Khmer Rouge

We had breakfast at the same place again today and it was once again incredible.

Anytime you leave your hotel or a restaurant you get bombarded by tuk tuk drivers trying to take you somewhere. The drivers are always so loud and don't care that you aren't interested they still shout in loud happy voices things like "Want to go to the Killing Fields?", their tone doesn't seem to match where they want to take you.

In order to understand what the killing fields are you need to understand some Cambodian history and here is a brief summary of what I learned.

In 1975, Cambodia's government was plagued by corruption and incompetence. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army, consisting of teenage peasant guerrillas, marched into Phnom Penh and seized control of Cambodia.

Once in power, Pol Pot began a radical experiment to create an agrarian utopia. Capitalism, Western culture, city life, religion, and all foreign influences were to be extinguished in favor of an extreme form of peasant Communism.

All of Cambodia's cities were then forcibly evacuated. Millions of Cambodians accustomed to city life were forced into slave labor where they began dying from overwork, malnutrition and disease.

Throughout Cambodia, deadly purges were conducted to eliminate remnants of the "old society" - the educated, the wealthy, monks, police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and former government officials were all killed.

On December 25, 1978, Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia seeking to end Khmer Rouge border attacks. On January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell and Pol Pot was deposed. The Vietnamese then installed a puppet government consisting of Khmer Rouge defectors.

The Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, a mass grave of over 20,000 people was discovered in 1980, was one of the first proofs to the outside world of what had occurred during Pol Pot's regime.

After reading about The Killing Fields I decided that it wasn't a place I wanted to visit. There are thousands of skulls and other bones all lined up on the ground and on display. Instead we opted to go to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which is a former school turned into prison by the Khmer Rouge and is now a museum. Nearly 20,000 people were imprisoned here and almost all of them were taken to The Killing Fields where they were either shot to bludgeoned to death. Photos of all of the prisoners were taken and records were kept of what happened to people.

Classrooms were turned into prison cells.

It is absolutely terrible the things that some people do to others.

See the rest of today's pictures in the slideshow below: