Traversing Through the Dark Era of Cambodia at The Killing Field

Previously on my trip to Cambodia, I started off the day by visiting the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and see for myself how Pol Pot had turned a school into a prison and used it as the torturing camp for those who had the slightest sign of treachery against him.

Bear in mind that most of the killings in the infamous genocide didn’t happen there. Instead, they were committed in a place 17 km south of Phnom Penh, in a place that is now known as The Killing Field. That was where we were heading to next.Riding from Genocide Museum to The Killing Field would take you a little bit across the countryside where you’d see beautiful paddy fields on both sides of the road. Although the feeling is beautiful, you might want to bring something to cover your mouth with because it is quite dusty especially when you’re there during the monsoon season like we did.So, we arrived at the Choeung Ek Killing Field in about half hour’s time. With an assurance of USD5 extra right into his pocket later, the Tuk Tuk driver was all smiling as we told him that we needed at least 3 hours to cover everything at the Choeung Ek Killing Field. “No problem! 4 hours, 5 hours, no problem!”, he said with his hands stretched in the air.Being in the middle of nowhere, Choeung Ek was a perfect place to do all the dark activities by Pol Pot and his regime and what I mean by activities here are the mass killing of people that he believed would be a threat to his ambition.Truckloads of people would be transported in every two or three times a month and they’d be lined up in a long row with their knees on the soil and somebody (probably with professional training) would smack them on the back of their neck with a stick SO HARD that they’d die almost instantly on a single hit. THUGGGGGGGGGG!Pretty fast isn’t it?All the things that happened at The Killing Field are so reflective to Pol Pot’s infamous motto that “it’s better kill a thousand of innocent people by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake”. Pol Pot’s ambition of making Cambodia the most communist country in the world had turned him into some kind of paranoid that he’d kill whoever he thought had even the slightest potential of turning against him.

He wanted nobody with too much brain who was intelligent enough to possibly think of a way to topple him down so he’d kill whoever has those intelligent looks. If you lived in Cambodia back during the Pol Pot’s era, you might don’t want to put your glasses on because that would make you look intelligent and you’d be an easy target. No kidding. It was to that extent.

Among those who were killed at the Killing Field were new-born babies because he didn’t want them to grow up and take revenge over their prosecuted parents. Apparently killing babies had been much easier for them.

They’d smack those babies right onto a tree, fracturing their bones and skulls and killing them instantly. Apparently some of them wanted a little bit of fun so somebody would throw a baby high in the air and another would shoot it with a gun. I imagine how every successful hit would be cheered on.

Being right at the place where it all happened kinda gave me some kind of somber feeling that I’ve never experienced anywhere else before. Being born with a strong imagination (damn!), I could almost imagine myself being among the prisoners, waiting in line as the prosecutor moved closer and closer and I had one final utter of ‘good bye world’ before everything went black.Then I couldn’t help but thinking of the family that they had left behind. All the thinking and imagining and summoning of images were beginning to take a toll me and I began to feel a little bit dizzy as I moved further and further into the site.In fact I had a throb in my head as I walked across the mass graveyard where hundreds if not thousands of human bodies were buried (and later unearthed).After doing a full circle of the trail, I just thought that may be I have had enough of it all so I decided to skip the movie show at the museum – something that I had planned to do before I came to The Killing Field.After spending some three hours at the Killing Field, we decided to return to Phnom Penh and see what we could have for dinner. After all the horrible things that we had witnessed at the Genocide Museum and Killing Field, we definitely needed something to cheer us back up.Cambodia was colonized by the French, together with Vietnam so it wasn’t at all surprising that the French influence is very obvious in Phnom Penh. Many of the buildings are heavily French although not as obvious as those in Hanoi.The popularity of baguette among the locals in Cambodia is evident to the fact that the French has certainly left their mark in the Cambodian cuisine. In fact they are widely sold and highly available in Phnom Penh especially at the stalls on Street 51.The only problem was probably to eat them the right way or at least not laughable in the eyes of the locals. We had to look at the other tables to see how the locals fix their meal with the baguette.Being so Malaysian that we were, baguette and all the things that came with it didn’t seem to stop the howling in our stomachs. We still needed something with rice so we surveyed around until we found a Chinese Restaurant at another corner of the street.Certainly some of the best foods that we have had in Cambodia at least up to that night because apparently, Phnom Penh and Cambodia as a whole is nothing short of a great foodie destination if you know how to dig deeper into the troughs.Anything of that would only be continued the next day when we covered some more of Phnom Penh attractions. All we needed now was a decent night ZZZZZZZ.