There aren’t many events in human history that are more tragic or more ridiculous than the Cambodian genocide that took place between 1975 and 1979. But before we get into what happened at the Killing Fields, here’s a little crash course on what happened leading up to that. Taken out of context these events are pretty nonsensical. ...Actually even in context they are still pretty hard to follow, but I'll do my best to give you a brief(ish) summary.

For the people of Phnom Penh, this story begins one hot afternoon when, out of nowhere, the Khmer Rouge army marched into Phnom Penh and took control of the city. At least they made it sound like it was out of nowhere during my visit. But maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start from the very beginning.

 
 

Pol Pot’s Beginnings

This story really begins with a man named Saloth Sar (who would eventually come to be known as Pol Pot). The brother of a royal concubine, he was able to gain admission to a university in Paris to study radio electronics. In Paris, while he wasn’t busy getting straight F’s in school, he was gallivanting around with his new friends, the French Communist Party (FCP). He did some window-shopping and 'tom-catting around' in the communist community of Europe, even having been involved in some of the ‘going-on’s of the former Republic of Yugoslavia, but he eventually settled down with the FCP. As a newly minted member of the FCP, his laughable academic track record actually played to his advantage. The FCP was staunchly anti-intellectual, praising the working class as the true heroes in society. However, after failing all his exams 3 years in a row, he was kicked out of school, forcing him to return to Cambodia.

Pol Pot’s Rise to Power

Upon his return, he bounced around for a little while, but eventually he got involved with the communist party in Cambodia. Over the next few years he climbed through the ranks to leadership. In the beginning he was one of many leaders in the party – but as time passed and he gained power, the party dynamic changed to a more absolutist regime, of which he was the sole leader. At this point his loyal followers amounted to no more than 200. With this transition Sar traded in his bunk bed for a private guarded chamber and his birth name for the self-given nickname “Pol Pot”.

In the interest of ‘getting to the point’, I’m going to try to streamline these events a bit. During the next few years Southeast Asia, as a region, saw a lot of unrest. The Khmer Rouge played pretty insignificant roles in most of the conflicts that occurred but they were always involved. Meanwhile, the policies of the current Cambodian government were causing a lot of unrest amongst the rural population. This played right into Pol Pot’s hands. The Khmer Rouge, in accordance with Pol Pot’s beginnings as a part of the FCP, believed the working class farmers to be society’s true proletariat. During this time Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge spent years traveling around the countryside, winning over the farmers village by village, and indoctrinating them into their strange and extreme strain of communism. Under Pol Pot’s rule, life was not good out in these rural areas, but his cause was aided by the lack of education of his followers and the (false) promise of a better life once the Khmer Rouge was in power. By 1973, the Khmer Rouge controlled nearly two thirds of the Cambodian population.

At this point, although he had once tried and failed to take Phnom Penh, Pol Pot controlled most of the smaller cities in Cambodia. When the educated city folk in these urban areas didn’t buy into his extremist propaganda as easily as the peasants did, he became frustrated and ordered that they all be sent to the countryside to be farmers. With that he would empty the cities. Out in the countryside, these poor souls were often worked to death. In the mean time, he experimented with torture on the Cham people, an ethnic minority in Cambodia.

The UN & North Vietnam

In 1974 Pol Pot controlled most of Cambodia, and this was enough to earn the Khmer Rouge a seat at the UN. It is worth mentioning that, at this point, the Khmer Rouge was in cahoots with North Vietnam (the Viet Cong), which was in the middle of its war against Saigon and America. It was a troubled relationship though, and the 2 communist rebel groups were eventually competing to see which of them could gain control of their respective countries first, thus earning the respect of their big brother, China.

The Fall & Evacuation of Phnom Penh

On April 17th, 1975, the Khmer Rouge army, composed mostly of brainwashed teenage peasant farmers, marched into Phnom Penh, met with little to no resistance. This is the day that the Khmer Rouge solidified their control of Cambodia once and for all. With this, Pol Pot declared “Year Zero” – he was going to press the reset button for Cambodia. His goal was to turn Cambodia into a socialist, self-sufficient, agrarian utopia. Pol Pot outlawed, well, pretty much everything other than work and sleep. There was no more "capitalist" commerce, no more religion, no more music, no more singing or dancing, no more anything. And in accordance with what had happened in all the smaller cities, when the inhabitants of Phnom Penh didn’t drop their capitalist business practices to hop on Pol Pot’s bandwagon fast enough, Pol Pot evacuated the city.

Pol Pot evacuated the city in 3 days. He had done this kind of thing before, but the evacuation of Phnom Penh unusual because of its massive scale - it was an outlier. The population of Phnom Penh was (at that point) about 2 million people, and he sent all of them to countryside over the course of 72 hours, which is pretty dramatic. This went along with an order to triple rice production. However, sending all these businessmen out to the countryside on foot to meet this nonsensical demand did not work out as well as Pol Pot had hoped.

