Cambodia's Killing Fields

In a period of 3 years, 8 months and 20 days, The Khmer Rouge killed 2 million people. Officially, their offenses ranged from knowing a second language to wearing glasses. Many were women and children who were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. 17,000 of the executed passed through the S21 torture center (a renovated school) before being shipped to the Killing Fields 10 miles outside of Phnom Penh. Most of their photographs were taken as they arrived at S21 and those photograhs are on exhibit there today.

The official Khmer Rouge policy stated that, "it is better to arrest 10 people by mistake than to let one guilty person go free."
This stupa stands in center of the Killing Fields today. It houses many of the remains of people who were buried in the numerous mass graves that surround it. To save bullets, most were killed with blunt instruments or knives. As you walk the grounds, there are new bones and more clothing unearthed by weathering every day.
Inside the stupa, skulls and bones are arranged so that the deceased spirit can come and go as it pleases, an important symbol given that none of these people was given a proper Cambodian burial.

(Note: When I originally posted this blog entry, I had included a close-up photograph of some of the skulls that are housed in the stupa pictured above. When I saw the final posting, it was so dark and disturbing that Denise and I decided that keeping it on our site did not sufficiently honor the dignity of those who had died during the violent and brutal years that the Khmer Rouge dominated Cambodia. We even considered erasing the entire posting altogether but decided that this is still a story that needs to be shared with others. so we just erased that one photograph).