The Killing Fields

Fifteen kilometers southwest of Phnom Penh lies the killing fields of Cheung Ek, where most prisoners from S21 where taken to be executed and buried in mass graves.

Today, these Killing Fields serve as a Genocide Museum, and a memorial to the some 17,000 people who died here between 1975 and 1979.

Upon entering the complex the visitor comes first to the ivory tower, which contains 9,000 of the human skulls which were recovered from excavations on the site in 1980. Many of the sulls bear grotesque testament to the brutality with which the victims were treated in their final moments.

Further into the complex the ground is littered with pits, some of which are fenced off and marked as mass graves.  It is not difficult to get a sense of the enormity of what happened here.  To this day, the earth here gives up its secrets.  The paths between the pits, being eroded by the footfall of tourists, often give up chilling relics from the past: clothes, teeth & bone fragments from victims whose remains went undiscovered in the excavations of 1980.

There is death in this place.