Having arrived in Cambodia yesterday, we jumped into a tok tok and made our way to a hotel in the centre of Phnom Penh. After a relaxed night in we set off on one of the most chilling and horrifying experiences of my life so far. As we entered S21, an old school converted into a torture chamber for all enemies of the state during Pol Pots regime, I was unprepared to see, what I believe, some of the most eye-opening artifacts that I will and have ever seen. Having visited Nelson Mandela's cell in Robin Island, South Africa, I was prepared to see something of the same level- a mat on the floor for sleeping, a dish for food, a small bowl for excrement barred windows and very few and far between visits to the outdoors. What I came across in the first set of dorms was a small room with glass windows and shutters, a steel bed with no mattress, a bowl for food and a bullet box for excrement. The thing that made this different from Robin Island was that the people were held in chains day and night and injuries uncared for consistently throughout their lives. We were to find out that the only time these people would see the light is when they were taken outside into the square for interrogation, with included hanging upside down until unconscious and then woken by dumping the victims head into fertilizer. Walking into the next section we found out that the prisoners were pinned down by their chains in a fashion only comparable to the way that African Americans were treated on slave ships from Africa. Constant "interrogation" of the prisoners caused injuries such as broken bones, slit throats and skull injuries. Many died here before they could reach the chillingly accurately named Killing Fields due to their injuries or through starvation, being fed only 3 spoons of rice twice a day. Due to their lack of food and weakness they were often carried to be interrogated like a hunter would a deer or wild animal he had killed. The prisoners were mainly men but any intellectual (teachers, doctors or anyone who wore glasses) would have had all of his close family, wives, sons, daughters, also interrogated- of all ages. These men, women and small children came here because they were suspected CIA or KGB informants. Guards of all ages from around 12 were used to interrogate, Pol Pots had used propaganda to warp these children's minds of all freedom and humanity- they had simply become killing machines. In the final room we saw the skulls of all the dead men, women and children that had been discovered in the surrounding area. I can not describe the feeling that I had at this moment, where it was anger that any man could allow this to happen, anger that so many obliged to their commands and did the bidding of the tyrant Pol Pots or fear that men were willing to dehumanize themselves to a scale that they are prepared to slaughter the innocent, people that have done nothing.

After this we got back in the tuk tuk and headed to the Killing Fields just outside of Phnom Penh. These people I consider to be fortunate as compared with those in S21, they were allowed to die. Arriving on buses never to see the outside world again, the brutality shown by Pol Pots continued in the same fashion. We found out that the majority of the people were killed either by bamboo sticks, farming tools or literally beaten to death. Those that survived the beatings were thrown into their graves and buried alive, covered in DDT fertilizer to cover the smell of the rotting corpses below. Babies and small children were killed by smashing them into large trees or thrown into the air and stabbed with a bayonet. 20,000 lives were taken in the Killing Fields. Innocent children, wives, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters were brought here and 343 other sites throughout Cambodia. A total of 3 million people were killed without reason and without mercy. They were merely killed because they had lived.