Year Zero

Today has been pretty tough. We've been to the Killing Fields outside of Phnom Penh and then to S-21 Tuol Sleng, the torture and interrogation centre in an old high school in the city centre.
It is a basic recognition of the madness of the years of the Khmer Rouge, and to pay respects to those they killed, not only through the torture and murder of suspect bourgeois, but the immense ruptures Year Zero did to the entire population of Cambodia. Clearing the cities and sending everyone into the country to do agricultural work whether they knew how to or not, food shortages, famine, disease, wholesale control of thought, public denunciation, private reporting back on behaviour, anything suspect was dealt with severe re-education.

I need to start this positively because it was an emotional morning. Here is a beautiful dragon I spied.

  Isn't she stunning?

Something we have learned about war is that it is much more efficient when done on an industrial scale. The Turks managed it against the Armenians, the Nazi's catalogued their ethnic cleansing, and Radovan Karadzic escaped justice by dying before he faced a verdict.  Darfur is another stain on the human population's inability to stop genocide. The Khmer Rouge, freedom fighters against an American puppet state, took control in Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975.

Truckloads of enemies of the state were rounded up and delivered to Cheoung Ek on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.  Blindfolded and forbidden to speak they were lined up next to pre-dug pits and bludgeoned, shot or stabbed and thrown down.

So matter of fact, a human slaughterhouse, murders done with shovels and iron bars, axes, machetes, or shot. This went on for three years, there were more than 300 mass grave sites across Cambodia.

Following the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, the stories of the Khmer Rouge insanity emerged and the Cheoung Ek Genocidal Centre is part of an international collaboration to bring awareness for this story.

The exhumation of those killed here is complete yet everywhere you look scraps of clothing or bones emerge from the alluvial soils after rains. A memorial stupa has been constructed to house the remains of those executed here, each identified by gender and method of execution.

 For more information on the Killing Fields
That beautiful dragon was sitting next to this shady tree.

Most of the nearly 9000 people killed here came from S-21 Tuol Sleng prison.

Where we headed to next via some back roads.
Yoen Soek was our tuk-tuk driver for the morning and was a extremely good guide as well with a wealth of knowledge for Cambodian history.

 Yoen Soek was 13 when the Khmer Rouge took power, his family were forced out of Phnom Penh, so taking us to these places must be hard - though is a necessary part of his work. His sister is still missing and they still hope to one day find her.

Back Roads

Phnom Penh sewage non treatment

A table with a pheeeyew

Rubbish dump

transporting lengths of metal

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng_Genocide_Museum


Its been a hard morning and I am finding this very difficult to process.  Each one of those rigorously photographed and torture derived confessions recorded was a son/daughter/brother/sister/mother/father/friend/colleague to many other people.  How did Cambodia get to the situation where having this terror anyway preferable to any other alternative?  A regime where Barry Manilow is compulsory - sure just like New Zealand? Utter madness. Nearly 3,000,000 dead at the hands of these monsters. Blood will always be on their hands.