Khmer Rouge

The Khmer Rouge was in power in Cambodia from 1975 - 1979 and was lead by a zealous dictator named Pol Pot.  Khmer Rouge means "Red Khmers" - Red meaning Communist and Khmer essentially meaning Cambodian (the Khmers are the majority ethnic group here).  Pol Pot wanted a complete overhaul of the Cambodian way of life and succeeded in closing down all currency, education, hospitals, arts organizations, businesses, and state run services turning Cambodia - practically overnight - into an agrarian based society where people were occupied in one thing and one thing only:  growing rice.  The entire city of Phnom Penh was emptied over the course of three days and its citizens were marched to work camps where many died due to starvation and lack of medical services while others were murdered by the Khmer Rouge.

Peasants were preferred over educated middle and upper classes.  Pol Pot felt that the upper and middle classes could not adapt to the Communist way of life and therefore ordered much of the Cambodian population killed in a genocide that eventually killed over three million people. 

Today I visited Tuol Sleng - also known as S-21, the secret prison where thousands of Cambodian people were held, tortured, made to give false confessions, and then shipped to Choeung Ek - the Killing Fields, where they were methodically killed and thrown into mass graves.  I also visited the Killing Fields today.  

Please research the Khmer Rouge to find out more about this sad page in history.  I know many people (myself included) who were alive when this happened.  Thinking that it happened in our lifetimes makes it seem so very close.

My guide at the prison was a woman who was about 47.  She was 10 when the Khmer Rouge took power and she remembers having to go work in a camp.  She lost many members of her family including several siblings (my dear sisters...can you imagine?) and kept repeating over and over again, "it's just so sad."  Yes indeed.  There were only 7 survivors of the prison when Vietnam liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge.  I got to meet two of them today.  They have both written their autobiographies and make their living selling their books to tourists and answering questions at the prisons.  I got my picture taken with my guide and with both of these brave men.  My guide's mother had recently died and she said she was honoring her mother by wearing a hat, but you can see in the picture that she took her hat off for the picture.  Her father was killed by the Khmer Rouge.  

The prison was originally a high school.  It had three levels of cells.  First level, a classroom was divided into two cells (I think that is right).  The most "important" prisoners where kept here...prisoners with the most political ties.  The second level prisoners were in classrooms that were shoddily divided into 11 cells.  These were on the second floors of the high school (which had more than one building).  The reason they were divided into 11 cells was so the doorways of the prisons would not face another prisoner's doorway.  Prisoners on floors one and two never saw or heard other prisoners.  Talking, tapping, or any other methods of communication were strictly prohibited.  Prisoners on the third floor were shackled together in classrooms with as many as 60 prisoners shackled together in one room. Conditions were horrible, as you can imagine, but the prisoners were never kept in the prison long.  Maybe a few days and then it was off to the Killing Fields.  

The ride to the Killing Fields is a 16 km very bumpy tuk tuk ride past the garment factory district and past the trash heaps of Phnom Penh which were a ways off the road, but which Sok pointed out to me.   Choeung Ek is only one of hundreds of killing fields that covered Cambodia during the reign of the Khmer Rouge.  Many have not even been found yet because live landmines still dot the countryside.  I took a very well done audio tour of Choeung Ek.  The killing fields left me spent and I had Sok drive me home right afterward instead of visiting Wat Phnom as I had originally intended.  The guides encouraged us to take pictures.  Documenting these crimes is one way to educated people to try to ensure that genocides don't happen again, but as we know, there have been genocides since the Khmer Rouge and there probably will be more.

On a lighter note, in about 10 minutes I'm riding my rental bike to Greg's office and then to a meetup to meet some of his friends and associates here.  Dinner will follow.  It will be nice to spend some happy time with friends.  And the thought of riding my bike if Phnom Penh's traffic makes my blood fairly thrum with anticipation.