Cambodia: Then and Now (Scholarship Entry)

CAMBODIA | Thursday, 27 June 2013 | Views [835] | View Smaller Image

-The Innocent- This image was taken at the Choeung Ek Killing Field site. An orchard and Chinese graveyard before the Khmer Rouge regime in the `70s turned it into a killing field, it houses a Buddhist stupa which displays more than 5,000 human skulls that have been unearthed. An estimated 17,000 people were brutally executed at the Choeung Ek killing field site alone, including women, children and even babies. As you walk through the fields you can still see human bones coming up through the dirt.

Tags: cambodia, khmer rouge, pol pot, skull, killing field

-The Way We Were-
Whilst back in Cambodia for another volunteer mission trip I wanted to capture the charm and wonder of Cambodia while also capturing the harsh poverty that went alongside it. This is a picture of some of the wall carvings in one of the temples in Angkor Wat in the Siem Reap province of Cambodia. There are hundreds of temples in this region which are a remnant of the once glorious Khmer Empire. Quite a contrast to how the country is now; still struggling over thirty years after Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime decimated this nation.

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-Left Behind-
This image was taken at the sobering Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh. A high school before the Khmer Rouge Regime in the `70s turned it into the notorious Security Prison 21 (S-21), it saw an estimated 17,000 people were tortured and imprisoned in just four short years. Of that 17,000 only seven people survived. This cell, constructed in an old classroom, held officers of the Khmer Rouge after their own leaders turned on them. Beds (and sometimes bloodstains) are pretty much kept how they were found when the UN came to Cambodia and intervened.

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Cambodia: Then and Now (Scholarship Entry)

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