On the journey out of the city to the rural areas was a harsh one. But if the rough conditions weren't enough, there were also frequent bombings from American fighter planes as the war between North Vietnam and America was winding down. These planes were trying to cut off North Vietnamese supply lines. If these people didn’t die on the journey out there, either from starvation, exposure, or having a bomb dropped on their head (which many did) they were useless once they got to the farms. These businessmen had no idea how to produce rice. On top of their inadequacies as farmers, they were all forced to work 18-hour days, beginning at 4am and ending at 10pm, on almost no food. This killed even more people – worked or starved to death.

Meanwhile, in Phnom Penh…

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Yeah, things were pretty bad out in the countryside… but it could have been a lot worse.

Tuol Sleng aka S21 was a high school at one point, but when the Khmer Rouge took over they turned it into a prison / torture facility. It has since been converted to a museum in remembrance of the atrocities committed here. It’s a pretty disturbing place for anyone to visit, but I felt like my particular experience cast light onto a new dimension of this house of horrors. You see, Cambodian high schools follow the same architectural format as do the schools in Vietnam. So Tuol Sleng is a spitting image of the schools that I teach at in Vietnam. It was a weird experience, seeing my place of work, called home by so many (mostly) sweet, innocent children, converted into a real-life version of the Saw movies. Here's a few snapshots of one of the schools where I work, to give you an idea of what Tuol Sleng once was:

The classrooms of this school in Phnom Penh, now, basically fell into 1 of 2 categories. The first were jail cells. The walls separating one classroom from the next looked like they had been busted down with sledge hammers on a day's notice. These walls were cleared away to make way for a continuous stretch of small stalls made of cement and wood. It looked like the stalls in barns that animals are kept in. It was probably one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen. Standing in one of these stalls alone is not a good place to be.

The second category of classrooms was those that were purely for torture. These classrooms were devoid of the desks and school supplies that had once been used here. In their place was a singular metal bed in an empty room. Attached to each corner of these beds were crude metal restraints, meant for arms and legs. Although today these classrooms sit in an eerie silence, the screams of countless men and women once echoed off the walls. Most of these people died strapped to those metal beds.

What exactly happened in these rooms? There were paintings on the wall depicting just about every form of torture you’ve ever heard of, and some that you haven’t. One painting show a man, blindfolded, with his hands and feet tied together behind his back forcing his body into a contorted backwards arch. He was having his throat cut while his head was being pulled back by the hair. That one stuck with me for some reason. Here's a another one of the paintings:

Among these paintings are also pictures of some of the thousands of men, women and children that were tortured to death here. Every prisoner that came into Tuol Sleng had their mugshot taken, as well as all of their measurements. Here are some of their faces:

The next gallery are some pictures I took of the places where these children died - maybe some of them had even attended this school before it was turned into a prison / torture facility. Why kill children? Pol Pot had a famous slogan that went something like this: "To kill a weed you have to dig up the root." In accordance with this, entire families were murdered. It is, however, worth noting that the guards of this prison were mostly between the ages of 15 and 19 - they were kids themselves! They were brainwashed, uneducated teenagers from poor, rural backgrounds.

However, this was not quite the end of the line for many of the prisoners of Tuol Sleng. The majority of Pol Pot's victims were eventually loaded into buses and dropped off at the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. And this is where our story gets really disturbing.

 
 

The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek

From Toul Sleng, these people were herded onto buses like cattle. Before the buses revved their engines and headed for, what would eventually be known as the Killing Fields, the people were told that everything was okay; they were just moving to a new ‘home.’ Maybe some of them believed that and hung onto it for the duration of the bus ride, but I don’t think many of them had many illusions left.

When they got to Choeung Ek, their lives were ended as quickly and efficiently as possible. The soldiers that brought them here had been ordered not to waste bullets, so they used whatever was at their disposal. And I want to draw particular emphasis to this: whatever was at their disposal. They also had little to no instruction on how to kill a human being. So it was fast and messy. People were killed with hammers, shovels, rocks, crowbars, small knives and even parts of plants. There is a certain kind of palm tree that grows here whose branches have saw-like ridges. I felt these edges – they are jagged and hard like metal. Throats were slit with these. When somebody’s throat is cut they do not die instantly, but in their last few moments they are unable to speak or make any sounds. So during their last seconds of life, these people fell silently and helplessly to a hard landing in a shallow grave on top of the piled, bloody, twitching bodies of the men, women and children that they had rode the bus with. Imagine having your throat slit with these:

Walking through the Killing Fields, you will come to a large tree with small Cambodian bracelets hanging from every available outcropping of bark. There were small children and infants killed here. The guards would grab these children by their feet and swing them into to the tree to bash their heads in. They would then be tossed into the grave like a rag doll to lay with their friends, parents, brothers and sisters.

