20-12-2015
Killing Fields of Cheung Ek is situated 15 kilometers south-west of Phnom Penh and made famous by the film of the same name “Killing Field”. it was a place where more than 17,000 civilians were killed and buried in mass graves; many of them transported here after detention and torture in Toul Sleng. This place is a chilling reminder of the brutalities of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. In the center of the area is a 17 story glass enclosures which houses 8000 skulls exhumed from mass graves. Visitors can walk along 86 mass graves from which the remainders of 8,985 men, women and children were unearthed after the liberation of the Khmers Rouges. Some of those skulls, bones and pieces of clothing are now kept in the nearby massive glass enclosure.
Over four short years, from 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge systematically exterminated up to 3 million people. The people of Cambodia had to live in fear, knowing that they might be the next one dragged out to the killing fields. The chances of being chosen were indeed high – by the end of the massacre, the Khmer Rouge had wiped out nearly 25 percent of the population.
The nightmare began in Phnom Penh, with the end of the Cambodian Civil War. It was the last stronghold of the right-wing, military-led Khmer Republic, and with its fall, Cambodia came into the hands of the dictator Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge regime.
Adults were forced to dig their own graves before they were slaughtered with spades and sharpened bamboo. Their children, meanwhile, were smashed to death against the trunks of trees and thrown into the mass graves where their parents lay.
There were more than 150 of these execution centers across the country. One of the most brutal, Tuol Sleng, was a former school that transformed into a factory of death. About 20,000 people ended up locked inside of its walls – and only seven got out alive.
The massacres on the killing fields stopped when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979 and brought an end to the Khmer Rouge. As the Vietnamese marched through Cambodia, they found places like Tuol Sleng. They uncovered mass graves full of thousands of human remains – and found photos of some of the many people who had been lost in the Cambodian genocide.
