Khmer Rouge

Contrary to all the statements I've made so far about what I don't know about Cambodia, I did actually read up a bit before I made this trip.  (I know you can barely tell!) Fun fact: Cambodia is the only nation to have a building on their flag - the main temple at Angkor Wat. 

 

Mostly it was recent history I learned about though. Cambodia was part of the French colony Indochina from the middle of the 1800s until they gained independence in the 1950s. You can see a bit of French influence in the architecture in the larger cities and the fact that baguettes were pretty common.  :) Being a neighbor to Vietnam, they were pulled into that conflict.  The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot came into power in Cambodia at the end of the War. They were an extreme Communist group who wanted to exclude all Western influence from Cambodia and return to the agrarian societies of the 11th century. Any one with Western education, intelligence, influence, religion or sympathies were arrested and killed. There are no precise figures, but between 1-3 million people were murdered during the period in the late 70s. 

 

Two infamous locations in this episode were the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng. They are both popular visitor sites in Phnom Penh.  The Killing Fields were rural areas outside of Phnom Penh where the regime murdered and buried thousands of people in mass graves.  I did not visit the Killing Fields.  After my one month overload on Holocaust locations last year, I couldn't handle much more of people-doing-horrible-things-to-each-other-sight-seeing.  I didn't want to be completely callous though and seeing and remembering some things like this are important.  So I did visit the Tuol Sleng museum.  

 

Tuol Sleng was originally a high school.  It is a set of four buildings with classrooms set around two large courtyards.  The Khmer Rouge commandeered the buildings and turned them into a prison called S-21 during the height of their regime.  Everyone brought here was first photographed and then interrogated and tortured.  The regime was looking for confessions of espionage and other crimes and also looking for prisoners to name other friends, family and acquaintances to be brought in.  It was basically a witch hunt and no one survived.  There are only 12 known survivors of the estimated 20,000 prisoners who came through S-21.

 

I won't get into detail about things they had on display. It was gruesome, I don't really want to and you can read it in a book if you are interested. I also don't take many pictures at places like this because it seems irreverent.  But here are a few views of the outside of the buildings.

 

In the 1980s Cambodia was governed by a combination of the Khmer Rouge leaders, Vietnam and the Soviet Union. The country was continually at war and unstable through the 1980s and into the early 1990s. King Norodom Sihanouk was named in 1993, although all power resides with the government and prime minister. Their current government is not exactly anything - sort of a combination democracy, communist state. I know that seems ridiculous, but apparently they have some policies that favor both.

 

In 2010 the first leader of the Khmer Rouge was found guilty of war crimes for what happened in Cambodia in the 1970s. Most of the those responsible have not been tried and those surviving still live in Cambodia, some even holding positions in the current government.  Pol Pot died in 1998.

 

I read somewhere before I went to take notice of the general age of the population in Cambodia. I agreed with the article - there were very few people older than about 40 years old. I encountered almost no one my parent's age and only saw a very few people in their 70s and older.