Choeung Ek had previously been a small graveyard. The Khmer Rouge had set up a government encampment there so the neighbors would not go wandering in. On these nights of executions the guards would play traditional Cambodian music as might be played during a social gathering. This was to cover up the sounds of cries, screams and splatter. The executions were illuminated by high-power lights that had been hung from trees by their extension cords, powered by large generators. They must have cast some pretty disturbing shadows. The Killing Fields tour is done via audio book, and in this series of sound bites, there is a passage were they recreate these sounds. The creepy traditional Cambodian music overlaid with the roar of power generators were the sound track for these atrocities. It is probably the least comforting combination of sounds you can imagine. The music sounded something like this, and it was about 10x louder:

 
 

In the beginning, these executions happened a few times per week, but as things escalated, the executioners couldn’t keep up with the amount of people that were arriving in the buses. If they couldn’t kill all of them in a night they would leave them sitting, bound, in a small barn until the next night.

Who was killed and who wasn’t? The people marked for death were those that were educated or were otherwise suspected to be able to think for themselves. Anybody with a college degree (that’s me – I’m dead), anybody with a business job (that’s me – I’m dead again), even anybody with glasses (that’s definitely me – dead). These people stood to question Pol Pot’s vision for the new Cambodia. Pol Pot also decreed that the families of these people join them in death. This order came from a Pol Pot slogan that went something like this: "To kill a weed, you have to dig up the root." This is how the Khmer Rouge hoped to eliminate the possibility of anybody seeking revenge against them.

 
 

The End of the Genocide

By the time the Khmer Rouge was driven out, roughly 3.4 million people, or about 25% of Cambodia’s population, had been murdered. That is 1 in 4 people. It was not that long ago either. If you go to Cambodia, you will notice that there are almost no elderly people walking around. They all died early deaths. And most - actually scratch that - all adults alive in Cambodia today lost somebody in this genocide.

So what happened to finally put a stop to this? People had come from abroad to see what was happening but were not able to convince the rest of the world to believe them, much less take action. The world lived in ignorance of what was happening.

What finally drove the Khmer Rouge from Cambodia was an attack from the recently unified Vietnam. When I heard this I thought to myself "Aw yay! Vietnam is the hero of the story!" But truth be told, Vietnam couldn’t have known exactly what was happening inside Cambodia - nobody could. Even on the inside, most Cambodian people didn't know exactly what was happening until it was all over. When Vietnam attacked, it was in retaliation to aggression from the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot had, pretty randomly, ordered the invasion of Vietnam's Phu Quoc Island. This started a manly, macho pissing contest between the 2 governments... ultimately won by Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge fled to the dense jungle on the border between Cambodia and Thailand and Vietnam accidentally ended the genocide.

The Aftermath

Pol Pot had completely dismantled Cambodian society, which left almost nothing for the survivors of the Khmer Rouge. With the Khmer Rouge gone, Cambodia lay in ruin. People took to the streets in search of food. It wasn’t long before somebody wandered into Choeung Ek looking for food and discovered the Killing Fields. The shallow mass graves had grown to be swollen mounds of dirt as decomposing dead bodies released all their nasty gases. The place is said to have had a powerful and disturbing stench when it was first discovered: the musk of death.

Today teeth, bones and pieces of clothing are still surfacing at the Killing Fields. The staff that work at the Killing Fields sweep the grounds to collect bones monthly. There is a giant tower, built in the Buddhist architectural tradition, that houses thousands of skulls and other bones that were pulled from the ground. The thing is though that less than half the mass graves at Choeung Ek have been excavated, so all the 9,000ish skulls in this tower are just a fraction of the men, women and children that died here. Most of them still lay undisturbed. In this tower there are diagrams explaining how to identify the weapon that had been used to kill the (former) owners of the skulls. You can tell by looking at the shape of the hole in the skull or, in come cases, how many teeth are still left. There are mass graves exactly like this one all over Cambodia; we visited a smaller one in Siem Reap too. The Killing Fields at Choeung Ek however, are the largest and most well known.

After the fall of the Khmer Rouge the Cambodian people were in dire need of help, but they didn’t get it. This was the during the Cold War, and Communist Vietnam's intervention was seen as having created a problem in Cambodia rather than having (accidentally) ended a genocide. The Khmer Rouge had been supported by most Western nations, including the U.S. In fact, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the international community refused to recognize the Cambodian people as a valid nation. For this reason, the Khmer Rouge held onto Cambodia's seat in the UN for the next 15 years. Like, just, WHAT?!? In accordance with this, all the aid money that came from around the world was sent to the internationally recognized Cambodian government: the Khmer Rouge. They used this money to finance their feeble attempts to regain control of Cambodia and continue their genocide. Thanks for lookin' out, UN.

Meanwhile, through the mid 1990s, the people of Cambodia starved as they struggled to reconstruct their society. A large number of people fled to Thailand but an estimated 650,000 died on the way due to starvation or stepping on landmines. Oh yeah – did I mention that the Khmer Rouge planted landmines all around the Cambodian border so that nobody could escape from their “agrarian utopia”? Well they did.

 
 

What became of Pol Pot?

I’m glad you asked. If you weren’t already getting angry, you might now. Pol Pot lived a long, restful life in the countryside with his family. In the few interviews there are with him, he showed no signs of remorse. He maintained that people were unfairly making him out to be the villain, as if it had all been a big misunderstanding.

Eventually, DECADES later, the world got around to dealing with this and Pol Pot was put under house arrest while the international community decided how to proceed. The Khmer Rouge agreed to turn Pol Pot over the U.S. so he could start to be formally tried for crimes against humanity. Pol Pot, who was an old man at this point, found out the night before he was to be handed over to U.S. and conveniently died within a few hours. Most people suspect suicide, but that was never confirmed because the Khmer Rouge refused to hand over his body for an autopsy. Instead they cremated him as fast as possible. His grave is small, shabby, overgrown and forgotten in the jungle near the Thai border.

 
 

Peter’s Perspective

They say that the death of one is a tragedy while the death of millions is just a statistic. I'm not sure if I did before, but I get it now. It’s pretty hard to process what happened at these places I’ve been writing about. It was obviously worse than any nightmare, but the horrors that happened here are just so far outside the average person’s threshold for evil that it is a pretty hard to fathom. It’s surreal that something like this could have even happened. How could people do these things? Walking through the Killing Fields, listening to first hand testimonies and seeing the human remains and the empty clothes of children, I didn't feel like I was really taking it all in. The death of one is a tragedy and the death of millions... is just incomprehensible.

Yeah, genocide is always bad, but Pol Pot's case is even less understandable than most instances of genocide over the course of history. Let's take Hitler for example. He was a savior to Germany - when he was in power the German economy was a powerhouse and he was a charismatic, inspiring leader. And he didn't get where he got over night - it took him years. And when he started killing people of other races, there was resistance from within, as well as from abroad. Pol Pot came into power over night, killed his own people, and nobody cared. I just don't get it, dude.

It’s true, Pol Pot basically got away with it. It’s true that he also claimed to have died with a clear conscience. But that doesn’t mean that everybody is a psychopath. There are other testimonies. The audio recording given to visitors to the Killing Fields include recordings of quite a few confessions and apologies from people within the Khmer Rouge. The one that stood out though is from a man named ‘Dutch’. He was the man who ran Tuol Sleng prison. Unlike Pol Pot, he understands. He understands what he did and his testimony is pretty terrible to hear. Living with that much blood on your hands must be terrible but hearing him speak is reassuring that people might not be so bad.

Overall it's absolutely worth a visit. I think that we, as members of the human race, have the responsibility to expose ourselves to things like this, because the fight is not over. Genocide has been, and continues to be a recurring phenomenon. And the rest of the world is establishing a track record of inaction - it's the bystander effect on an international scale. At the end of the audio book tour what happened at the Killing Fields is compared to, among other things, the genocides that happened Western nations such as Australia (against the Aborigines people) and the U.S. (against the Native Americans).

I'm sorry to say it, but they have a point. So tell me, my fellow Americans, if we're so conscientious, if we're such a leader in the human rights department, if we felt like we were so qualified to put Pol Pot on trial, where are our monuments and memorials? Where's our big apology? We've barely even acknowledged our own genocide.

Come on, man.

Of course, there's nothing we can do about any of this now, but what we can do is prevent it from happening again. Here's something I bet you didn't know about: right now Myanmar (aka Burma) is about half a step away from committing full-on genocide against its Muslim minority, the Rohingya people, or as they are now being called "the boat people." They are called this because thousands of them have fled Myanmar, and are now floating around the South Pacific and starving to death in rickety, overcrowded, fishing vessels, abandoned by their traffickers. Myanmar has stripped them of their citizenship and rounded them up into camps where the vague but frequent occurrence of "abuses" is the only information that has managed to escape to the international media. Now that the "boat people" have started to land on foreign shores it has become other people's problem and the world is finally starting to take notice. I plan on visiting Myanmar soon, so I'm sure I will elaborate on all this later. But in the mean time, you can (and should) read about it here:

( The New York Times ) 

( NPR )

 
 

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