16 03 Killing Fields

Today, on our final day in Cambodia, we visited two sites that are infamously connected to the dark days of Pol Pot's thuggish Khmer Rouge Cambodian rule. Both of these places were more of an endurance than an enjoyment however they are important to visit to begin to understand exactly what the people of Cambodia have endured in recent decades.

The first was The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a museum chronicling the Cambodian genocide. The site is a former secondary school which was used as Security Prison 21 by the Khmer Rouge regime from its rise to power in 1975 to its fall in 1979. From 1976 to 1979, an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng (the real number is unknown).  Tuol Sleng was just one of at least 150 torture and execution centers established by the Khmer Rouge, though other sources put the figure at 196 prison centers. On July 26, 2010, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia convicted the chief of Tuol Sleng Prison, Kaing kek Iew, (alias Duch) for crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and sentenced him to life imprisonment.

And the second was  Choeung Ek. This is the site of a former orchard and mass grave of victims of the Khmer Rouge - killed between 1975 and 1979 - about 17 kilometres south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It is the best-known of the sites known as The Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge regime executed over one million people between 1975 and 1979.  

Mass graves containing 8,895 bodies were discovered at Choeung Ek after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. Many of the dead were former political prisoners who were kept by the Khmer Rouge in their Tuol Sleng detention center and in other Cambodian detention centers.

Today, Choeung Ek is a memorial, marked by a Buddhist stupa. The stupa has acrylic glass sides and is filled with more than 5,000 human skulls. Some of the lower levels are opened during the day so that the skulls can be seen directly. Many have been shattered or smashed in.

Tourists are encouraged by the Cambodian government to visit Choeung Ek. Apart from the stupa, there are pits from which the bodies were exhumed. Human bones still litter the site.

On May 3, 2005, the Municipality of Phnom Penh announced that they had entered into a 30-year agreement with JC Royal Co. to develop the memorial at Choeung Ek.[2] As part of the agreement, they are not to disturb the remains still present in the field.

Both sites were well presented with audio guides and are well worth about an hour and a half each. I could not take too many pictures.....

Birds of the Killing Fields Site.