Outline of Cambodia, filled-in with human skulls and bones from the massacres.
Outline of Cambodia, filled-in with human skulls and bones from the massacres.
[Please note: parents should preview this page before allowing pre-teens access. Some of the images are pretty disturbing.]
For those who remember the film by this name, the experience is unforgettable. This topic is definitely one for the "Despair" part of the "Surprise, Delight, Despair" page. For half a decade, not terribly long ago, a truly evil man born Saloth Sar, murdered over three million Cambodians in a misanthropic (to put it mildly) attempt to bring Maoist ideals and "agrarian-based self-sufficiency" (translation: a nation of pre-mechanized farmers, like around the 1800s before the Industrial Era) to the country. "Saloth Sar" you may know as "Pol Pot", and the regime the Khmer Rouge (Red Khmer in French; the Khmers are indigenous Cambodians).
His "vision" was to start the clock over for the country. The result of the efforts was to be called "Year Zero". Time would start over. Like Hitler's Germany, when news of the genocide began to reach the outside world, people could not believe it. Literally. The stories were so horrific as to be thought in-credible. The murders continued for nearly five years. Pol Pot was never made to pay for the crimes against humanity in Cambodian genocide; he died in the jungle just a couple of years ago. There is some speculation that it was suicide.
We visited two sites from Pol Pot's Cambodia: the "Killing Fields" (Cheoung Ek Genocide Center), site of mass graves of men, women and children; and "S21", a prison for Cambodian people prior to their murders. Vacations are supposed to be fun, and in general ours has been, but this was an important, somber thing to see.
Theses
holes contained hundreds of bodies, each.
Signs
mark each location. Some include a description like "women and
children, mostly naked"
These
bones just lay on the ground at the sight. Perhaps they're just
animal bones; but probably not.
Skulls,
categories by gender and age. Many were killed by blows to the head
with a steel rod. It saved bullets.
Teeth
missing from broken jaws
The
two images at left are just samples from a monument two stories high
full of skulls. And most of the graves haven't been excavated
Look like a high school? It was a high school. The Khmer Rouge turned
it into the notorious S21 prison. 20,000+ people were processed through it
all carefully catalogued and photographed. Men, women, children arrested for
some real or imagined offense or slight. There are walls covered with their
thousands and thousands of mug shots. They were kept in unbelievably inhumane
conditions, then taken out to the Killing Fields to be finished off. Only
7 people who came here made it out alive - all were sculptors and painters
who could turn out images of Pol Pot.
In retrospect, it's probably better that we saw the Killing Fields (which were far outside town) prior to visiting the prison from which the victims had been sent. To have seen the prison first may have been too much to bear. We were both nauseated anyway. It's hard to fathom such cruelty — in the name of anything. It may be the most disgusting thing we've ever seen. Makes the Taliban look like a bunch of Sunday School teachers. The Khmer Rouge managed to kill about 2-3 million people - 20-30% of the population, a far higher percentage of the population than Hitler.
The photos speak for themselves (with a little help from captions). "Viewer discretion advised".
Classrooms
converted to cells.
Barbed
wire installed to keep prisoners from suicide
Interrogation
cell. Prisoners were tortured until they confessed to "crimes" they
did not commit.
Painting
from a prisoner showing how prisoners were shackled and "stored".
Example
of the leg irons depicted in the painting
Young
prisoner - one of hundreds of pictures at the S21 museum
Young
prisoner - one of hundreds of pictures at the S21 museum
There are some additional photos here.