vedderman

Phnomh Penh is stricken with poverty, extended families live together in tiny huts formed from sheets of corrogated iron. Young children sell books on the streets, their tiny frames barely able to lift their bulky bags. Some are obviously malnourished, yet they have a real character and zest about them. They all speak good English and it is essential they do as the tourist trade is their main market. They roam around Phnon Penh’s  cafe’s and restaurants playing on the consciences of the western tourists, whilst the cafe and restaurant proprieters try to shoo them away.

They see the children as a nuisance “they will pick your bags and pockets” one waiter warns us, but when you speak to them you realise they are just children who want attention and want to play and have fun like any other child.

“you’re a lady boy” a little girl shouts at me, as she does a cheeky smile covers her face. Her name is Kia and she is 8 years old, yet she looks younger. It’s now 10 pm and she hasn’t eaten all day, she knows the night is far from over and that she can’t return home until at least a couple of books are sold. We buy her a coke and some food which she decides to share with her friend, they have very little but look out for each other at all times.

“You buy a book from me now” there’s a look of expectation in her eyes. The books she is selling are predominately about the brutal reign of the Khymer Rouge. A reign which socially and economically Cambodia is still coming to terms with. I ask Kia if she knows what the books are about, she shouts “the Khymer Rouge” a child  however could never comprehend the atrocities administered 25 years before her birth.

9 miles from the centre of Phnom Penh in the Loueng eck region of the city are the Killing Fields that will forever provide a haunting backdrop to  Phnom Penh. They are the grim legacy of the Khymer Rouge revolution, an uprising that bore witness to mass genocide between the years 1975-79 and oversaw the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people.

On the approach to the killing fields the tuk-tuk darts in and out of traffic. The locals stare at you as if you were an alien and thats often how you feel because life here is unrecognisable to anything I have witnessed. We drive through the main gates at the perimeter of the grounds, immedietly my surroundings feel different. There is a silence, as though all life had abandoned the area. I had heard that at former Nazi concentration camps that the bird’s have evacuated the area, never to return. It felt the same here, the birds didn’t sing, perhaps they feel the death, destruction and tragedy.

As the harsh Sun beats down a light gust of wind blows over me, perhaps it’s all in my head but it leaves me cold, I feel eerie and the juxta position between the busy streets and where I stand now is palpable. I have to brace myself before  I walk any further.

A tower stands at the front of the killing fields, built in memory of the thousands of men, woman and children executed there. The tower holds hundreds of their skulls, they looked unreal, I don’t think that my mind could effectively visualise them as people. Each skull is broken displaying crude cracks and holes inflicted by the Khymer Rouge. For a few moments we stand in respect and pray to whatever higher being we believe in, we lay flowers and burn incence in their memory.

The temperature is approaching 36 degrees yet I still feel cold. As our guide points out the fatal injuries inflicted on each skull, his eyes swell with tears. He is an elderly man approaching his mid-sixties and has been working as a guide for 25 years. In that time the anger and the pain has never abated. There is an abruptness and a strain in the way he speaks to us. He points out a brutal crack in a child’s skull inflicted by a blunt instrument such as a garden hoe. He turns and looks me in the eye, shaking his head he asks “why?”I try to find an answer but I am almost choking on my emotion and of course there is no answer.

We walk across the grounds and I do my best to avoid the human remains protruding from the ground, as I avoid one shard of bone I step on another, I feel so disrespectful. We stop in the shadow of a tree “Here they would smash babies to death against the trunk of the tree”. I reach out to touch the tree,  i’m shaking as I do so, i’m not sure why I felt the compulsion to do this, I suppose it was my show of respect.

In the same area Khymer Rouge soldiers would throw babies into the air and catch them on the razor sharp blade of their bayonets, piercing then straight through the heart before dumping them in 8 foot deep pits. ” You cannot explain this type of brutality, why kill young babies? I was here in 1979 and i saw the bodies piled high, the smell made me sick lots of times, even today I do not understand, i’ll never understand”.

Our guide was one of the first people to discover the killing fields after the fall of the Khymer Rouge. He helped to clean up the death and destruction, fending off an almost intolerable sickness in his stomach as he waded through the mass of dead bodies.

Scattered around the grounds are items of clothing such as stray shoes, that are ghostly reminders of the victims humanity. I notice a small girls shoe and I think back to Kia-how many young girls like her were killed indiscriminatly? It was a really tough thing to comprehend.

We approach a deep pit, the sign next to the pit describes how people were thrown into it alive, and  burnt to death with the chemical DDT. The victims would burn for hours bound next to eachother, their bodies twitching in agony before the mercy of death finally arrives.

The methods of execution used by the Khymer Rouge were merciless and involved unimaginable torture and suffering for their victims. Bullets were expensive and had to be imported from countries such as Russia and China, it was far more efficient to slit a persons throat and watch them bleed to death than waste a bullet on them.

We stop at a tropical looking tree. it is perhaps the only vibrant piece of living beauty to remain in the grounds. The guide points at one of the branches and encourages me to reach out and touch it. “Be careful” he says. The edge of the branch is razor sharp “They used these branches to slit peoples throats, please take photographs and tell as many people back in the U.K what you have seen and heard, people have to know what happened here”.

He was pleading with me, the emotion and pain in his voice growing with intensity as he demands that these victims are not forgotton. As the sun sets we sit and talk for a while and it becomes apparent that he feels the world has forgotton or are simply ignorant to the mass genocide and the lessons that should have been drawn from it. It’s something that hurts him, he cleared the bodies of the dead, felt their existence and how it had been brutally snuffed out. It had become his lifes work to ensure that they are remembered and didn’t die in vain.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS