Killing Fields

I leave tomorrow, so I headed off to the Killing Fields this afternoon. It is a fair way away which means it was expensive to get to. US$14 there and back. It would've been cheaper if I could find someone to go with but this hostel is virtually empty. My 6 bed dorm is occupied only by me.

The site is actually called Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre. The term killing fields was coined by Dith Pran, who is the bloke in the movie The Killing Fields.

The place was quiet and peaceful. The buildings that used to be there are long gone, removed and repurposed by a desperate population after the Vietnamese invaded. Instead they have cartoonish looking pictures on signs where the buildings once stood. There were only a couple of buildings originally anyway. The admin centre, a building to lock up prisoners if they had too many to kill and a chemical storage building.

The chemical being stored was DDT. For those that don't know it was a common, powerful and extremely lethal pesticide. It has been banned for quite some time in western countries as it bioaccumulates and causes incredible damage to entire ecosystems. The Peregrine Falcon was almost wiped out by this chemical.

The Khmer Rouge would sometimes push their victims into the pit alive and spray the them with ddt. The audio guide said this was to kill them, but to be honest I don't think DDT can kill that quickly. The second reason was to mask the smell of the bodies - nobody knew what this area was being used for and I suppose they didn't want the smell to give it away.

Near the old site of the chemical storage building was a palm tree. It wasn't like a normal palm tree, but I can't remember it's name. It had a big fat trunk with wide palm leaves extending from a long, hard stem. The stem had jagged thorns coming from it. These stems were taken and used to slit the throats of prisoners. They'd also use hoes, blades, hammers, axes and pretty much any farm implement you can imagine.

When I went to Gallipoli a few years ago I kept my eyes on the ground, hoping I would spot an old spent cartridge that someone had missed. In fact somebody on my tour kicked at the dirt and found one. In Belgium a couple of years ago there was a place where the guy has thousands of cartridges, found after plowing. At the killing fields, the bones and rags of clothing actively climb out of the ground. Most of the mass graves have been exhumed of the large bones and skulls. They now reside in a stupa (which is a bloody big monument thing) that was built on the site. But still, there are fragments of bone that make their way to the surface. The brochure kindly asks you to avoid stepping on them. It was like spotting shells at the beach. I eventually stopped taking photos. Every few months the "keepers" gather up the bones that have surfaced and "care for them". I thought this was a lovely way to put it.

Walking around I came across the famous magic tree, where the loudspeaker was hung to blast revolutionary music to drown out the cries of the dying. I thought at first that was to keep the guards sane, but actually it was to disguise what was happening so people outside didn't sus on.

I also came across the tree they'd throttle kids against and toss them into the ditch. That is one of the mass graves that hasn't been exhumed. The guy who discovered the graves described how he was looking for potatoes when he noticed blood and brains on this one tree. He dug down and found the grave. Man I bet he wished he went looking for apples or something instead. The place was a Chinese cemetery before the Khmer Rouge though, admittedly with only 16 occupants, but still not a great place to look for potatoes.

People throw money on the graves, which I find weird. Someone had thrown a $100 note on there. I'll admit... I thought about it. They also throw wrist bands and the occasional hair tie. I've been looking for hair ties for days so I'll admit... I thought about that too. I probably need to be clear in case my reputation precedes me:  I DIDN'T though.

There was another grave full of headless men in Khmer Rouge uniforms. They had been stationed near the Vietnamese border. They had either defected, or more likely, Pol Pot was paranoid they would defect. They were decapitated because they were "Cambodian in body but had Vietnamese heads". Pol Pot had heaps of sayings like this and they were pretty much all just as shit. I bet he thought he was pretty bloody clever.

There was one other story on the audioguide that I thought was worth mentioning. One of the survivors said how he was in Tuol Sleng, being tortured as a teenager. He'd make stuff up to confess to, but one day he ran out of stories. Basically, he had confessed to literally everything he could think of. Once you run out of things to confess to, that was it, you'd be executed.

A neighbouring prisoner heard him not able to think of more things to confess to, so he pestered the guards, telling them to let the boy go, he shouldn't be in this prison with adults etc etc. He kept at them until the decided to execute him instead, thus saving the teenagers life.

After I came back, the tuk tuk driver and his mates were going to have a few beers, so I joined them on the footpath outside the hostel. They were good value and genuinely nice guys. I learnt a lot about the day to day lives they live.

For instance, the tuk tuk cost my driver us$1200 second hand, not including the bike. The other driver paid $3000 for a new one. That is an enormous sum for these guys. I'd been giving him shit earlier because he wanted to take me to some other tourist trap and I told him "I can't afford it, we aren't all earning tuk tuk driver wages". I'm glad he took it as it was intended.

He told me there are too many tuk tuks to make any decent money now as the government wages are so low everyone decided to drive a tuk tuk. He also told me he is younger than me but already has 2 kids. That annoyed me, because he is 31 and just assumed I was older. Jerk.

I tried to steer the conversation towards the past when he mentioned his village is on the border with Vietnam. I asked if they were bombed when the Americans began bombing the border. He really knew very little about it. I told him the dates and he pretty much described it back to me in extremely simple terms. Basically, "Our king helped Americans, but then he helped Vietnam to kill Americans. Americans got mad a bombed us. Our King wasn't very good."

I was shocked, but then again, why would he know it more accurately. He certainly wasn't a stupid guy, he just probably has never been told what happened. Possibly, that dropped down the list of priorities pretty bloody quickly!

He did mention that the Prime Minister now is like the King was then. I've seen thousands of signs for the Cambodian Peoples Party on the roads. So many that they couldn't possibly afford them independently, so I googled them to see what the go is. I already knew they are corrupt and they crush resistance. 

But this guy very carefully told me the same thing. He said there was no way he could talk to another Cambodian about this stuff. Too risky. Only foreigners. There was a protest a few months ago about 800 metres away from here where they killed a bunch of protesters. There is an election coming up, and people wanted to change the way elections are held. The elections are always rigged, he said, so the only way to change anything was to change the elections. Those people have already been rounded up and they're all in jail. I get the feeling they're just trying to hang in there while old age sorts these bastards out.

Tonight I went to a restaurant with a Dutch bloke I met at the hostel. We went to a place called Mok Mony. I highly recommend it. Excellent food and the policy is, if you don't like something send it back. They won't charge you and will give it to the poor, and you can order something different. As far from as policies go, I thought this was only second to their "for a $1.50 we'll add 2 shots to any drink on the menu" policy.

It's really late and I'm tired. All the photos are of the killing fields. Most have signs. If it looks like a picture of nothing, there is probably some bone fragments. Underneath the "don't step on the bones" sign there are large bones pieces (arms or legs) embedded in the dirt. I don't mean the stick, trees don't have bones. The picture of the tree is the magic tree.

Goodnight.