The Killing Fields

On my recent trip to Cambodia, my friends and I chose to visit the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, better known as The Killing Fields. This site is located a short ride outside Phnom Penh and is the most visited of over 300 former Khmer Rouge prisons and killing fields throughout Cambodia. The regime, headed by Pol Pot, marched into Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975 and in just three days emptied the city forcibly and transported all educated people and their families to the countryside. The people were supposedly sent to "collective farms". Pol Pot wanted a self-sufficient country and demanded they increase rice production by threefold. His plan was to have a rural, classless society and built his army with young, uneducated village men… promising them equality.

During the reign, one-fourth of Cambodians were killed… by their own countrymen. At the location we visited, we saw where mass graves of 450 victims were unearthed. Mass executions took place on the site, with as many as 300 people killed a day and thrown into piles as if their lives had no meaning.

The executions weren't carried out with guns or poisonous gas, but with crude instruments such as axes, hoes, and even a killing tree where skulls were smashed against its bark.

We saw the swollen mounds of earth evidencing the 129 mass graves on the site. We walked carefully around bone fragments and scraps of cloth from victims' clothing still lying on the ground. We heard audiotapes of a former prison director confessing to killing over 10,000 people, from a soldier who claimed he had no choice but to enlist in the army, and from one man who was arrested, beaten, imprisoned and managed to survive.

Most of all, we simply walked in silence around the sacred grounds on a hot day and paid our respects to the victims of the brutal crimes of the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979, in disbelief that this had occurred during our lifetimes.