This is going to be a hard one so I’ll put the pictures below so you don’t have to see them if you don’t want to. Today I (Meade) visited the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek about 15 km outside Phnom Penh. Amy visited an aftercare center for women who have left the sex trade.
Choeung Ek is unlike anything fathomable. There’s no interpretative center like in a holocaust museum. There’s a “stupa” with thousands upon thousands of skulls classified by age and gender stacked on shelves. As you walk around mass grave sites there are literally bones and old bits of clothing poking out of the path underneath your feet. I could have picked one up like a pebble. There are no tour guides. Just signs that say how many people were found in this particular site. There were 17,000 people buried there.
These people were killed by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1978. Anyone and everyone could be killed. He wished to make a completely equal society of peasants so intellectuals, religious leaders anyone was killed. They killed you if you wore glasses.
God have mercy. The people of Cambodia haven’t .
The central Stupa. Look closely through the glass.
“Juvenile Female from 15 to 20 years old.”
scattered clothing
Killing tree and bones.
June 2, 2008 at 3:23 pm
As a follow up to this, we visited later in the week the school that was converted into a torture center. 20,000 people, women, men and children were tortured, and later taken to the killing fields. only 7 survived. We will likely not post on it b/c it is too graphic, and frankly we don’t even like talking about it, it’s the most gruesome thing I have ever experienced. I really nearly vomited, and had to run out. I feel a little bit like not saying much is not giving the whole story of why or how Cambodia is the way it is, but I think the killing fields is explanation enough.