(12 October)

This was not a happy morning, we went on a tour of S21 and the Killing Fields.

I didn't really know anything about this before today. Basically in the late 70s a guy called Pol Pot came to power in Cambodia, and decided that the best way to get rid of any opposition was to kill them all, and kill anyone who was educated enough to consider opposing him, and their families and friends. Over 3 million people were killed in a 4 year period, and it was seriously,seriously brutal. I found this even more distressing than the concentration camp in Dachau.

S21 is a former school, which Pol Pot turned into a prison when he arrived. It has been left almost exactly as the Vietnamese found it when they arrived and stopped what was happening. They found 11 people I think who were alive only because they were useful and working at the prison. Only 3 of them are still alive.

First we saw where they kept the "VIP" prisoners...political figures etc. There were about 10 rooms. Each one contained the beds that the prisoners were kept on, along with the ankle locks etc that tied them to the beds, and the bullet box that they used as a toilet. There was a photo on the wall of each room of the prisoner that was found there dead when the Vietnamese arrived. It really was horrific. Our guide pointed out how they were killed... Some hit over the head with a bar, some had their necks cut, some had their stomachs cut open and their liver etc eaten by the guards... I've never seen anything like it, it was horrible. There was even still bloodstains on the ceilings. The prisoners could only get their toilets taken out once every two weeks... I'm not sure if they even lasted more than 2 weeks.

Sometimes they would send a man into the prisoners that told them they had overthrown Pol Pot and wanted to help them by giving them a place in the new government. They would get them to say what they did, who their family was, other friends that could be "helped". Then they would take them to the fields and kill them, and round up anyone they had mentioned and kill them too.

There was seriously horrific torture going on. We passed the gallows where they used to hang people upside down until they passed out and then dunk their heads in a bucket of manure and icy water to wake them up. They had a lot of the torture instruments on display, and paintings of what had happened, even photographs of people who had died after being tortured, things like beating, with barbed wire, putting acid on their faces, pulling off their fingernails... There was more, it was just horrible. They would rape the women, and send them all to shower in a room on the second floor afterwards. So many tried to jump to kill themselves that they had to put up a barbed wire fence.

The non-VIPs were kept in probably about a metre square brick cells. They couldn't speak, even if they're family etc were in the cells opposite. They also didn't take the toilets out, and got barely any food. They had to ask permission to do anything, even turn over in their sleep, or they would be beaten. If anyone cried when they were being beaten they got extra punishments. Once every two weeks, the men got to was when a guard threw a bucket of icy water into their cell...they then had to wait until they dried and wait for the floor to dry so that they could sleep on it.

When Pol Pot occupied Phnom Penh, he sent all of the ordinary people out to work in the fields. Our guide was actually 6-10 years old while this happened. He was separated from his parents to try and keep him safe. The kids were forced to work in the fields. His dad died during the regime and some of his brothers. It really hit home how recently this actually happened.

There was a room about the people who ran these places, killed and tortured people. Many of them are still in the Cambodian government now. Pol Pot himself was still a member the UN for TEN YEARS after all this happened, even though people knew about it! Apparently because he was seen as being at least better than than the communism that would get into all of SE Asia if he wasn't there.

Speaking of communism, China knew this was all going on, and didn't care, because they received nearly all of the food etc grown in Cambodia in exchange for providing weapons etc.

The trials of some of the leaders of these prisons have only started recently. The leaders who are in prison are living better lives than over 85% of the Cambodian people... They have safe, clean cells, food, exercise, TVs etc. It's absolutely ridiculous. The guy who ran S21 was convicted recently. He got 35 Years in prison, which was lessened for the time he had already been imprisoned. 35 years for the orchestrated torture and killing of so many people...it's just unbelievable.

I just about managed to get through all of this until we came back to near the entrance and there, sitting selling the book of his life story, was one of the survivors, one of the people they had found when the Vietnamese arrived at s21. I don't know how that poor man can come back there after what happened to him. That totally set me off, and that wasn't even the end of it. After walking out past the most horribly burned poor man I've ever seen and land mine victims begging, we were on the bus to the killing fields, with out guide telling even more stories along the way.

The killing fields are about 45 minutes outside the centre. First we saw the point where the truckloads of people would stop. Sometimes there were too many for the guards to kill all in one night. In front of this was a big memorial type building, filled with skulls found in the mass graves.

We saw the first mass grave, which was closet to where the guards lived. They used to pour chemicals over the bodied to get rid of the smell. People were rarely shot as their lives weren't thought to be worth the cost of a bullet. They were hit over the head, their throats sliced etc. Sometimes they just threw them in and buried them alive. The spaces were absolutely tiny and there was an unbelievable amount of bodies found in them. We had to walk over the graves, a lot of things had been brought up to the surface during the floods...our guide happily pointed out bones, teeth, and clothing that we had to walk over. We saw the tree whose bark was very sharp and was used to kill people. There was a grave for the soldiers who knew too much, or refused to kill. They were all headless and the heads have never been found. There was the grave for women and children, next to the "killing tree". This was the tee where the killed the babies, by taking them by the legs and hitting their head off the tree before throwing them in the pit, often while the mothers watched. Women were raped and buried naked, and their clothes kept for the ones who were still alive and working. The last significant thing we were shown was the "magic tree", which played music to drown out the screams. People were also hanged there.

How do we know so much detail about the killings? Because the people who did them are still walking around today. Our guide had seen one of them at the killing fields a few times, getting paid to give interviews to journalists. It is actually disgusting.

After all this I was thoroughly depressed, as you can imagine. Sorry if you are too, but this is an experience that I will never forget, and people should know that these things are still going on in the world. I can't believe I'd never even heard about it before coming here!