Phnom Penh: Cheoung Ek Killing Field

With Andrew and Jo taking a head start on Vietnam today, I’m sort of left here in Phnom Penh by myself for a few days, waiting for my Visa to kick in. Since the weather has cleared up considerably, I decided to try my luck with the Choeung Ek Killing Field again.

Along the way, I learned that mullets and leisure suits still attract babes. I have neither, unfortunately:

Best seat in the house:

The giant Stupa at the heart of Choeung Ek was constructed in the late eighties as a final resting place for the 8958 Cambodians exhumed from nearby mass graves. Victims, carted here by the truckload, were almost always bludgeoned to death here to save on ammunition.

Skulls inside the memorial have been carefully arranged by age and gender:

And are piled in shelves reaching up to the high ceiling:

While clothes recovered from the mass graves are heaped haphazardly on the floor:

In accordance to local custom the memorial stupa is kept partially open to allow spirits to move freely from this world to the next. Despite the added ventilation, an overwhelming musty, almost chalky odour dominates the building’s cramped interior.

Outside, signs placed around crater like pits document victims found in mass graves

One reads:
“Mass grave of 166 victims without heads”

Another:
“Mass grave of more than 100 victims children and women whose majority were naked”

Other signs point out execution sites, while unclaimed bones sit atop bricks nearby. The ground is littered with white flecks of bone and cloth that surface with the rain. I've read that executioners would often grab babies by their legs and swing them against this tree until they died:

An unknown number of bodies still remain in undisturbed graves surrounding the site, though estimates peg the total to be around 17,000. Sadly, despite the numbers, Choeung Ek probably doesn’t rank highly amongst the hundreds of other killing fields documented around the country. The figure seems a paltry sum considering upwards of three million people, or almost a third of the country’s population succumbed to “unnatural deaths” while the Khmer Rouge were in power.