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Today we were up early for our visit to Choeung Ek, the scene of some of the worst atrocities ever committed. Our trip left from the agents where we booked it yesterday just after 9am. When we arrived at the killing fields, we were told we'd be there for 90 minutes and we headed inside. The first, unmissable sight was the huge stupa that has been built there to commemorate the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime, but more about that later.
We didn't really know much about what went on Cambodia during Pol Pot's reign, but we've learned a lot since we arrived. His vision was to transform Cambodia into a peasant-dominated farming cooperative, with communal ownership of everything and communal eating at every meal. he declared the beginning of his regime in 1975 to be Year Zero and began to forcibly evacuate the residents of all of the major cities, including Phnom Penh. People were forced to march into the countryside and work in the fields for up to fifteen hours per day. Families were separated and anybody considered to be an 'intellectual' was systematically wiped out - wearing glasses or having a foreign accent was reason enough to be killed.
At Choeung Ek, we saw the place where trucks would pull up, usually at night, filled with between twenty and thirty blindfolded people who were usually told that they were going to new houses in the countryside. We then moved on to where some of them would then be detained in a wooden hut, before we arrived at the site of the first of many mass graves, which are now just empty pits in the ground in between raised mounds of earth.
Men, women and children would be led to the edge of the grave and told to kneel, before being bludgeoned with a range of farming tools and pushed into the pit. The Khmer Rouge preferred this barbaric method of execution as bullets were considered too expensive to be 'wasted'. Following this, the soldiers would pour on a chemical powder which would kill anybody who'd managed to survive the initial attack. All of this took place while traditional music was played over loudspeakers to drown out the sound of the killings. Horrific, bone-chilling and completely mindless.
Further on, we saw an area where bone and clothing fragments were still scattered on the ground; apparently they still rise to the surface even now and are collected for the displays every few weeks. We also saw the 'killing tree', which was used by the guards to beat babies and children against until they were dead. This was definitely the most upsetting part of the whole experience, we couldn't believe that people could do these things to each other, especially to innocent children all in the name of a crazy political dream. The last stop was the memorial stupa I mentioned earlier. it displays more than 8000 skulls of the victims as well as their ragged clothes and it really brought home the scale of the operation there.
After a trip back to town, our next stop was S-21 prison, where many people were held before being transported to the killing fields. Formerly a secondary school, it was taken over by Pol Pot's security forces in 1975 and they transformed classrooms into torture chambers. We wandered around the empty cells, which still contained the original beds where the prisoners would be tortured, before entering a display of hundreds of photographs of victims, including some graphic photos of prisoners' bodies after they had been beaten to death. When the prison was liberated by the Vietnamese in 1979 there were only seven prisoners alive, all of whom had used their skills - such as painting or photography - to stay alive. Overall, during the three years and eight months of Khmer Rouge rule, between 1.5 and 2 million people were murdered by their rulers. The whole morning was a haunting experience and one that will stay with us both for a long time to come. Amazingly, the Cambodian people have managed to somehow attempted to recover from the trauma and sadness and they're very proud of how far their country has come since 1979, as they should be. They're some of the friendliest people you'll meet anywhere!
After we arrived back at the travel agency, we sorted out our Vietnamese and China visas (we think - we have to leave our passports with them for a week and collect them when we're back in Phnom Penh!) and had some lunch at a place called Kiwi Bakery. After a busy and thought-provoking morning, we headed back to our hotel for a lazy afternoon. We watched some cable TV and caught up with Dawn on Skype before getting ready to go out for the night.
We headed to a restaurant close to our hotel where I had some Lok Lak, a traditional Cambodian dish - delicious! Afterwards, we had a few cocktails at a bar overlooking the waterfront before calling it a night.
Tomorrow we leave for Kampot on the south coast.
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