The Killing Fields 🇰🇭

On 17th April 1975, following five years of civil war, the Khmer Rouge army of Pol Pot liberated Phnom Penh and marched into the city to cheering crowds and waving flags. He promised the people a new vision and a new Cambodia.

Within 4 days most of the towns and cities across the country were deserted.

The Khmer Rouge, previously known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea (or CPK), set up a government which they called ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ (DK). Whilst they didn’t directly identify themselves as communists, they held extreme communist beliefs, and within hours of taking power had started to implement their far reaching socialist programmes. The people given most power were the rural, illiterate Cambodians who had fought alongside the Khmer Rouge during the civil war.

City dwellers were forcibly moved into rural areas, and put to work on the land. These former city dwellers were known as ‘new people’ and were particularly badly treated. The Khmer Rouge also put in place measures to control all information, they restricted free speech, forbade all religious activities and controlled access to food and information.

Intellectuals, merchants, bureaucrats, members of religious groups and anyone suspected of disagreeing with the party (which became known as Anker, which translates as ‘the organisation’) were killed. Millions of others were relocated, sent into forced labour, starved and tortured. Even wearing spectacles singled you out as an ‘academic’. Paradoxically, Pol Pol and his clique were all well educated, clearly the rules that applied to the people didn’t apply to the party elite (one of them can clearly be seen in old photographs wearing spectacles).

Later, DK’s ideology became openly racist. Ethnic minorities in Cambodia were hunted down and expelled or massacred. Party members accused of treason were hunted down and ‘removed’ and anyone suspected of any kind of cooperation with the state’s enemies suffered and countless thousands were killed.

In Phnom Penh there was a school named Tuol Svay Prey High School in the southern reaches of the city. In 1975 it was taken over by Pol Pot’s security services and turned into a prison known as Security Prison 21 (S-21). This soon became the centre in Cambodia for detention, torture and ultimately execution.

Today it is known as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a memorial to those who perished and testament to the terrible crimes of the Khmer Rouge.

Everybody who entered S-21 was photographed, like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records. Sometimes they were photographed again after they had been tortured. Around the museum now are countless photographs of men and women, boys and girls, from a few years old to the elderly. In order to prevent any ‘revenge’ attacks, the families of those arrested, spanning multiple generations, were also detained. The one thing that virtually all of these people have in common is that they were ultimately executed. Only a handful of detainees ever walked out of S-21 alive.

Classrooms were turned into detention cells. Some mass cells had shackles chained to the floor, used to shackle the ankles of prisoners. Other classrooms were divided into single cells, either with rough wooden or brick walls, again with chains to shackle prisoners, often 2 in a cell no more than 6 feet by 2-3 feet wide. Other rooms were used as torture rooms some with iron beds used to chain prisoners to, some with other torture implements such as water boarding racks. Outside, apparatus once used by children for PE and exercise were used for torture, prisoners being tied upside down and hauled up until they blacked out. They were then revived by dumping their heads in vats of foul water containing excrement and other disgusting substances and the cycle continued. 

All this to force prisoners into making false statements indicating their ‘guilt’. They had to admit allegiance to the CIA or the KGB, organisations that many of these people had never heard of, or other crimes that could include religious practices, treason, or a multitude of other things. Confessions were kept, and each prisoner had their own ‘biography’, some of which ran to hundreds of pages.

Prisoners were kept alive until they had ‘confessed’ to the satisfaction of the cadres (the Khmer Rouge activists and workers). There were even medics to make sure they didn’t die under torture. Then they were bound and blindfolded and taken from S-21 in vans, transported fifteen kilometres outside the city to a place called Choeng Ek, where they were executed.

Choeng Ek is the place now known as the Killing Fields.

Vans would arrive at night. At first two or three times a month. Later they would arrive daily. Prisoners would be taken from the van, and in the early days they would be taken out to the edge of a large pit and then bludgeoned to death with bamboo sticks or old farming tools such as hoes and shovels. They did this as bullets were expensive and they were short of ammunition. Sometimes they would cut their throats (with the saw like edge of sugar palm leaf stems) to stop them screaming. They also played revolutionary music from speakers hanging in a tree to drown the sounds of the the gruesome goings on so that the sounds could not be heard by other prisoners or any locals within earshot.

Later, as the number grew, there were too many people to execute in a single night, so they were detained in a dark shed with no windows until the next day when they would be taken to their deaths. At the peak, up to 100 prisoners a day were taken from S-21 to Choeng Ek for execution.