The two main things we wanted to see in the city were the S-21 Museum and the killing fields of Choeung Ek.... Before I go on I will give you a brief history because I kind of think that most people do not know about the genocide that took place in Cambodia from 1975 - 1979 that was an event more devastating than the Holocaust. In 1975 a small group of people known as the Khmer Rouge (Khmer is the culturally name of the Cambodian people) took over after the US bombings (affects of the Vietnam War) subsided and ousted the reign of a man named Sihanouk. They evacuated the city of Phnom Penh by saying that the Americans are going to bomb the city and shift all the citizens out to the countryside to work the rice fields to start a communist country. They separated parents from children, wives from husbands, and sisters from brothers to place them in cooperatives around the country where they worked to produce large amounts of rice for 12 - 14 hours a day (basically slaves) to be exported to other countries for the next 4 years. The people were given very little to eat and no medicine so disease and starvation spread rapidly and people quickly started to die off because they could not survive the conditions. Any business person, professor or person with any education was taken to the killing fields to be executed by the truckload (300/day). The people were either decapitated, shot, or hung to die. Once they thought the people were dead they would pour toxic chemicals over them to be sure and start the piles of bodies on fire to hide the evidence. They also used landmines to stop people from leaving certain areas which caused the people to die or lose limbs years after the end of the genocide. Over 1.7 million people died over those 3 years and the rouge was finally taken down in January 1979 with the help of the Vietnamese government. This left hundreds of thousands of children orphaned and thousands of women pregnant because they had been raped by soldiers. Due to this the population of Vietnam today is made of over 50% of people being younger than 18 years old.
The Killing Fields was an area where the people were executed for 4 years and today they continue to excavate the grounds where we walked to find skeletons. It was very eery and somber walking through those fields. The S-21 museum is a school that was turned into a Prison during the rouge to torture women and men. The museum had one exhibit that described the history and then a large exhibit of just photos of the people and the bodies. They also had stories and photos of those who survived the genocide who watched their loved ones die and so many other forms of torture. I thought one of the most interesting exhibits was the photos and story of a Swedish man who was let into the country during the genocide because he thought he politically supported the Khmer Rouge. The Rouge hid the genocide so well he thought they were just working very hard to improve the economics of the country. He did a documentation about his thoughts during his travels and his thoughts now about what really was happening to those people. It was just something that the rest of the world knew about and because it was a so recent many of the people in the streets have lived to tell their stories so the documentation is abundant. (L: picture of excavated skeletons, M: fields where excavation has occurred, R: room in museum where piles of clothes lay from people who were killed)
I apologize if this blog is a bit heavy but I actually left out a lot.... I think my head was spinning after today. It is really hard to imagine, but you see the poverty level everywhere and the children who constantly walk with you along the streets begging for money and trying to hold your hand so it makes it very real. All I wanted to do was pick the children up to bring them somewhere safe but I couldn't. The country is still very corrupt and we ran into a couple bad/scary situations with people and heard of others because people are just trying to survive. Nothing can describe it.... In saying that though there are still tons of tourists in all the major cities with areas of posh French cafes and beautiful resort golf courses, so tourism is definitely improving some of the economic damage caused by the genocide.
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