Killing Fields.

While in Phnom Penh, I wanted to check out the Tuol Seung Museum (bottom pix) and the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek (top), two grim monuments to Cambodia's recent past.

I'd been reading about the rise of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, a piece of history that I'd had only a fleeting knowledge of prior to my arrival in Cambodia, and difficult to avoid once I was here. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, and for the next four years performed a radical attempt to erase the past and start a new society. Dissenters, which included a great deal of the country's educated population, were imprisoned, interrogated and executed, as were children and infants. Though Khmer Rouge were overthrown by the Vietnamese in 1979, these events are still reverberating today.
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Once I got the hang of the bike, not to mention Cambodian traffic, I headed out of town down a dusty dirt road, rife with ruts, potholes, and the lounging crews sent to fix them. After about 15 km, I reached the entrance to Choeung Ek, and went to park the moto. I still hadn't got the hang of pulling the bike backwards onto the double kickstand, so I luckily had a crowd of cheering locals when I lost the bike and dropped it on its side.

Choeung Ek served as an death camp during the Pol Pot regime, and from 1975 to 1978 it is estimated that 17000 people died here and were dumped in mass graves. Just past the gate, the monument containing skulls, organised by age and sex, some containing obvious traces of the trauma which landed them within the exhibit. Surrounding the monument are the grounds of the orchard which dug up in favour of human disposal. A network of footpaths wind among grassy pits in the ground, the remnants of mass graves unearthed in 1980. A few trees and several open areas signify where an estimated 8000 bodies still remain buried, serving as another aspect of this memorial. While exploring the site, trying to imagine the merciless acts that took place in this peaceful environment, the visitor encounters a tree where a PA speaker was hung to play music and drown out moans and screams. While the visitor gets accustomed to seeing tattered clothing lying caked in the dirt, when it is accompanied by a human femur poking out of the ground, one can't escape the chill.

A little more sombre, somewhat spaced actually (though well in control of my bike again), I made my way back into Phnom Penh, and next saw the Tuol Seung Museum, also known as Security Prison 21 or S21. From the outside, it looked like an innocuous highschool, which is the function the building served prior to Pol Pot. While he was in power, the building served as an interrogation and torture centre. Prisoners were bolted to bedframes, from which point on they were subject to a variety of sadistic butcharies. The bedframes remain, accompanied by a photo of the prisoner found bound there when the Vietnamese Army liberated Phnom Penh. The site is also famous for having room after room of headshots of former inmates. While looking through, it struck me that the subjects were being pretty cooperative to sit still for a pic while awaiting a nasty fate. A larger picture later on explained it to me. Apparently, a metal device was invented to bind the arms tightly behind the back, force the head up, and get that wiggly prisoner to sit still. Necessity breeds invention, I suppose.