Title: "The Killing Fields"
About: Travel and Tourism Cambodia

There are two things that lure tourists to Cambodia: the temples at Angkor Wat and that stretch of fields known as Choeung Ek or the “Killing Fields.”

The Background

It was April 17th of the year 1975 when the communist guerilla group known as the Khmer Rouge was led by Pol Pot and took over the nation’s capital of Phnom Penh. City dwellers were forced into countryside labor camps where they were either maimed for life or killed. Institutions, learning, individuality and commerce were banned. Religion, schools, and families were split apart and broken. Each day was composed of 12-14 hours of hard labor and starvation. People subsisted on just one watery bowl of soup with a few grains of rice mixed in.

Cambodia’s darkest years saw the death of millions of people killed because they either didn’t work hard enough, they were educated, they were from a different ethnic group, felt sadness when family members were taken away, or when their captors simply didn’t like them. Most of these people were brought to and killed at Choeung Ek which is located just nine miles out of Phnom Penh.

Bullets, at that time, were too precious to use for executions. Axes, knives and bamboo sticks were far more common. As for children, their murderers simply battered them against trees.

In that reign of fear and terror, the Cambodians were forced to pledge total allegiance to Angka, the Khmer Rouge government.

In the liberation of Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese, 600,000 Cambodians fled to the border camps of Thailand leaving behind about ten million land mines planted by the Khmer Rouge.

The year 1991 saw the installation of the United Nations’ largest peace keeping mission in Cambodia to ensure free and fair elections after the withdrawal of the Vietnamese troops. Cambodia was ripped apart during the Khmer Rouge years leaving the country the daunting task of physical, mental, and economic recovery.


The Killing Fields Today

Eight thousand human skulls in the glass shrine still stun visitors into silence. The wide green pasture outside the museum occasionally reveals human bones unearthed by heavy rains. It has been some years since the bloody reign of the Khmer Rouge yet the horror of their atrocities remain palpable at Choeung Ek.

Ironically, it is this very same horror that draws tourists to Cambodia with the result of money being slowly pumped into Cambodia’s shaky economy.

"Tourism has increased by 40 percent every year since 1998," says Chhieng Pich, economic counselor at the Cambodian embassy in Washington, D.C. "Nearly all tourists that visit Cambodia will go see Angkor Wat. Over 30 percent will visit the killing fields, too."

A soccer-field-sized area surrounded by farmland, the killing fields contain mass graves, slightly sunken, for perhaps 20,000 Cambodians, many of whom were tortured before being killed. The bordering trees held nooses for hangings.
 

A memorial building stands in the center of the killing fields. Many of the skulls inside were pulled from the mass graves.

Hundreds of Cambodians now make a living by guiding visitors through the killing fields and other genocide-related sites. Many guides tell harrowing personal stories of how they survived the Khmer Rouge, often by becoming refugees in Thailand.


Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide

Another notorious site is the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide in Phnom Penh. Once a high school, Tuol Sleng became a torture camp, prison and execution center.

Today the place’s facade shows none of the horrors it once saw during the Khmer Rouge days. With gently waving palm trees and grass lawns, from the outside, Tuol Sleng could be a school anywhere in the world. But it is when visitors go inside the museum where the illusion stops and the bloody history of the country is once again brought to the fore. Weapons of torture, skulls, bloodstains and photographs of thousands of people who were murdered are exhibited inside the museum’s walls. Poignant reminders of a past that proves not all humans have humanity.

The scene just outside is also heartrending. Amputees of all ages beg near refreshment and souvenir stands where tourists congregate. The Khmer Rouge may have long gone, but many of the land mines they laid are still killing and maiming.






 

Visit Cambodia today!  A walk down culture and history..