Killing Fields in Phnom Penh

In the Killing Fields it was like I could feel the ghosts of 2,000,000 men, women, children, elders, deported from Phnom Penh into the country under the Khmer Rouge regime.
I was not prepared to see this place, I was not prepared to see all this beauty and all this misery, I was not prepared to encounter all that death smell around me in the Killing Fields. The Khmer Rouge believed that the origin, the source of all modern problems, difficulties, social differences, unfairness, was the city. I could agree on that.
But for them for their madness the new man of the new Era must live and struggle for life in the country not in the comforts, like it was in the ancient ages like it was during the glorious ancient Khmer empire. So, when the Khmer Rouge entered in Phnom Penh winning a war against the regular army loyal to the King and against a bunch of Americans advisors, they decided to evacuate the city. Even sick people from the hospitals was driven into rice fields to work. Many of them simply died along the road before reach any destination, many were killed, many just starved months or years later in the Killing Fields.

It was the biggest ‘social’ experiment, no one could think to be prepared I guess, more the 3,000,000 Cambodians died of starvation, overworks, sickness, or just killed because they were doctors, engineers, teachers, politicians, or simply not farmers and so not worthy to serve the party. This was the biggest nightmare, the biggest idiocy.
They were forced to plant and grow rice to be sold to China in order to buy weapons, there was rice for the army of course, but not for people.

An entire generation of babies was left without parents, an entire population was deprived of its souls and mind. I have visited the mausoleum, the old prisons, the killing fields. I left Phnom Penh asking myself how could it happen? Where it was the world?

Posted on October 25, 2001

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