The Killing Fields — Jake and Jesslyn's World Tour

After our time in Nha Trang, Vietnam, we spent five nights in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The top two things to do in Phnom Penh, according to Trip Advisor and anyone you ask, are to visit the killing field Choeung Ek and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Today Cheung Ek is a memorial site and is the most well known of over 300 killing fields (mass grave sites) throughout Cambodia. It is approximately 15 kilometers outside of the city center. Tuol Sleng is within the city center and is more well known as the "S-21" prison. It was the secret center of a network of nearly 200 prisons where people were tortured by the Khmer Rouge. Between 12,000 and 20,000 people were imprisoned at S-21 with only 12 confirmed survivors. We set out to visit both sites in one day and it was a humbling and educational experience.

The day started with a 45 minute tuk tuk drive through the dirt roads of Phnom Penh, to Choeung Ek. You visit this memorial site by listening to an audio guide as you respectfully walk the grounds of the killing fields. It explains some history of the Khmer Rouge and what happened at this site as well as sites like this throughout Cambodia. On execution days, typically a few hundred arrived by bus from the S-21 prison and were held in an overcrowded shack until night fell. At night music would be played loudly as people were brought out to the field to have their heads bashed in, followed by their necks slit and then dumped in a ditch. We saw several indentations in the ground which were remnants of mass graves. We also saw two glass boxes: one with victim’s clothing and another with victim’s bones and teeth. Areas that are known to be mass graves are roped off. As the rain washes away soil, bones and clothing are unearthed and they don’t want anyone walking on it. Monthly, staff collect these particles. We saw The Killing Tree, where brain particles and hair had been discovered, as well as a mass grave of baby bodies. The prison director confessed that this was the tree where they smashed babies heads before throwing them to their final resting place. Many areas we walked by had informal memorials of piles of friendship bracelets, money, etc. that visitors have left behind in remembrance. The audio guide ends at the Memorial Stupa which includes a column about 12 feet high that contains rows and rows of skulls that have been excavated from the site. They are grouped into categories so that you can understand the estimated age, gender and method of execution. The memorial was well done and very sobering.

Before planning our trip, I knew nothing about the genocide that has occurred in Cambodia. The night before our visit we watched the Oscar nominated 1984 film, The Killing Fields. It’s a true story about two journalists, one from Cambodia and one from America during the years of 1973 - 1979. The film was good but it left me with a massive amount of questions. Jake found this paper online which I read before we went to the killing field and S-21 prison. Reading the paper, along with touring the facilities answered most of the open questions that I had. I highly recommend that you read the paper, it’s easy to follow and provides a concise overview.

Imagine if one out of four people you knew were killed by your own people. Then imagine that person’s entire family was killed too. Why? So that no one would live to seek revenge. This is what happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge during the years 1975-1979. Approximately 2 million people, 25% of the Cambodian population was killed by murder or starvation. Below is my history lesson to you, much of which is courtesy of Wikipedia.

The Rise, Fall, and Destruction Caused by the Khmer Rouge

According to Wikipedia, "The Khmer Communist Party, was a communist party in Cambodia. Its leader was Pol Pot and its followers were generally known as Khmer Rouge. The party was underground for most of its existence, and took power in the country in 1975 when it established the state known as Democratic Kampuchea. The party lost power in 1979 with the establishment of the People's Republic of Kampuchea by leftists who were dissatisfied by the Pol Pot regime, and by the intervention of Vietnamese military forces after a period of mass killing.”.

The Khmer Rouge ideology was influenced by four principles:

Total independence and self-reliance
Preservation of the dictatorship of the proletariat
Total and immediate economic revolution
Complete transformation of Khmer social values

After taking power, the Khmer Rouge set out to immediately revamp Cambodian society and isolate the country from all foreign influences. Their first step was to rusticate the cities so that the urbanites, suspect for their “regressive” class background, could be reformed through hard labor. These reformed subjects could then contribute to the new agrarian economy focused primarily on exponential increases in rice production. The Khmer Rouge transferred Cambodia into a rural, classless society in which there were no rich, no poor, and no exploitation. To accomplish this, they abolished money, free markets, normal schooling, private properties, foreign clothing styles, religious practices, and traditional Khmer (Cambodian) culture. The national bank was destroyed. Public schools, hospitals, pagodas, mosques, churches, universities, and government buildings were shut or turned into prisons, stables, reeducation camps, and granaries. There was no public or private transportation, no private properties, and no non-revolution-related entertainment. Soon after seizing power, they arrested and killed thousands of soldiers, military officers, and civil servants from the former Cambodian government.

