The Killing Fields and the Genocide Museum
Sombre day today as Sal and I went and visited the haunting Killing Fields memorial and the Tol Seung Prison museum, both very important parts of Cambodia’s tragic recent history.
The Killing Fields, or the Choeung Ek Genocial Center, was really, really well done. I thought they did an amazing job preserving the area in a respectful manner and the audio tour that was provided was phenomenal. It was a bit surreal standing in the middle of quite a pleasant field, sun out and breeze blowing, and listening to how 14,000 people were murdered here. And not bullet-to-the-back of the head executed. Apparently bullets were too expensive for the Khmer Rouge. No they hacked, stabbed, slit, machete, and clubbed their victims to death. Often times they’d half ass it so people would still be alive when they were thrown into the mass graves. Instead the guards would salt them with DDT and then bury them alive. Don’t even get me started on what they did to the kids and babies either. There is not a hell dark enough for those pieces of shit. Anyway I found it a great example of both mans horrific inhumanity to man as well as how to acknowledge and preserve the past while encouraging people to move forward. Great stuff.
Leaving the Killing Fields behind we tuk tuked back into city to see the Tol Seung Prison. Notorious for being the centre of interrogation and torture during the Khmer Rouge reign and where most of the people sent to the Killing Fields came from. Unlike the Fields though I found the ‘museum’ at Tol Seung to be pretty terrible. They’d mainly just left the buildings as they were when the Khmer Rouge were ousted, and their were a couple of poorly done info boards scattered around to ‘explain’ stuff. This is one of THE main historical points of the interest in the country and this is the best they could do? I found it a bit disrespectful really.
Sal and I literally walked around for maybe 30 minutes just randomly looking at buildings before we finally got to our first info room, and then it was all about the American invasion of Okinawa in WW2. Why the FUCK am I reading about this? Who gives a shit?! Where is the info on the prison? Apparently it was part of some info/training exchange with the Okinawa Memorial. I don’t care, it should not be the first goddamn thing that people read when they are walking around a CAMBODIAN memorial. C’mon guys.
Two things I did find interesting was a little min-exhibit on the main leaders of the Khmer Rouge, and a room detailing some of the accounts from survivors of the prison. The former because to this day the 4 or 5 main people in charge maintain they did not know the extent of the genocide they were taking out. They trusted people who went to far apparently. Bullshit, you knew, of course you fucking knew, and you deserve to burn for it. The latter because it highlighted just how bug-shit insane the people running the show were. One poor guy worked for the Khmer Rouge for years, was a card carrying member, did everything they asked of him, and one day two spies arrested him and accused him of working for the CIA. Apparently he didn’t even know what that was. Didn’t stop him being randomly tortured.
All in all the day just really brought home what a bunch of loonie pyschopaths Pol Pot and the rest of his inner cadre were, and just how much evil they perpetrated against their own country men. Sad, sad stuff.