Phnom Penh

I’m going to be here a few days. The first day was spent moving hotel. I had booked one which was slightly further out of the city, it was more expensive but looked very nice. On arrival I found I had failed to select the right room and had opted for a broom cupboard with no window. To upgrade cost me a lot. Once in my room it was very nice. The aircon struggled to cope, cooling the bigger room.

I headed out on foot and found I had effectively moved from a nice hotel in a nice area to a more expensive hotel away from anything with dodgy aircon and a resident gheko, but it’s a non refundable booking.

Speaking with the resident tuktuk man, he was available to do all the big ticket items the next day.

Day 3. Mr Buntha was ready and off we went, headed to several small sights and then Choeung Ek or better known as Phnom Penh’s killing fields. Another preserved site that details the horrific execution of Cambodians by Cambodians. When Pol Pots democratic party of Cambodia came to power, the population was 7 million. The Kmer Rouge killings saw 2.5 million people killed. Nearly one third the population, slain by a maniacal dictator, who came to power with the support and funding from America. The logic was that Pol Pot sold them his democratic dream but had no intention of stepping away from being a communist dictator. His paranoia meant that anyone with an education may undermine him and must be killed. Not just that but one of his moto’s was ‘if you don’t want the grass to grow you must remove the roots’, effectively, if you kill one opponent you must kill their entire family.

Pol Pots army was made up of supporters and those forced to fight or die. Most of those forced were children, as young as 8yrs. Early teens became executioners, killing up to 300 people per day at this site. The methods were barbaric, bullets were expensive, so most were killed by blunt force trauma. Its the site of the ‘killing tree’ where babies were killed in front of their mothers. Something I thought was just myth.

With that done we headed back towards S21 the school, turned interrogation centre.

S21 or Tuol Sleng Prison is probably the most well known Kmer Rouge interrogation centre. Where prisoners were tortured until they admitted being spies for Russia or America and effectively signed their own death warrants.

The criteria to find yourself detained was very loose. If you were educated, a manager, religious, a teacher, if you wore glasses that made you look intelligent and even having a pen in your shirt pocket were all true reasons people were detained. Several tourists including a Brit passed through and were never seen again.

8 men survived the ordeal. The man on the far left was a mechanic and was spared so he could maintain the lorries and typewriters in the prison. Another was a sculptor who was tasked to make endless busts of Pol Pot. 4 of the survivors were children who hid in piles of clothing taken from prisoners. They were hiding for the last ten days that the prison remained under Kmer Rouge occupation.

Two of the survivors visit the site daily to promote their books. Now in their late 80’s early 90’s the men look like shadows, wearing the physical scars and mental trauma of hard lives just surviving.

When Cambodia was liberated by the Vietnamese, Pol Pot went into hiding in the mountains. He lived out his life in those mountains until the year 1998. But let’s not forget that the United Nations General Assembly recognised him as the rightful leader of Cambodia and again funded him.

Its a humbling end to the tale. This country, in which everyone knew someone who was killed, decided those Kmer leaders would face trial, but no death sentences, because there had been enough killing of Cambodians by Cambodians.

The term Genocide was born out of this time. You have to think, this happened in my lifetime and we should have learnt the futility of conflict, but we haven’t and nor have we stopped genocide, its happening right now in full view.