In the footsteps of the Khmer Rouge

It was a painful day. I had hired a tuk-tuk driver to take me out to the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre on the site of one of the Khmer Rouge 'killing fields', and then to the Tuol Sleng Museum at the former S-21 Security Prison. I wondered if it was a good idea having so much misery in one day, but after leaving the killing fields I was in no mood to do anything fun and so the Tuol Sleng museum was appropriate to continue learning about the Khmer Rouge war crimes.

On 17th April 1975,  after years of civil war, Phnom Penh was taken by the Khmer Rouge, an extreme Maoist group with a vision of a peasant agrarian utopia. The entire population of Phnom Penh were forced to march out of the city and into the countryside to be forced into labour in camps known as the killing fields. Denise Affonco's To The End of Hell is a very vivid memoir of her experiences of three years of forced labour, seeing her daughter die and husband disappear to be executed. Choeung Ek was one of these camps, fifteen kilometres from Phnom Penh on the site of a former graveyard for the local Chinese population. Here, 17,000 people were killed between 1975 and 1979, with a total of 3 million people killed across the country. As the population of Cambodia at the time was only 7 million, this was the most large-scale genocide of a population in history. The regime sought to destroy all remnants of the pre-revolution past, renaming 1975 as Year Zero and executing those who had held senior government and military posts under Lon Nol. The urban population were labelled the 'new people', even those who had recently fled to the cities from the countryside to escape US bombing from the war with Vietnam, which had spilled into Cambodia. Anyone who could speak a foreign language, wore glasses or had soft hands were particularly suspected. The Khmer Rouge figurehead Pol Pot saw no value in the educated urban class, only in the traditional peasantry, or 'old people'. 'To keep you is no gain, to lose you is no loss', he once famously said.

Memorial Stupa

The Choeng Ek killing field was discovered after the Khmer Rouge were forced out by the Vietnamese in 1979. At the time, swollen pits filled with dead bodies were everywhere, and the stench of death was overwhelming. All of the structures of the camp were destroyed after the Khmer Rouge fled. Starving, desperate and angry former-prisoners tore everything apart, taking every piece of food or material that was available. In 1988 a memorial stupa was built in memory of those who died here. Inside are around 8,000 human skulls as well as other bones and scraps of clothing that were dug up from the 129 mass graves on the site. Walking around, you can see scraps of clothing, bone or teeth that have been brought up through the soil by the rain.

The centre provides an audio headset for a very moving and personal-feeling tour around the grounds. Visitors sit or stand in silence listening to the recording. Firstly, sign posts mark the sites where buildings once stood. There is the truck stop, where twenty to thirty people would be delivered several times a month, blindfolded, starved and beaten, with no idea where they were or the fate that awaited them. In 1978 this increased to daily deliveries of up to three hundred people. Most of the people who were brought here were executed immediately. This was done by beatings with cheap tools at the edge of a pit. Bullets were considered too expensive to be wasted. But when there were large deliveries of people and the slow process of one-by-one executions could not keep up, new arrivals were detained overnight in a wooden windowless building with double-thick walls, meaning that nobody inside could see each other, and sounds were muffled. Next to the detention building there once stood a chemical store room. Chemicals such as DDT were thrown onto the mass graves to cover the stench of decaying bodies, and to finish off those who were still alive.

Another horror of the site was a sugar palm tree, the stems of which were used to slit throats. I could touch the stems to feel how hard and rough the edges were. Perhaps the most saddening part, however, was a mass grave once filled with around one hundred women and children. The women had been stripped and possibly raped before being thrown into the pit. Next to this pit was a tree known as the killing tree, which Khmer Rouge guards used to kill babies against. The audio guide also provided statements from former guards, as well as some very harrowing accounts from survivors of the killing fields. One woman was unable to prevent her eight-month old son dying from starvation as she was forced to work in the paddy fields every day. Another was beaten and raped by ten to twelve men. And finally a man who had been forced to beat a child before being being beaten himself, had been made to eat excrement and had watched a woman being beaten to death.

