Welcome to Hell

One has to admit that this was not the most enjoyable excursions of this trip. The visit to the Killing Fields and the Museum Tuol Sleng is an excursion to the horrors of the most recent history of Cambodia. During the 3 years, 8 months and 21 days that the dictatorship of the Khmer Rouge was in power, it is estimated that between 1 and 2 million people died (in a country of around 7 million!).

Since they arrived to power in 1975, the Khmer Rouge brutally promoted the instauration of a Maoist agrarian society. All the cities, including the capital, were evacuated and the society was structured in agrarian cooperatives, where people worked non-stop in exchange of a couple of rations of rice a day and the hope that you were not killed indiscriminately. People with education were particularly targeted. To make things even crueler, the Khmer Rouge trained children as soldiers to undertake some of the most brutal actions.

The visit to the Killing Fields, where one can see the mass graves in which 8,985 people have so far been found and the visit to the Tuol Sleng Museum, an old school that was converted into the largest detention and torture centre during the regime (and from which less than half a dozen of the c. 14,000 people detained there left alive) can not leave you indifferent. The thought that all the population in Cambodia of more than 30-40 years were during the regime either victim or executor (or both) makes you shiver and makes you wonder to what extent are the wounds closed…

The film “The Killing Fields” tells the story of Sydney Schanberg, an American journalist and Dith Pran, his Cambodian assistant during and after the war. Worth seeing….