The Killing Fields

From his home in central Phnom Penh, Kassie Neou watched and waited.  Up until that morning he had been an English teacher, heading a government department that broadcast English language materials over the radio.  The past year had been particularly tough with food shortages and barrages of rocket fire.  Like many, Kassie hoped that the arrival of the black clad peasant soldiers, strange as they seemed, would at least mean a return to normality.  ‘We were so sick and tired.  We longed for peace and were led to believe it was the end of the bloody war.’  But within hours the atmosphere changed and and the Khmer Rouge suddenly ordered the entire population to evacuate claiming the Americans were about to bomb the city.  Young soldiers walked the streets shouting the orders to evacuate .  Others went door to door forcing inhabitants out of their homes and into a frenzied exodus along the highways.  ‘Go go go’,  urged the voices on loudspeakers.  ‘You will meet Angkar, Angkar will help you. ‘  In their haste many left without anything.  Hospitals were emptied at gunpoint and patients some still with IV lines attached were pressed into the sinister procession.  In the fierce dry season heat, the evacuation became a death march.  - Hun Sen's Cambodia by Sebastian Strangio

This is our first day in Cambodia and we had one day on Phnom Penh so we decided to visit The Killing Fields.  This was one of 300 places where Pol Pot and his followers brutally murdered thousands of innocent people in order to create what they believed to be a new era, a new society, to socially engineer a classless communist society, aiming particularly at intellectuals, city residents, civil servants and religious leaders.  Even if you wore glasses you were a target as this showed that you could read.  I added this passage above as I was thinking about what it must have been like to be going about a daily life and then for it all to change in a terrifying way.  Someone knocks on your door and forces you to leave your family, your home and everything with no idea as to whether you would see any of them again, whether you would return or where you were being taken to.

Walking around the place,  we listened to deeply tragic stories of those that had survived and witnessed bones still sticking out of the ground and torn clothes still stuck amongst the dried mud.  They have tried to make it a more peaceful sanctuary now with trees, plants and a lake to sit around and think about the many that died here.  The Cambodians we spoke to say they don’t want to forget as most lost their relatives.  One said that the kids however don’t really want to learn about it and there were some teenagers at the place running around taking selfies.  But I thought that is fine. You can deal with this in many ways. Many would of course want to brush all these painful memories far far away.  This country was torn apart and after all this went away they had to start all over again, learn how to live all over again.  And this was only 40 years ago.

What astonished me is how little the world did to help and what we all knew of what was going on at that time.  And how Pol Pot was still accepted by the world and the UN as the leader of Khmer Rouge until way after he had murdered all these people.  The US even supported him politically until into the 1980s - I suppose because they opposed the Vietnam occupation. 

The universal uniform for men and women

We have been told that one of the main ways we can help at the schools is to give the students more confidence by talking to them a lot and encouraging them to speak to us successfully in English.  Juan says that the Pol Pot years knocked it all out of them and still does.  It is not surprising.  We will do everything we can.