Phenom Pehn and the Khmer Rouge

Cambodia's capital Phenom Pehn was busy and crazy with bicycles and motorcycles, tuk tuks, cars, trucks and any other transportation you can imagine with their knack for transporting people and goods.  The traffic on the roads in Phenom Pehn appears to be complete chaos but once you join in it your realized there is an organization to their madness.  I came to Phenom Pehn to get my Vietnamese visa, see the S-21 museum and the killing fields.  All of this I accomplished in a day and two nights minus the killing fields.

My path crossed again with Berg my fellow traveler from China who I met in Bangkok weeks before.  His plan was a mirror image of mine so we decided to execute it together.  We met up for dinner the first night and I had my first taste of pizza in months and months, oh how I have missed western food.  The next morning we agreed to rent bikes, ride to the embassy, then to the museum and the killing fields. 

With the embassy quick and easy we set off for the S-21 Museum.  The museum is the sight of an old school that the Khmer Rouge took over and converted into a prison where they kept people and tortured them.  The school has changed little since 30 years ago and is very powerful in all of it's rawness.  The experience in the museum was so intense and sad I did not take any photo's of the gruesomeness that went on here.  At the school there were multiple different buildings where they imprisoned men, women and children.  To this day the people and the government do not understand Pol Pot and what he was trying to do or accomplish through this horrific genocide. 

We hired a guide who was 10 when forced with her family was evacuated from Phenom Pehn.  Depending on your location the day the Khmer Rouge came into the city the forced everybody to leave, whole families where forced apart and in different directions, so if you were in the north they pushed you north, south...they pushed you south. Kids were left separated from their parents, wives were separated from their husbands and the city was in complete chaos with not a person understanding what was happening.  

The only goal of the KR was to kill people, with a focus on the men.  No one at the time even knew who Pol Pot was as no one had television or food.  Everyone was forced into labor camps and denied basic human rights.  At the prison we visited they chained, tortured and kills thousands and thousands of people.  The victims pictures hang in the museum, some with pin tags stuck in their necks with their bed numbers on them. 

As the Vietnamese came into the city to free them, there were only 7 remaining survivors all of which held skills valuable to the regime.  Right before they arrived they killed the 14 other high ranking KR prisons.  They killed them after torture usually by slitting their throats.  You can visit each of the cells the prisoners were found in and there hangs photos of their dead bodies.

After seeing the atrocities committed by Pol Pot for no reason both Berg and myself realized that we did not need to visit the killing fields where there are over 100 mass graves of the people they killed mostly by bludgeoning them to death.  Some of the graves have been dug up but many remain. I have been told you can still see the bones and clothes of the people in the field.  

For the rest of the day Berg and I took it easy.  We got some food, visited the different markets and felt we had enough cultural history for the day, week, or even month.