Killing Field tourist: Glimpsing Cambodia's bloody past

A visitor to Choeung Ek, Cambodia's most infamous Killing Field, learns about the Khmer Rouge's murderous past in graphic detail

By Simon Roughneen 18 May, 2011

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A Buddhist stupa towers over the site and is usually the first stop for visitors passing through Cheoung Ek, though there is competition from the souvenir shop to the left of the entrance. During the Khmer Rouge era, Pol Pot sought to eliminate all forms of religion and murdered most of the country's monks and religious minorities.

Inside the stupa lie the skulls of around 8,000 of the people murdered at Cheoung Ek. Many were killed by a blow to the back of the head, which accounts for the number of shattered skulls. Most of the remains are behind glass, but lower down some can be touched. Those killed at the site were first interrogated and tortured at S-21, a school in Phnom Penh.

After rain washes away topsoil, human bones and teeth often protrude through the ground at Cheoung Ek. Thousands of skeletons remain in the ground here. The site was run by a Khmer Rouge cadre called Comrade Duch, so far the only person convicted of crimes committed during the Pol Pot era.

Babies and young children were not spared the barbarous madness that took hold in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Many were killed by being thrown against this tree. When the Khmer Rouge regime fell in 1979, people returning to Cheoung Ek found human blood and tissue tangled in the bark.

Complaints about the commercialization of Cheoung Ek first emerged in 2005. This bench on the walkway to the rear of the site carries an advertisement for one of Cambodia's well-known beer brands. Others say that commercialization is fine, so long as the money is used to help some of the victims and survivors of the Khmer Rouge.

According to the text on the US$2 entrance ticket, some of the proceeds from the 300-400 visitors per day goes to a charity called the Sun Fund, which helps send students on scholarship to Japan. The charity is linked to the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP), whose insignia is seen all over the country, including here at the side-road leading into Cheoung Ek.

From March 28-30, Comrade Duch appealed the sentence handed down to him last year, claiming that he cannot be held accountable for the murders at Cheoung Ek. He says had he not done so the Khmer Rouge leaders would have killed him. Pictured is the Khmer Rouge tribunal building, where the recent hearings took place.

The four main surviving Khmer Rouge leaders are due to go on trial later this year, with Duch again likely to be a key witness. He may say that he was forced by the four accused to torture detainees on waterboarding devices such as this one, pictured at S-21, which is now a museum in Phnom Penh.

This is the view from inside the holding cell area at S-21. Most of those who passed through S-21 were kept for a few days of questioning and torture, before being convoyed out at night to Cheoung Ek, blindfolded and terrified. Duch himself participated in the nocturnal bloodletting, often running a generator to drown out the cries and death throes of the victims.

In the absence of justice or compensation, some Cambodians are seeking other ways to deal with the past. "Breaking the Silence" is a sparse, Beckett-like dramatization of real-life accounts of Khmer Rouge rule, after which audience members are invited to come on stage and share their own stories of life under the brutal Communist dictatorship.

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From 1975 to 1979 an estimated 1.4 million Cambodians were killed under the despotic rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

The executions took place on what have become known as Cambodia's Killing Fields. The best known of these is Choeung Ek, 17 kilometers from the center of Phnom Penh. Here, an estimated 17,000 men, women and children were butchered by the Khmer Rouge.

It is a suitably grim and eerie memorial to those who died, an Auschwitz-Birkenau for Asia.

Choeung Ek is run by Japanese company JC Royal, which pays the Cambodian Government an annual US$15,000 levy for the site.

But for the five million survivors of the Khmer Rouge era there's little positive to come out of that tragic period. Many live on less than US$1 per day, and are still waiting to see the perpetrators behind Cambodia's darkest era punished.

Click through the gallery above for a virtual tour of Choeung Ek.

Simon Roughneen has reported from Pakistan, Haiti, Kosovo, the Middle East and from various countries in Africa. He is currently covering southeast Asia. Visit his website simonroughneen.co m or follow him on twitter @simonroughneen

Killing Field tourist: Glimpsing Cambodia's bloody past

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