We’ve all headed to the capital, Phnom Penh for a few days of learning about more recent Cambodian history before heading to the coast for some sunshine and beach living.
Cambodia, as a former French colony, retains some significant French influences, particularly in the architecture and food. (Baguettes! For breakfast! Very exciting.) Phnom Penh has beautiful colonial architecture, and wide boulevards, but this hides a dark history.
In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge fighting forces, led by Pol Pot, entered Phnom Penh, told its citizens to leave for the country and declared it to be Year Zero - money & the postal service was abolished, markets were closed and the Khmer Rouge sought to impose the fastest agrarian, communist revolution the world had ever seen. Intellectuals were the first target - educated people were killed, those who wore spectacles were killed and those who survived were sent to farm the land for rice for 15 hours a day. Starvation was an ever present threat. Families were separated - it was deemed that the ‘Angkar’ or ‘organisation’ was the only family one needed. The regime grew ever more paranoid, turning on itself. During the 3 years and 8 months of Khmer Rouge control, between 1.5 and 3 million people were killed - the exact number may never be known.
To give it some context, it’s the equivalent of around 15 million British people being killed in less than 4 years.
One of the most notorious prisons was S21 - Tuol Sleng. This rather ordinary looking building had been a school prior to the Khmer Rouge occupation. It was turned into a brutal prison, where prisoners were tortured every day - they were told what to confess and the confessions were beaten out of them. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge were painstaking in their recording of the brutality, and S21 is now a museum containing all the biographies and mugshots of the detainees there - men, women and children. 20,000 people were detained in S21 between 1976 and 1979.
Only 7 survived.
What really brought this home to me was not the photographs, or the video, or the stories of the victims - the atrocities were almost too big to comprehend.
But 1 photograph, of a boy who was killed in 1979 really struck me. He looked like he was probably 2 or 3, and he was photographed with a single tear on his cheek and a number on his shirt. He could have been born on the same day that I was. By an accident of birth, I was born into a world of privilege and opportunity. He was fated to die before he was 3 years old, guilty of some kind of offence against a brutal regime.
What makes people so blinded by a belief that it feels not only right, but necessary to kill so many people?
And how can we, as Europeans who experienced Nazi atrocities, not only allow this to happen in my lifetime, but happen again and again - Darfur? Rwanda?
Or is this just purely and simply the human condition? Where life is nasty, brutal and short?
10,000 of the inmates of Tuol Sleng prison were taken by ox cart to an area just outside Phnom Penh known as Choung Ek, or the Killing Fields.
Here they were executed, and buried in mass graves. Many have been disinterred and a huge stupa has been built to hold skulls that were found there. Other bodies remain undisturbed, and whilst walking through the Killing Fields, you’re acutely aware of the human bones and clothing that are poking out of the ground.
There is a strange beauty to the killing fields that completely opposes the horrors that took place there - hundreds of beautiful butterflies flutter around you as you walk around the site of so much death and destruction.
Leaving the Killing Fields and returning to the city, we again contemplated what we’d seen - it was hard for us to imagine the sheer scale and size of what happened here - we plan to watch the film ‘The Killing Fields’ to give us some context and human story.
Again, it moved us to think about our lives, and our role in the world. We all feel that Cambodia has touched us in a way that Thailand could not.
Our partying in Siem Reap has been put into sharp relief. But there is a place for the two side by side - the Khmer people have such a strong sense of carpe diem - when life has always been short, and there may not be a tomorrow, there is a massive sense of living for the moment here, grabbing every opportunity you can, always being afraid of missing out on something. I think that’s perhaps why we feel that affinity - all 4 of us are doing our own version of Seizing the Day and Living for the Moment.
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