A Day at The Killing Fields and S-21

I didn’t do much planning or research before heading to Cambodia. All I knew was that I wanted to volunteer for a week at the Cambodia Wildlife Sanctuary and, of course, visit Angkor Wat.

What I didn’t plan for was the Killing Fields or S-21. This mostly came from my own ignorance and not researching or reading into Cambodia and the history of the country before arriving.

Beaches and Angkor Wat, right? I was completely unaware of the country’s dark and recent tragic history. We didn’t learn anything about Cambodia in the school back home [in Canada]. It’s just not included in our history classes.

It wasn’t until one of the volunteers I was working with at the Cambodia Wildlife Sacntuary mentioned the Killing Fields and how I needed to include it in my trip that I added it to my itinerary.

She was absolutely right. The Killing Fields and S-21 is an incredibly important visit to make. It was a horrific and difficult day, learning about this dark past of Cambodia, that left me in tears. I think the most shocking thing to me though was the fact that I did not know this had happened. It wasn’t even that long ago – 1973.

For those of you who don’t know about the Killing Fields and S-21, they are essentially memorials for the mass genocide that occurred in Cambodia in the early 1970s.

According to the audio tapes I listened to in S-21, while the world was focussed on the War in Vietnam, there was a secret war being waged in Cambodia. More than 110,000 tons, or more than 2 million bombs were dropped on Cambodia during this time. Still to this day, Cambodia remains the heaviest land mined country in the world.

So when the Khmer Rouge Regime marched in to Siem Reap, the people were happy to see them. They thought this meant freedom and an end to the bombings. The terror was just beginning though as Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge Regime had extreme communist views, forced everyone out from the cities into the outlying villages, and then forced them one again even further out. He demanded rice production be increased to a number that was simply not attainable but had people working themselves to death.

Anyone intellectual was viewed as a threat to him – if you wore glasses you were screwed as this was viewed as a sign of intelligence. Pol Pot questioned and tortured thousands and thousands of people, including his own army generals when he felt threatened by them, leading to the execution of more than 1/4 of the population.

The Killing Fields and S-21 are set up in an informative and impactful way.

I started the day at S-21, one of many schools turned prisons during the Khmer Rouge Regime. With the entry ticket, you are given a headset that guides you through the prison, recounting what happened there and teaching visitors about the Khmer Rouge Regime. It’s a sobering walk through the buildings, seeing the different torture tools that were used on the prisoners and the horrendous conditions in which they were kept.

It was a school and it very much looks like it once was a school, making it all the more chilling because you can practically hear the sounds of children bantering in the classrooms while you learn that barbed wire was strung up across the balconies to prevent prisoner’s attempting to jump to their death.

S-21 was a good spot to start the day as the tour here gave a lot of background information on the Khmer Rouge Regime, as well as included personal stories of survivors and testimonies from members currently on trial for their crimes against humanity.

From S-21 I went over to The Killing Fields. The Killing Fields is known for its five-storey high memorial to the victims of the Khmer Rouge made from skulls that have resurfaced from these mass graves during rainy season.

Still to this day, during rainy season, bones of people murdered at Pol Pot’s orders are turning up as the heavy rains push the bones up from below.

The tapes here walk you through the different areas where mass graves were found, explaining the different ways that people were executed. The whole tour finished with an audio recording of the propaganda that would loudly play over the speaker phones in that area, which had an incredible and lasting chilling effect on the tour.

The visit is a difficult one. As I said, it left me in tears. I don’t understand how we can treat one another so horrifically. However it is an important visit to make. Out of respect for the country and their past, but also out of respect for history. History needs to be studied and recounted so that we can learn from the mistakes of the past. Hopefully we can learn from this tragedy moving forward. If we can’t learn from this tragedy, then hopefully we can learn to respect the value of life.