During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups who they believed were enemies of the state, spies, or had the potential to undermine the new state. They executed hundreds of thousands of people that fit into these general categories

Professionals and intellectuals - in practice this included almost everyone with an education and people who understood a foreign language. It also included people who required glasses or had soft hands. To the KR this meant that you spent too much time reading books or doing non-agrarian type of work.
Ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, ethnic Thai, and other minorities in the Eastern Highlands, Cambodian Christians, Muslims, and Buddhist Monks.
“Economic saboteurs” - many former urban dwellers who were deemed guilty of sabotage due to their lack of agricultural ability.

Before execution, many of these people were forced to write confessions for things they had never done or even heard of. For instance, while we were visiting the S-21 prison I heard stories of dozens of people who were forced to admit that they were part of the CIA when this wasn’t even a commonly heard of organization within Cambodia. We saw the interrogation cells at S-21, where prisoners were chained to beds and torutured. We saw various kinds of torture devices and I couldn’t stay in these rooms very long. It made me feel sick and I had to go outside for fresh air. Many of these people died in prison due to starvation. If starvation didn’t take their lives, then they were executed at the killing field. Executions were typically carried out by a blow to the head with a metal bar and then the prisoners neck was slit afterwards to ensure they were dead. They were not shot because bullets were expensive.

The rest of the population was forced to become farmers in labor camps. In Phnom Penh and other cities, the Khmer Rouge told residents that they would be moved just outside of the city, and would return to their homes in a few days. Some witnesses say they were told that the evacuation was because of the "threat of American bombing" and that they did not have to lock their houses since the Khmer Rouge would take care of everything until they returned. People who refused to evacuate would have their homes burned to the ground and would be killed immediately. The evacuees were sent on long marches to the countryside, which killed thousands of children, elderly, and sick people. They were dehumanized, no longer referred to by their name, or even “he” or “she”. Everyone became “it”. Walking through the S-21 prison, there was room after room containing mugshots of thousands of people: men, women, and children. You could feel the sorrow in their faces. No names, no identification. I will never be able to imagine what it would be like to be a family member walking through those rooms looking for faces of their loved ones.

The total lack of agricultural knowledge by the former city dwellers made famine inevitable. Rural dwellers were often unsympathetic or too frightened to assist them. Such acts as picking wild fruit or berries were seen as "private enterprise" and punished by death. The Khmer Rouge forced people to work for 12 hours non-stop, without adequate rest or food. These actions resulted in massive deaths through executions, work exhaustion, illness, and starvation.

The audio guide at the killing fields mentioned "the secret war”, in which the U.S. dropped more bombs on Cambodia than they did in all of World War II. It mentioned that about 100,000 died from these bombs, mostly farmers. I read that this was one of the reasons the Khmer Rouge was able to easily gain followers from rural communities.

By December 1978, because of several years of border conflict and the flood of refugees fleeing Cambodia, relations between Cambodia and Vietnam had deteriorated. According to Wikipedia, "On December 25, 1978, the Vietnamese armed forces, along with the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, an organization that included many dissatisfied former Khmer Rouge members, invaded Cambodia and captured Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979. Despite a traditional Cambodian fear of Vietnamese domination, defecting Khmer Rouge activists assisted the Vietnamese, and, with Vietnam's approval, became the core of the new People's Republic of Kampuchea. The new government was quickly dismissed by the Khmer Rouge and China as a “puppet government”.”

I’ve done some research on what happened from here, but is very unclear to me. It seems as though first world countries still recognized the Khmer Rouge as the Cambodian government and they even had a seat on the UN. Today Cambodia is officially a multiparty democracy but as you drive through the country you see signs everywhere for “Cambodian People’s Party” as well as pictures of the Prime Minister.

Pol Pot continued to rule the Khmer Rouge for twenty more years but lived in hiding. He was not seen in public after 1980 and never went to trial for his crimes. In 1998 the Khmer Rouge agreed to turn him over to an international tribunal, and according to his wife, he died that evening.

Cambodia first approached the United Nations in 1997 for assistance to conduct a trial for the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge. Why did it take so long for that to happen?!?!?!? I really don’t understand this. Two years later, the Royal Government of Cambodia began actively working with the UN to establish this special court called the Khmer Rouge Trial. It did not become fully operational until 2007. Along with Pol Pot, many other leaders of the KR had already died or been killed but four senior leaders remained. Among these four was “Duch”, the notorious leader of the S-21 prison. His trial began in 2009 and he was found guilty the following year. Despite the fact that it is estimated that 15,000 people were killed at S-21 , Duch was sentenced to a mere 35 years in prison. Duch appealed the verdict and I’m happy to report that that backfired. In 2012 his original sentence was replaced with life imprisonment. Three other members of the Khmer Rouge lived to be sentenced for crimes against humanity.

