Friday was a somber day as we sought to understand Cambodia’s painful history of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s ruthless and cruel regime that wiped out the city of Phnom Penh in the mid-1970s, following the end of the Vietnam War and on the heels of an eight-year Cambodian civil war. The Khmer Rouge and their ruthless leader were responsible for killing an estimated 2-3 million people, almost a quarter of Cambodia’s population at the time – a tragedy I was vaguely aware of prior to our visit.
The Khmer Rouge propagated a radical ideology that rejected Western ideas and anything that represented modernization or progress, including the owning of private property. They believed the country’s best chance at economic survival was to abolish big cities and instead focus on rural growth and collective farming – specifically on rice farming.
When the Khmer Rouge troops first arrived in Phnom Penh, they were welcomed into the city as the people thought they were restoring peace. However, their radical plans began unfolding almost immediately. Houses, businesses, schools, and even hospitals were emptied at gunpoint, forcing people into the streets. It was mass chaos that ended with families being separated and mass casualties throughout the city. They seized Buddhist temples, destroyed centuries-old art, and imposed a new “classless” society that targeted educated, middle-class, and religious people as the enemy. Many doctors, teachers, lawyers, and business people were persecuted.
We visited Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, a former local school that was converted to a torture prison where it’s estimated that 17,000 men, women, and children were housed on their way to the killing fields.
While there, we met one of only seven survivors, Chum Mey. He was imprisoned, accused of being a spy, and tortured until he falsely confessed. The only reason he survived was because he was an accomplished mechanic and was deemed useful to the regime.
After leaving S-21, we headed to the outskirts of town to Choeng Ek, one of the mass grave sites known as the Killing Fields. Shockingly, this was only one of 340 mass grave sites during Pol Pot’s four-year reign. Thousands died of disease and starvation, while countless others were taken from prisons and ordered to work manual field labor in the countryside. Any slight expression, emotion, or defiance resulted in blunt trauma to the head and death.
Remnants of clothing from prisoners are on display; a tree is adorned with bracelets and necklaces in memory of the babies and their mothers who died in the mass grave below it.
Walking through these fields and seeing the marked areas where mass graves once existed, including a gravesite where mothers watched their babies die before they, too, were killed, was almost too much to process. Like the Nazi concentration camps, however, we must acknowledge these atrocities and never forget, lest history repeat itself.
Later that afternoon and back aboard our ship, light rain showers brought lovely rainbows – universal signs of hope and peace. Amid this beautiful trip, this was a day we will certainly remember.
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