Killing Fields

I need to talk about the Killing Fields.

In the previous entries in this blog I have been somewhat flippant and silly about a lot of things. You cannot do that with the Killing Fields.  Up to this point in my life I did not believe there was such a thing as pure evil.  The events in Cambodia in the 70’s are rapidly changing my mind.

We visited S-21 - one of the prisons where Pol Pot imprisoned, tortured and killed over three hundred eighty-five thousand people.  Of all the people that were imprisoned in S-21 only seven survived.  S-21 was only one of one hundred sixty-eight prisons that the Khmer Rouge kept in Phnom Penh.  The torture that the prisoners faced was unspeakable and meant to wring from them confessions of crimes they did not commit or had no knowledge of.  Some of those crimes consisted of: not answering questions quick enough, grieving for relatives killed by the Khmer Rouge, crying out under torture, or not working hard enough. 

Not only were the prisoners tortured and killed, so were their families.  Every family in Cambodia has lost at least one or more family members.

Like the cultural revolution in China all the intellectuals and educated people were taken to the country to work in the fields for sixteen hours a day and fed one bowl of rice porridge a day.  Pol Pot set a quota of 5 tonnes of rice per hectare of land – which is impossible.  One hectare of land can, under the best conditions, yield 1 tonne of rice per year.  If you did not meet that quota you were not working hard enough – a crime punishable by torture and execution.

In 1975 when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge came to power he evacuated Phnom Penh – a city of three million people - by claiming that the Americans were going to bomb the city.  He told everyone to leave their doors unlocked and not take any of their possession with them as it was only going to be for a few days.  He then marched the people to the countryside and put them to work in the rice fields – a job that none of them had any experience with.  Thousands of people died in the march from starvation and exhaustion and many more died in the fields for the same reason. 

Altogether over two million people died in the four years that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge held power in a country of eight million people. 

We visited the Killing Fields on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.  There is a pagoda there with seventeen levels.  It is filled to overflowing with skulls found in the mass graves.  No one knows who these people were or why they were executed.  Execution was accomplished by beheading.  They were often beheaded by using a palm tree stem – which is a stick that has naturally sharp edges.  It often took fifteen minutes or more to finish the job.   Failing that, rather than waste a bullet, the prisoners were simply buried alive.  Bullets were too expensive.

The Skull Pagoda - housing  over 8,000 skulls

Human bones resurfacing

No one really knows how many bodies there are in the one Killing Field.  As you walk through the area you can see where more and more bones are coming to the surface as the soil erodes or the ground shifts.  So much agony and fear must permeate that ground.

What hit me the hardest was seeing where the babies were killed by bashing their heads against a tree.

At that point I believed that pure evil does exist.

Pol Pot did not act alone.  He had help from Mao Tse Tung and Ho Chi Minh.  He also had deputies that assisted him in his crimes – people that actually did the dirty work.  Pol Pot did not, as far as we know, actually kill anyone himself – he delegated it.  But they did as he told them.  He even had most of his accomplices killed as he got more and more paranoid.

How is this possible?  How could someone kill children by bashing their heads against a tree because they were told to?  How could one man have so much power that everyone was so afraid of him that they committed such unspeakable crimes.  Why did they not just say “No”.  He was just a single individual.  Why would someone be so afraid that they would torture and kill their own relatives? 

We were all deeply affected by the jail and killing fields.  I find myself returning again and again to this in my mind.  I find it incomprehensible.  This affected me to the core of my being and I am only seeing the aftermath thirty years after it was over.  How must it have affected the people involved in the actual events – both the Cambodian people and the Khmer Rouge? 

We were privileged to meet a survivor of S-21.  His name was Bou Meng and he survived because he is an artist who was able to paint a flattering picture of the Monster.  There are only 2 survivors left – the other five have since passed away.  He was such a cute little man with a huge sunny smile.  He must be incredibly strong.

Bou Meng - 1 of  7 survivors of S-21

Pol Pot died in the early 1990’s of natural causes.  Such a shame – he will never be called to answer for his crimes.  Some of his deputies are still around and five of them are to be tried by international court.  One already has been and has been sentenced to life in prison.  Four more await trial.   Their sentences cannot be enough.  Nothing we can do can ever come close to justice.

And there are not enough tears.

Telen writes:

The visit to S-21 prison and the nearby “Killing Fields” was very emotionally straining to me too.  Pol Pot was an admirer of Mao Tse Tung and he wanted to change Cambodian society into a communist country similar to China.  The man was obviously very paranoid.  He wanted absolute control.  The Cambodian tragedy lasted for 4 years as compared to the Chinese Cultural Revolution that took place over 25+ years.

It seems that everyone here has lost a loved one to the genocide, i.e. a wife, children, a father etc.

I can look around here, people are struggling to live here BUT they seem relatively happy.  There is a statue of a bronze rifle twisted into a knot in the centre of Siem Reap.  It symbolizes the Cambodian people’s desire for NO MORE war and violence in the world.  May be this is why people here all seem to have a warm smile when I greet them.  At least now, they are living in peace.

The children here are beautiful.  According to Wikipedia, 50% of the population is 20 years old or younger.  The genocide has eliminated not only culture and the intellectuals, it has killed off 25% of the population.  People’s lives here are slowly improving.  Now, only 1 in 20 children will die before age 5.  10 years ago, the statistic was 1 in 8 children. 

How could anyone hurt such a child?

Our tour bus stopped in a farming village yesterday on route to Siem Reap from Phnom Penh.  We donated a soccer ball, some decorative hair bands for the girls, several bottles of bubbles, soap, shampoo and combs.  A soccer match amongst the children and several members of our tour group quickly broke out.  Rand did a “hole in one” kick when the ball ended up hitting the English fellow in our group right in his crotch.  Well, he dropped like a stone onto the group.  Everyone just laughed and laughed.  We really had a great time in spite of the language barrier.  Cambodia has suffered a lot but the spirit of the people triumphs—as reflected in their gentle smiling faces.