Some interesting facts about the movie I mentioned above, The Killing Fields:

The man that plays the Cambodian journalist, Haing S. Ngor, had never acted before. He was spotted by the film's casting director at a Cambodian wedding in Los Angeles. For this role, he won both the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He was a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime and the labour camps. Prior to that he was a doctor based in Phnom Penh. In 1975, he was one of the millions of people forced to leave the city and move to labor camps in the countryside. He spent four years there before fleeing to Thailand. In February of 1996, he was shot dead outside of his home in Los Angeles. Three men who were members of the “Oriental Lazy Boyz” street gang were charged with the murder, but other sources indicate that it was a politically motivated killing carried out by sympathizers of the Khmer Rouge.

Angelina Jolie Pitt

As an avid People Magazine reader, in the past when I’ve heard about Cambodia, I’ve thought of Angelina Jolie Pitt. Wow, actually putting that into writing makes me feel pathetic. Anyway, I’ve associated her with the country because I knew that the first child she adopted was an infant from Cambodia and I had read that she purchased a home in his native province in an effort to connect him with his heritage. I can list several celebrities that have adopted children from other countries, but she was the first one I can remember hearing about. I think it stuck with me because I think it’s admirable that she wants her son to learn the culture of his native country from within. She makes headlines most often for her high profile family, but what impresses me most about her is her humanitarian work and charitable giving. I knew that she was a United Nations Ambassador but didn’t know much about how that came to be so I just looked into it. She first visited Cambodia in 2000 to film “Tomb Raider” and witnessed the effects of what this country has been through. She contacted the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for more information on trouble spots throughout the world and in 2001 was named a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador in 2001. She has since gone on 40 field missions and has contributed over $5 million of her own money. I’d love to quote her entire UN profile here because I think it is so awesome but I’ll leave it up to you on whether or not you are interested. You can read more about her work on the UN Refugee Agency website here.

Jolie Pit is currently directing and producing a film version of the memoir, “At First They Killed My Father” for Netflix. The memoir was released in 2000 by Loung Ung, a survivor of the Pol Pot regime. Loung was one of seven children of a high ranking former government official and was five years old when the Khmer Rouge went into power. She was trained as a child soldier while her other siblings were sent to labor camps. The book is her account of what happened during those years and after. I haven’t read the book yet but I plan on it. The movie is currently being filmed in Cambodia with an all Cambodian cast and is scheduled to be released in 2016. The production company is employing another 300 Cambodians to help make the film. I’m thankful that Netflix and Jolie Pitt are producing this memoir as a film. I think that it will give a wider audience an opportunity to understand some of what happened in Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge.

Closing Thoughts

The experience of staying in Phnom Penh for a few days, visiting the killing field and prison amplified my thankfulness for being born in the United States of America. One thing I can’t shake though is my lack of knowing about this genocide in Cambodia. Where else in the world have things like this happened and I was never taught about it in school? I don’t have a wonderful memory, so maybe there was a paragraph about it in one of my history books. Maybe I didn’t choose the elective that would have taught me more about the history of the world. When Jake and I set out on this trip I didn’t anticipate that one of the things I’d enjoy most is learning world history. Sometimes we see families traveling with small children in highly cultural/historical places and think to ourselves, “Those kids must be so bored. I’m sure they’d rather be playing on a beach or at an amusement park.” Traveling through Phnom Penh gave me a new perspective on why kids should be exposed to different cultural and historical places: what career options you are exposed to! Sure, some kids may be bored out of their mind and it ends there. Others? Others may end up becoming a teacher that changes the world through passionate history lessons, a doctor helping people in third world countries, a life of work dedicated to preventing genocide. Travel with kids - I get it now.

I leave Phnom Phen with similar feelings as the ones I had while in Berlin: massive respect for what the citizens of this contry have been through. It pains me to think about how many lost their lives, how many people don’t know what happened to their loved ones, and how long it took to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to justice.

~ Jesslyn

Sources: Some of my sources were given above via hyperlinks. Below is a comprehensive list. Please note that the informed retrieved from Wikipedia was retrieved on either January 3rd or January 11th and is subject to be changed.