** This one’s not funny or entertaining, but it needed to be written. This is not for the faint of heart. **
2 million people. That’s more than the populations of Washington DC, Atlanta, Miami, and San Diego combined. It’s 1/4 of the total population of Cambodia in 1975. It’s also the number of people that were imprisoned, tortured, and killed during the Cambodian Genocide under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
I am sure that we learned about the Khmer Rouge in school, but I probably paid enough attention to pass the tests and then it all slipped into the recesses of my memory, along with how to properly do long division and what mitochondria do. During a recent visit to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I went on a tour that included the S-21 and the Killing Fields, and what I learned was horrific in a way that I can’t fully describe in words.
 |
The high school at Tuol Sleng that was turned into the S-21 prison. You can see the barbed wire on the building. |
The short version is that Pol Pot was a communist leader who incited the uneducated laboring class, mostly farmers, to revolt against the Cambodian military dictatorship in 1975. Pol Pot’s vision was to make Cambodia a self-sustaining country based on agriculture. In pursuit of that vision, educators, merchant, bankers, and other classes of the ‘bourgeoisie’ were imprisoned. In keeping with the anti-intellectual philosophy of the Khmer Rouge, many schools were turned into prisons, including the school at Tuol Sleng, which was renamed S-21 and became one of the most well-known prisons during the Cambodian Genocide. In order to provide food for the military, the Khmer Rouge moved city dwellers to rural areas and forced them to become farmers. The fact that the urban population had no knowledge of or experience with farming, combined with forced work for as much as 12 hours per day, helped lead to widespread famine among the working class.
 |
The monument at the Killing Fields. If you zoom in, you can see piles of human skulls recovered from the graves. |
Anyone who spoke out against the government or even complained about the situation was sent for re-education, often by being arrested and removed in the middle of the night. People who were sent for re-education were almost never seen again; the few exceptions were prisoners who were freed at the end of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, from whom a lot of the inner workings of the prison were learned. As people n the villages starved to death or disappeared, many found themselves without their husbands or wives. The government started to arrange marriages between surviving spouses with the expectation that they would procreate to continue building a workforce. Anyone who protested the arrangement would be sent for re-education. Once one person disappeared, the rest of the village quickly fell in line.
 |
The wooden frame was originally built for students to climb ropes for athletics. When the school was turned into a prison, it became an instrument of torture. Prisoners would have their wrists bound behind them (see the mannequin), and the rope would be run through the pulley at the top. The rope would be pulled by the prison guard, lifting the prisoner off the ground, dislocating or destroying the shoulder. The pots were for an even worse purpose. |
At one point, the Khmer Rouge government contacted Cambodian expatriates around the world to tell them to come back to Cambodia to help with the new country. Since communication by the general population was limited, the expats did not know what was going on back home. Many of them returned to their homeland, hoping to try to help improve the lives of their people, only to be arrested and sent to prison as soon as they got off the plane.
After being held and tortured at S-21 for weeks or months, anyone who survived would eventually find themselves blindfolded, arms bound behind their backs, and sent to the killing fields. The killing fields were the sites of mass graves around Cambodia where enemies of the state were executed without a trial. To be held at one of the prisons meant that you were guilty, execution was simply the next step of your punishment. In all, over 20,000 mass graves have been found, including several at the killing fields. Some of the graves hold over 150 bodies, many skeletons still showing signs of torture. The soldiers, many of whom were boys barely in their teens, were told that any sign of compassion or mercy for the enemy would be punished, while excess brutality would be commended and rewarded. As a result, the soldiers got creative with their execution methods. Mothers, waiting for their own execution, were forced to watch their child get killed. Some of them died of heart attacks while watching their children get tortured, indirectly saving themselves from a similar fate.
 |
Photos of the mass graves uncovered at the killing fields. |
The stories of torture that occurred at S-21 and at the Killing Fields are too horrific to describe here. Suffice it to say that I don’t think that my mind was properly able to wrap itself around what humans are able to do to each other. Fortunately, the Cambodian government has embraced the horrors of their history and turned both S-21 and the Killing Fields into a museum that both serves to remind us of their history and to raise funds for survivors. Piles of skulls are a terrible sight to see, but if it can help us as humans to never do that again, then the sight is worth it.
** I have deliberately skipped going into detail about the torture inflicted upon the prisoners since they are thoroughly documented online. If you are interested, here are a few links: 1, 2, and 3.
