Fields apart

Copyright Tan and Trev 2005

Fifteen miles away in Choeung Ek are the infamous Killing Fields.
It is here that those who survived the ordeal of S21 were taken for execution. This is where the actual genocide took place. Forced to kneel down at the edge of a pit, the prisoners were bludgeoned from behind and pushed in. Here 11-year-old boys literally executing their own parents with a blow of a shovel to the back of their heads, all for the "capitalist" crimes of speaking French, wearing glasses, or being a teacher.

Over 8985 corpses were exhumed here in 1980. Their skulls are now arranged in stacks (according to age and sex) in a small pagoda built in 1988 to commemorate the dead. The remaining 8000 corpses are left in situ here, amongst the rice paddies and water buffalo.

We walk into the pagoda to find the bones stacked 25 levels high.


Copyright Tan and Trev 2005

The remains were protected on three sides by a thick pane of glass, yet the stacks of skulls at eye-level were strangely open without a fourth containing pane. I watched a stream of people shuffle around the narrow passage and was surprised to find everyone resisting any urge to reach out and touch the bleached stacks. How refreshingly restrained.


Copyright Tan and Trev 2005
Even today nearly two decades after this appalling mass murder took place, pieces of clothing and bone still protrude from the ground. Pieces washed up in the rains, or kicked free by flat-footed tourists are periodically stacked in small piles around streets - to protected them from plodding pedestrians.


Copyright Tan and Trev 2005

Ever since seeing the film 'The Killing Fields' years back I've struggled with answering the difficult question of how on earth an entire nation could literally commit suicide. In Cambodia, there was no dominant ethnic group oppressing a minority, no country wiping out its neighbor in the name of nationalism. Instead, Khmers killed other Khmers, sons killed families, first over political struggle, then over social ideology, and finally over bloodlust and paranoia as ends in themselves. This small Asian nation exterminated as many as two million of its own brothers and sisters. Two out of seven Khmers starved or murdered in less than 45 months: April 17, 1975 to January, 1979.