Long live the king

When travelling it helps to keep up to date with the news, however, this is harder than you may think. When we got the bus to Phnom Penh, Cambodia we were unaware that the King’s father had passed away a day earlier. This meant that the day we were travelling became a public holiday (I assume for mourning), so a 5 hour bus journey took 8!

This death may have meant little to you unless you were clued up on Cambodian history, particularly, 1975-79, a period in the deceased guy’s, King Sihanouk, reign. If that name isn’t familiar then maybe the Khmer Rouge will ring a few more bells. If however you, like me, have forgotten/were never taught this piece of modern history I warn you it’s not for the faint hearted.

So our tour of the Cambodian capital began with the Killing Fields, which was quite simply what the name suggests. In 1975, Pol Pot (an educated man from a reasonably prosperous background, leader of the Khmer Rouge) decided that Cambodia’s problem was the inequality between the rich city dwellers with their fancy education and the poor peasants slogging it in the fields. So he turned things around, taking the city dwellers from the cities and putting them into intensive work camps in the fields to supply food and supplies to the Khmer Rouge soldiers. Removing all sophisticated machinery and animals, insisting that un-trained civilians work from dusk till dawn on a couple of bowls of watered down rice porridge a day, many died of exhaustion, starvation or disease. They may well have been the lucky ones.

'Friendship bracelets' left at the site of a mass grave

in rememberence of the suffering of the victims

In his insanity Pol Pot killed all those who were part of the previous government, anyone who held an education including doctors, teachers etc. As his paranoia set in, Pol Pot targeted the remaining family members of those he killed including women and children, in total 25% of Cambodians were murdered. The Killing Fields was one such location of the homicide. Touring this place is instantly sobering as an audio guide leads you around the area where the mass graves were found; hearing methods of execution, stories from people who survived the regime and information of the excavation of the site brought us close to tears.

A remnant by the side of a mass grave.

Bones and clothes are brought back to the surface

by weather erosion of the soil

The other main site of interest regarding this harrowing episode in history was the S21 prison, a former school turned into a confinement and torture facility (all prisoners eventually met their end at the killing fields). Today most of it is still preserved as the Khmer left it, with makeshift cells in what were once classrooms, barbed wire and boarded up corridors, and mock interrogation implements fashioned out of school exercise equipment. Truly ‘the worst school’ ever. Portraits of the prisoners taken upon their arrival by the Khmer were displayed as part of the now museum, faces of children, women, men and foreigners. Only 7 survived.

A torture bed

Prison rules

All this sad history doesn’t show in the behaviour of the people you meet in today’s Cambodia, friendly and eager to help, they make you feel very much welcome. However, we saw the streets fill with people as they awaited the receiving of the body of King Sihanouk into the royal residence for 2 weeks of mourning. The people saw him as an enemy of the Khmer Rouge and a symbol of peace, and this was a time for them to show their appreciation.

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For futher reading: First they killed my father - Loung Ung, is a non-fiction book of a child survivor of the Khmer Rouge.