It began to rain heavily and I walked to the end the site which was marked by a lake. Walking along a dyke above the lake, I looked out at the drowned paddy fields on the other side of the barbed wire perimeter fence. At one end a one-legged man was begging through a gap in the fence. I had a strange feeling that I was at the end of the world. I walked back through the muddy path in the rain, between depressions in the land that marked dug-out pits. At the end of the audio recording a sample of Khmer revolutionary music was played, mixed in with the humming sound of a diesel engine. The narrator suggested that these were the final sounds that many people heard before their deaths here. Music was played from loudspeakers hung from trees at night, to drown out the sounds of screams. Listening to this and walking past the mass graves in the pouring rain was unbearably upsetting.

Bracelets left at the 'women and children' grave

Block B of the prison

In the afternoon I went to the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes. I recognised quite a few faces from Choeung Ek and it seemed that I wasn't the only one doing the 'horror tour' today. I was lucky to arrive just in time for a film screening, which was held in one of the rooms that would once have been a prison cell. The film was a short black-and-white silent clip of footage taken by Vietnamese journalists when Cambodia was invaded in January 1979 and the Khmer Rouge fled to the hills to the West. Tuol Sleng was discovered, and inside were the corpses of fourteen people who had been tortured to death just before Phnom Penh was liberated. They were buried in tombs in the courtyard. The film showed graphic images of these bodies, starved, shackled to their beds with blood and mess all over the floor. There was also footage of the prison building at the time of its discovery, and scenes of five children who had been rescued from the prison alive by the Vietnamese. A guide explained afterwards that one of these children died shortly afterwards of starvation, and two others were adopted overseas. The final two are still living in Phnom Penh today, of course now grown-up. It is thought that between 14,000 and 20,000 people were executed here. The number of survivors is not well documented, as there are only seven known survivors. Neither could I find out from anyone whether this seven included the five children or not.

The building was once a high school, but under the rule of Pol Pot all educational and religious institutions were shut down. This concrete 1960s building was turned into the most secretive of 196 prisons in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, used for detention, torture and execution, primarily of ranks of the Khmer Rouge who were accused of treason, along with their families. Nobody who entered the prison were told what they were accused of, but signed false confessions after being tortured into submission. Usually they declared themselves to have been working against the revolution in one way or another, or claimed that themselves, family members and colleagues were CIA or KGB spies. Copies of such confessions can be seen in the museum. There are also wall after wall of black-and-white photographs of inmates on arrival, and many of beaten corpses next to number signs, as documented by the regime. Most were imprisoned and tortured for 2-4 months, although political prisoners were held for 6-7 months. Walking through the buildings, you can step inside the rooms that once held prison cells. Each is furnished with an iron bed-frame and other objects, perhaps a bowl, a pair of shackles or tools used for torture. On some of the walls are photographs of the rooms as they were first discovered, with dead bodies sprawled across these same beds. The dirty yellow and white tiled floor, the dark, stained walls and cracks and chips everywhere show how relatively untouched the building is from how it would have looked when it was a detention centre.

Tombs of the fourteen corpses found when the prison was discovered

On my way back to my hotel I noticed a sticker on a passing tuk-tuk, which read 'I support the KR trials'. It reminded me of how close to the heart the events of the late 1970s must remain to many Cambodians. Indeed, many would have memories and experiences of the Khmer Rouge from within their lifetimes, may be grieving the loss of their families, or still searching for loved ones who had been separated from them. Throughout the years of horror, the Khmer Rouge were accepted as a part of the United Nations and received support from the US, the UK and Australia amongst others. As the borders with Vietnam and Thailand were closed and lined with landmines, there was little international knowledge of what was happening inside the country. Indeed, some foreign nationals in Cambodia were also captured and killed by the Khmer Rouge. Justice is coming too slowly for those responsible for the atrocities. Only in 2003 was a body established to organise trials for high- and mid-level leaders of the organisation, and to date only one person has been convicted. Only ten individuals are being tried and prosecutors have announced that they will not pursue any more suspects. A lack of funding to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), and controversy surrounding particular cases, are hindering progress. Meanwhile, Pol Pot continued to be the leader of the Khmer Rouge for a further twenty years and died at the age of 72 of unknown causes.