Staring Back Into The Abyss

About 14km south of the city of Phnom Penh is a former orchard which was once also a Chinese cemetery. It is a shady, leafy area with a nearby pond, ducks and geese waddling around without a care and a general feeling of peace and serenity. This collection of green spaces is known historically and locally as Choeung Ek.

We know them as the Killing Fields.

A visit to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek is an essential Phnom Penh experience, but it's a harrowing one as well to get an up-close glimpse of the hell that was Democratic Kampuchea under Pol Pot. No one is quite sure how many Cambodians died under the Khmer Rouge regime, though estimates range from 1.5 million to 3 million, a scarcely comprehensible level of genocide, made even more horrifying - if that's possible - when you consider that the regime did this to its own people.

In truth, Choeung Ek is just one of more than 300 known Killing Fields across the country, with no doubt others still to be uncovered. When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, and with it control of Cambodia, few could envisage what was coming. The entire population of every city, town and village was marched out into the country and forced into backbreaking labour in order to build a new, completely agrarian, society. Doctors, teachers, students, intellectuals, actors, singers, indeed anyone creative or educated, were systematically executed, as was anyone suspected to be a dissident of any kind. Neither age nor gender were important - men, women and children were all equal victims. Even infants of murdered families were killed - the Khmer Rouge thinking being that infants were of no productive use to keep, but might grow up to take revenge. Many were beaten to death, Khmer Rouge soldiers being told to - wherever possible - conserve precious bullets.

Wandering around Choeung Ek, it's difficult to comprehend what went on here only a little over 30 years ago. Indeed, much of it seems rather serene until you realise that the areas of lowered ground were in fact mass graves, and you take the time to read the signs posted up at various points around the site.

It's all driven chillingly home by a memorial monument in the middle of the site, which houses over 8,000 human skulls, of all ages, which have so far been recovered from the land around it. There are photographs of these in the photo link for our Phnom Penh entry, but I'm not going to show them here.

If Choeung Ek was horrific beyond words, then perhaps even truer hell was to be found at Tuol Sleng Prison, known as S-21. Executions took place at the Killing Fields, but it was at S-21 - a high school converted into a concentration camp - that the most brutal interrogations and inhuman torture rituals were performed.

Like the Nazis before them, the Khmer Rouge took great care in maintaining records and documentation of those they had "processed" - these included biographies and photographs of everyone who passed through these cells. The photos are on display, and seeing the resigned, desolate faces of these men, women and children stare at you from the past is an unnerving experience.

The former head of S-21 - a man known as Duch - has in recent years admitted what went on at the prison and taken responsibility. He remains the only Khmer Rouge leader to have done so. And, given how long it is taking to bring them to justice, he is likely to remain so. All other Khmer Rouge leaders - those that haven't been allowed to cheat justice by dying in the meantime, anyway - maintain the stance that that they had absolutely no idea what went on here or at any of the Killing Fields.

The photos in this entry - and in our larger Phnom Penh photo gallery - are unpleasant. We were unsure about taking them, and we're unsure about including them. But I feel that they add a visual input that mere words, no matter how descriptive, never could.

The final words here, however, should be for the Cambodian people. To have been through this kind of hell and come out the other side with their spirits unbroken is one of the most remarkable stories of any country on Earth. If the world is even the slightest bit fair, this nation and its people should be able to look forward to the brightest and happiest of futures. We truly hope that is the case.