The Killing Fields and Toul Sleng Genocide Museum

Choeung Ek Memorial (The Killing Fields) and Toul Sleng Genocide Museum should be a mandatory visit for any traveller going to Cambodia. It is a gut-wrenching experience that brings home just how savage the Khmer Rouge were under the leadership of Pol Pot, how much damage they did to Cambodia, and how recent the experience is.

The Killing Fields were created and used from 1975-1979 by the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot evacuated all the cities in Cambodia, forcing people into the villages across the country to work farms, and the old, sick or educated were all executed. Over 3 million people were executed, starved or died of sickness during this time. The Choeung Ek Memorial is one of 343 killing fields across Cambodia, the closest to the capital. The killing Fields contain the mass graves of an estimated 17 000 people, although only 9000 remains have been dug up. Some mass graves have not yet been disinterred, and every heavy rains more skulls are exposed – we saw many bones and skulls half exposed in the path from yesterday’s rain. The skulls have been placed in a monument to remember the people, with sixteen levels of skulls divided into age and sex (they have no other identification). The killings were brutal beyond belief – babies were held by the feet and slammed head first into ‘killing trees’ (of which we saw several) or thrown into the sky and speared with bayonets.

S-21, or as it is called now Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, used to be a primary school before it was turned into a concentration camp. 17000 prisoners were interrogated and tortured there (they took photos of all of them which were on display). Prisoners were beaten and raped and tortured, were drowned, had their skin peeled off while alive, were forced to live in their own faeces, had their fingernails pulled out, had their nipples clamped and scorpions put on them, had limbs cut off with shovels, had their livers cut out and eaten in front of them, were hung by their ankles above faeces, and so on. Only 21 prisoners survived until the Khmer Rouge was defeated.