exodus of the entire city into the countryside where rice production was to be tripled based on the false belief that the waters around Ankor Wat served as an irrigation reservoir that allowed the city of 1+ million people in the 12th century, the biggest in its time, to sustain itself.

Indirectly, people died from disease and starvation. Directly, they were taken to what are known as the killing fields, scattered throughout the Cambodian countryside. They served as mass graves for the victims of the Khmer Rouge. There, they were murdered not with bullets as they were too expensive, but with farm tools, bladed weapons, blunt objects, the saw-tooth edge of a palm which was used to cut the throat, or even a tree trunk onto which babies were swung and killed. As before in Europe 7 decades back, loud music was played to drown out screams of the dying while subjecting the surrounding population to state propaganda. And to think some of those responsible at the highest levels of government are still on trial today.

The SR21 prison did not affect me as much as the Chueung Ek whose memorial is a monolithic tomb containing level after level of piles of skulls of the victims dug up from the grounds. It was a powerful thing that I tried to capture with pictures, an impossible task. I still am near tears when I think about the feeling I had or when I revisit the pictures, a stark reminder of how low humanity can sink and unfortunately how it can continue even today as with North Korea, for example.