People ask me all the time why I chose to travel to Cambodia. For many I guess, Cambodia just doesn’t hold the allure of the more ‘postcard’ destinations scattered throughout South-East Asia like Thailand or Vietnam.
The cities of Phnom Penh and Siem Reap certainly aren’t your “let’s go grab a coconut and spend the day lazing by the beach” sort of destinations. But that doesn’t mean Cambodia is lacking – far from it actually.
The people of Cambodia’s capital city Phnom Penh hide heart-wrenching details of a bloody history behind their friendly smiles and warm greetings. And what’s even more unbelievable? These people are all survivors of this sordid past.
After five years of civil war in Cambodia, Pol Pot and the Communist Khmer Rouge movement overthrew Phnom Penh in 1975. With the desire to create a classless, agricultural society, Pol Pot and his followers set a genocidal agenda in an attempt to engineer this vision. Utilising what are now known as ‘Killing Fields,’ the Khmer Rouge murdered an estimated 2million Cambodian citizens.
Infants, children, men, women – the Khmer Rouge did not discriminate. In the dark of the night, Khmer Rouge soldiers would take truckloads of prisoners to designated ‘killing fields’ – places where only the soldiers left alive. With a desire to learn first-hand of the atrocities of Cambodia’s past, I travelled by bus to what is probably the best known killing field, Choeung Ek, located just 17 kilometres from Phnom Penh’s city centre.
A strange sort of silence seems to settle upon the bus as we arrive. We’d attempted to prepare ourselves over breakfast for the things that we would see behind the dusty walls but as I walked through the entrance gate and the feeling of devastation and heartbreak really hit me. The feeling of loss and sadness was so strong it was almost a tangible thing that I could reach out and cut with a knife.
The Killing Fields are aptly named: a place where Khmer Rouge soldiers took their peers and national counterparts to murder them before burying them in mass graves. Walking around the memorial, I found myself thanking my lucky stars that I was born into a country where I’ve not experienced anything like this. And as I looked around at the other tourists, I realised that they too were thanking someone or something for this same luck via birth.
Everywhere you look, you’re reminded of the chilling brutality of this regime which had Cambodia in its grip a mere 40 years ago. Walking the paths, you find yourself stepping over bone and clothing fragments that are slowly rising to the surface from years of rain and foot traffic.
Aside from the whispered explanations from the guides, you could hear a pin drop. The mood is so sombre that it feels almost sacrilegious to break the silence. Not even the birds chirp – they seem to have deserted this place 40 years ago.
We were guided through the memorial by a Cambodian man who was a child during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. He survived. He was one of the lucky ones. And he now kindly shares his story with foreigners who are fortunate enough to not have experienced this monstrosity first-hand. His optimism and love for his country seems to jar against his experiences as an 8 and 9-year-old child.
Afterwards, I kept asking myself “How can someone who experienced such brutality and loss at such a young age, be so optimistic about the same country that caused it?” But as any Cambodian will tell you, it’s a lesson learnt, and one that they will never repeat.
After four years of intense brutality Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were ousted from power in 1979 after a Vietnamese invasion. What was even more shocking for me to discover, was that Pol Pot was able to flee to the border region Cambodia shared with Thailand, and continued to control what was left of the Khmer Rouge until he was arrested in 1997. It wasn’t until 1997 that Pol Pot was trialled, before being placed under house arrest. He died in 1998. I was 8 years old in 1998. Many of the victims of his regime never even made it to 8 years old.
If you are planning a trip to Cambodia or are keen on a gap year in Southeast Asia, the trip to Choeung Ek is chilling and brutal, but it’s one that every traveller should take. As you walk the streets of Cambodia’s Phnom Penh, it’s a sobering thought that anyone over the age of 40 was subjected to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge’s regime. And they survived. That person selling you an ice cream? She survived. Your tuk tuk driver? He survived too. They all have a story to tell, and it’s one that we all need to hear.