The Killing Fields

Location: Hoi An
Weather: Warm and sunny

Other than the gun range (as a side note, guns are still a bit of a problem in Cambodia there are signs everywhere asking people to give in their weapons and some restaurants/shops have notices saying "Leave Your Gun Outside Please"), most tourists stay in Phnom Penh to see...

The Royal Palace - This is where King Norodom Sihanouk lives (or lived until last year, before he abdicated). He seems quite a good King from what I've seen/read/heard him say. The palace is quite amazing - a truly grand place, very beautiful and striking. Saying this I found it quite an incredible the contrast between Phnom Penh and most of the rest of Cambodia, you have huge, elaborate buildings and most of it looks very modern compared to bamboo huts and not much else.

S21 Prison - this is where between 1975-79 the maniacal Pol Pot (leader of the Khmer Rouge) sent just about anybody who even remotely didn't agree with his ideas or possibly could have in the future - yes, wearing glasses, listening to non-communist music or being "too clever" were good enough to be imprisoned here in the tiny cells, then tortured using the most barbaric instruments I've ever seen and then probably murdered. Who ran this place? Pol Pot used mostly 15 year olds as guards, presumably because they were easy to indoctrinate. They had a film about the awful place and a box of skulls of some of the poor people that had been there. To make it worse, S21 used to be a school. This was a very good and interesting place to have seen.

The Killing Fields - If you didn't die in S21 you got sent about 20km's out of Phnom Penh to the various fields where you were murdered and dumped in a mass grave, usually by being clubbed over the head with the wooden handle of a hoe or shot or whatever. Surprisingly I didn't find the Killing Fields area particularly moving, I guess I was expecting far more than mere pits in a field and a large stone monument filled with hundreds of human skulls for something so tragic and terrible as what happened here.

History Lesson If You're Interested
I later saw a film in a cafe about Pol Pot's rise to power, his insane vision of the perfect communist society was to literally have a society with no money, no ideas, no love for anything but the state and everybody working in the fields using disastrous collective farming methods, in other words him and his 4 friends ruling everybody else. This was the excuse he used for S21 and the genociding of almost a third of the population. And what did the rest of the world do whilst this was happening? NOTHING. Many blame the Americans for the rise of the Khmer Rouge(they were seen as non-dangerous communists so the US bombed the dangerous Cambodian/Vietnamese communists instead) and say the Vietnamese were heroes for eventually storming Phnom Penh in 1979, which I suppose to some extent they were. But actually the main reason Vietnam sent troops to Cambodia was because Pol Pot was such a nutjob that he tried invading Vietnam! the man was a grade 1 mental case. In 1979 he legged it to the jungle where allegedly he died in 1998 of natural causes.
If you want more info check out http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/pot.htm

By JamesReed on 11.04.05 @ 04:36 PM GMT