Seeing the busy streets of Phnom Penh today, its hard to believe how the Khmer Rouge emptied the city of its whole population
after 'liberating' the city on April 17th 1975. Virtually everyone was forced to leave as the KR's experiment of returning
what they renamed Kampuchea, to 'Year Zero' began. The population of Phnom Penh and other towns were forced to flee to the
countryside and work on the land.
In the four and a half year period that followed, an estimated 1-2 million people died. Many murdered, whilst others
died of starvation, disease and malnutrition. Others simply vanished - never to be heard of again.
Two 'monuments' remain in Phnom Penh which go some way to respecting the memories of the babies, children, women and
men who lost their lives. Tuol Sleng, once a school, was taken over by the KR and used as a prison and torture centre and
is now a genocide museum. Of the 17,000 people that passed through its gates, only seven remained when it was liberated by
the Vietnamese in 1979. Bodies littered the gardens and some were still strapped to the beds where they were tortured just
hours before.
The KR were surprisingly keen to record in pictures every single person who entered the walls and many of the original
photographs are exhibited. Babies, children barely old enough to sit unaided, young boys and girls and adults. They sat looking
into the lense - frightened, bewildered, confused. Some pictures suggest a flicker of defiance maybe but this is a place
where they came to die, often in the most brutal fashion, so scarce was ammunition.
Today Cambodians and visitors from all over the world come to bear witness to mans inhumanity to man. Its a
moving, quiet place that perhaps raises more questions than it answers.
Most people are by now familiar with the Killing Fields after seeing or hearing of the marvellous film of the same name.
There are dozens of them all over Cambodia, where hundreds of thousands met their fate. Drowned, beaten and bludgeoned to
death, babies snatched from their mothers and beaten against trees or simply ripped apart by hand. Buried in mass graves,
stripped of their dignity, starving, weak, frail - many possibly saw death as a relief given the circumstances and terror
of their existence.
The fields closest to Phnom Penh can be found 17 kilometres away in
a quiet place set amongst farmlands. A monument to those who lost their lives was built and contains the skulls of several
hundred people. Visitors can see where people were buried and many mass graves still remain untouched to this day, fragments
of clothing protruding from the soil.
Everyone has a story to tell here. Many over thirty years old have vivid memories of those times and can remember
the KR, some were members of the Khmer Rouge themselves and most have lost one or both parents, sisters, brothers, sons,
daughters and members of their extended family. No individual seems untouched in some way or another. Hard to tell exactly
how it affects people, both individually and collectively - and stranger still perhaps that many Cambodians make a living
of sorts out of the tourist industry that is so fascinated by the terror experienced here.
And still... in central Africa today, the same things still happen as murderous ethnic cleansing continues. The world
does little or nothing of any great importance, as it did almost thirty years ago in Cambodia.
Have we learned anything or do we only continue to respond where massive oil reserves spur us into action?
For those interested in reading and finding out more about Cambodia, there are numerous books and survivors stories or
you could log on to a website set up by The Documentation Centre of Cambodia at the following address. http://www.bigpond.com.kh/users/dccam.genocide
