The Killing Fields
In the four years that it ruled over Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge was responsible for the deaths of an estimated two million people. Mass graves were still being discovered years after the fall of the regime, such was their disregard for humanity. To date, over 20,000 burial sites have been identified; the United Nations have declared these as the sites of multiple crimes against humanity. The people of Cambodia simply call them the Killing Fields.
The Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), better known the world over as the Khmer Rouge, rose to power following years of civil war in Cambodia. They had promised peace and stability to a nation which craved an end to that turbulent time. The people of Phnom Penh flocked to the streets to welcome the Khmer Rouge soldiers as they took control of the city in April 1975, effectively bringing to an end a civil war which had ravaged the country for more than eight years. But the promised peace never came. Instead, the population was subjected to a brutal period of social engineering by the communists, led by the now notorious Pol Pot. Money, private property, religion, schools, and hospitals were quickly outlawed. Hundreds of thousands of city-dwellers were forcibly resettled to communal farms in the countryside as the regime attempted to create a utopian society based on agriculture. Without any agricultural knowledge to guide them, people of all ages were forced to work incredibly long days, every day, performing back-breaking but largely fruitless tasks.
"Life was so hard," Oung recalled. An ox-cart since the days of the Khmer Rouge, recalls, "We were forced to work all day, under the blazing sun. Everyone suffered terribly".
Soon, entire communities were dying from disease, starvation, or exhaustion. And as the crops failed, the leadership of the Khmer Rouge became increasingly paranoid. Anyone suspected of being a threat to the revolutionary movement was sent to so-called "special centres" for interrogation, torture and, in almost every case, execution. Often something as minor as wearing glasses, seen as a sign of being one of the intellectuals who were viewed as enemies of the regime, could be enough to raise suspicion to be sent to one of these special centres. The most notorious of these was known as Security Prison S-21, a secondary school building converted into a detention centre.
Today, that school-turned-prison remains exactly as it was following the eventual fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, a shocking reminder of the brutality that took place under its roof. An old metal bed, to which victims were chained and subjected to unspeakable suffering, stands in the centre of a classroom once alive to the sounds of chattering children. In the unnerving silence of the room, it is hard not to imagine the screams of agony which must have echoed off its bare walls, as unfortunate souls were tortured until they provided the required confession, followed by execution, which brought them peace at last.
Most of the victims of Security Prison S-21 were buried in mass graves within a nearby orchard known as Choeung Ek. To date, nearly 9000 bodies have been recovered from what would have otherwise been an unremarkable field. Their skulls lie piled to the ceiling of a giant memorial, built on the grounds in memory of their suffering. But so many more remain entombed in the mud of the old orchard. Most were not subject to torture, a process seen as too labour intensive for some members of the Khmer Rouge. Instead sent entire communities directly to the killing fields, just in case one or two of them might have thoughts of rising up against their oppressors. These included children, beaten to death against a tree as they were deemed unworthy of the cost of a bullet. The regime's inhumanity appeared to have no limits. But, within four years, the social exercise failed and the Khmer Rouge were overthrown by forces from neighbouring Vietnam. Since then, successive generations of Cambodians have wondered with despair at how such a brutal regime was able to impose so much brutality on its own people.
It is a question we should all ask ourselves. It is far too easy to look back on history with the assumption that the sins of the past will never happen again — they absolutely can. The sad reality is that, when left unchecked, humanity can be a ruthless species capable of unspeakable acts of violence. Much of the horrors inflicted by the Khmer Rouge were at the hands of ordinary people who, swept up in the charisma of the regime's leadership, allowed themselves to follow that leadership into violence. This is why, as a society, we must remain constantly vigilant. We are living through an age of division. For vast numbers of people all over the world, the concepts of right and wrong seem to be taking a back seat to tribal allegiances, where winning, at any cost, is more important than the causes being fought over. But when we forgive the sins of those in power, simply because they say the things we want to hear, we allow evil to take root. Surely we owe it to the poor souls who met their end in the Killing Fields of Cambodia never to let that to happen again?
