I was going to just write one entry on Phnom Penh, but I realized I had a lot to say about the killing fields and S-21, so this part deserved its own post. (You can see the broader post about our time in Phnom Penh here) It’s so important to know and remember what happened to the people of Cambodia not even 40 years ago, especially at a time when the US is holding people in concentration camps who are fleeing violence in their own countries. This experience served as a reminder to me that anything can happen to anyone, especially during a perfect storm of political unrest and a wave of extremism. The Khmer Rouge came to power as a product of fallout from the Vietnamese war with the US, a bourgeois that was perceived to be corrupt while the common man didn’t get his fair share, and an evil disguised as egalitarianism and communism that had already swept China and Eastern Europe at this point in history. The nightmare genocide that Cambodia as a country experienced for 4 years was not unlike the Holocaust in Germany, or the Taínos and other Indigenous peoples in the Americas. This is not an extensive explanation and I’m leaving out a lot, but I’ve tried to get the general points across from what I remember of the tour and I think it’s really important to know about.

There are two main attractions in Phnom Penh that revolve around Cambodia’s dark history from the 70s: the Killing Fields outside the city, and S-21, the high school-turned into a torture and holding facility for people who were considered to be “against the state”. It is now known as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. We took an audio tour of both places, which was masterfully done and a definite “must” if you go. It’s not a very big area, but the audio tour really gave context for what we were looking at, narrated by a man who had survived the time from 1975 to 1979 when the Khmer Rouge traumatized, starved, and tortured its entire population and were responsible for the deaths of anywhere from one to three million Cambodians (the population at the time was just 8 million). It’s a difficult story to digest, especially when you hear personal accounts. The cities were cleaned out in Cambodia, and everybody was forced to walk en masse to the countryside for forced hard labor and farming. Pol Pot’s aspiration was to triple the rice production in a short period of time, which was impossible, and have a clean start with a purely agrarian society. Part of that process included killing anybody with an education (and their family members), including those who spoke another language, people with glasses, people with soft hands, Buddhist monks, and Muslims.

When people were discovered to be intellectuals or for any reason deemed “against the state”, they would be brought to places like S-21 scattered all over the country. There, they would be held in deplorable conditions, often shackled by the ankles in long rows of naked prisoners for weeks. They often got about 4 small spoons of watery rice porridge per day as their only sustenance. Their guards were often 15 and 16-year old boys who had been taught to be as cruel as possible. One by one, people would be taken to a different area of the complex and tortured for information about how they had committed treason, then forced to write confessions and sign them.

From there they would be taken in the night in trucks outside the city to the killing fields, where they would be murdered in the night. The Khmer Rouge didn’t want to waste any money on bullets, and thought that guns would be too loud and arouse suspicion on the nearby farms. So, they would kill with machetes, spears to the head, decapitation, etc — any way they could, really. They blasted loud propaganda music to mask the screams of people going to their death, then dumped their bodies into mass graves.

In 1979 the Vietnamese fought their way into Cambodia and took over Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge fled to the jungles of Thailand where, aided by China, they reestablished their forces. From 1979 to 1990, the Khmer Rouge was recognized in the UN as the only legal representative of Cambodia. Pol Pot died peacefully in his home under house arrest in the 90s, surrounded by his family. Hardly justice, if you ask me. I think it was really important to visit these places first, though, because you can really feel how the Cambodian people have had to completely rebuild. They mostly use American money because the Khmer Rouge literally destroyed their national bank. All their factories and farm equipment were destroyed, making it impossible to produce anything (or buy the equipment to produce). In one fell swoop, the Khmer Rouge took away everything.

There is no sunny takeaway from this visit, which is not something I often say. Our time at these places was deeply moving and hit both Seth and me hard. We knew about the Khmer Rouge, but it was different for me to be there and hear the words from a survivor. It’s just so difficult for me sometimes to understand injustice and cruelty in this world. I know that Cambodians are not the only population that have suffered at the hands of monsters, but that doesn’t make it any less horrifying. We are all human beings with lives and pain and thoughts, and I honestly don’t think it’s too much to ask to remember that every day as we go through life.