Cambodia and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge

Leaving Saigon, I have met up with my new group for Cambodia. Leaving from the small Vietnamese town of Chau Doc, we caught a boat up the Mekong Delta to the Cambodian border. It was an excellent chance to see the country and the people living on the river. As we are in Monsoon season, the water is quite high, and the river banks are flooded by as much as 5 meters above dry-season levels.

Our first stop is Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and our first organized activity is the Tuol Sleng prison and the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge. If I thought the museums in Saigon were graphic - this was a wake up call.

Tuol Sleng (or Prison S-21) is sunk in the middle of the slums of P.P. A former Secondary School, the prision was taken over to house torture chambers, interrogations rooms and the rooms modified for cells for the inmates. It is only 1 of hundreds of prisions used by the boy-soldiers of the Khmer Rouge. In power for less than a decade, the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, lead a campaign of terror and slaughter that has certainly gutted Cambodian's ability to have a stable country. At the fall of the pogroms against the inteligencia, only 300 educated people (Doctors, officials, teachers) existed in a country of over 7 million. Approximately 3 million people were killed by Pot's boy soldiers, usually only 10-20 years old.

The Killing Field for S-21 is 15km outside of P.P. and again is only one of thousands. Many Cambodians were just shot at the sides of the road - you see buried plots everywhere off the sides of roads. The ground is littered with human remains, exposed by the rain as it errodes the soil away - the Cambodians have only dug up some of the mass graves.

The loss of so much knowledge has left Cambodia - opened up in 1993 for tourism, and only relatively stable since 1998, without any solid professional or trades class, a hobbled education system and a disintegrating infrastructure. The houses of the rich are surrounded by slums and unpaved roads, even in the Capital, the drainage system is in such a state of disrepair that the streets flood with an afternoon of rain, and the poverty compared to Vietnam is very apparent. Even knowledge and workers for the cultivation of rice is hard, over 50% of the population is under 17 - born after the Pot Regieme. At a significant amount of the rice paddies are in obvious dis-use - many because of land mines.