Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia and probably the beginning of the end of this trip. We took the bus from Saigon, which took about 6 hours. You kind of have to take the bus as you need to get your visa at the border, which was really badly handled by our bus company but we got in there anyways. It’s not a great city, Cambodia itself is very poor and Phnom Penh isn’t very different. There are hundreds of temples around the city but we saved ourselves for the Angkor temples further north at Siem Reap. Because of this, we only spent one night here in Phnom Penh. One thing I did notice about Phnom Penh is that the people here are nicer than the people in Vietnam. In the morning I went to the Tuol Sleng genocide museum which was right across the street from our hostel. Cambodia has an incredible history and the period in the seventies under the Khmer Rouge regime is particularly horrific. This era is highlighted in the Tuol Sleng museum. Originally a high school, it served as the Security Prison 21 (S-21) under Pol Pots reign. Around 20,000 people were imprisoned here in brutal conditions. Most were tortured, killed and then sent to the Killing Fields outside of the city. Most of the people imprisoned were cambodians but it also included thais, vietnamese, americans, british, new zealanders and australians. The prisoners were men, women and children.
The museum still contains the tourture chambers and photographs depicting prisoners after the treatment. It also contains photographs of the majority of the prisoners as they were being admitted, as they were being beaten and as they lay there starving to death. It’s a brutal insight into the countries recent past. Human skulls brought back from the killing fields are on display as are stories of some of the survivors of Pol Pots reign.
After seeing this I was determined to go see the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, around 15km to the south west of the city – $5 return on a tuk-tuk. This is where the majority of prisoners from Tuol Sleng were brought. Some were already dead and thrown into mass grave sites out here, some were beheaded and some were just buried alive, with chemicals thrown on them to quicken their deaths. It’s a grissly story that seems out of place with the pleasant countryside that lies there now. The large white tower near the entrance, a buddhist stupa, contains more than 5000 human skulls, unearthed from the graves.
1.5 million Cambodians died under Pol Pots ‘social engineering’ – an extreme communist idea for an agrarian utopia where cities were abolished and everyone lived and worked in the countryside. Those who opposed were killed and his slogan to the city people was ‘to keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss’. Eventually he was removed from power in 1979 after an invasion by the vietnamese. He died in 1998 and was never put on trial for his crimes.