The sudden short heat wave we are experiencing reminds me of my days in Cambodia, where the temperature never dropped below 30 °C and huge amounts of perspiration were just a permanent fact. Also, the trial against four former Khmer Rouge leaders just started in Phnom Penh (gotta watch those h’s!), so I guess this is as good time as any to write my long overdue post about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Of course I had heard about the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot before, but once I was in Southeast Asia and started reading more about it, the sheer madness of their reign of terror became all too clear. It was just mind-boggling.

When they captured Phnom Penh on the 17th of April 1975, they declared the “Year Zero”. But in reality they catapulted the country way back into the stone age, nearly destroying a whole civilisation. 

Their big ideal was a “great agrarian society”, so they forced everybody out of the cities to work as slave labourers in the countryside. Many did not survive the gruelling conditions. Phnom Penh, a city of 2 million people, was reduced to a ghost town of a few thousands of inhabitants. Money was abolished during the Khmer Rouge regime. Now, as if to compensate, they use Cambodian riel, US dollars and Thai baht all together.

There was no place for “intellectuals” in their system, so they killed all architects and engineers, professors, doctors, teachers, artists and musicians … Even wearing glasses was enough to be seen as an intellectual. (Ironically, Pol Pot and the other leaders of the regime had studied in Paris or other European cities.) They also murdered most of the Buddhist monks and destroyed many temples. There are countless accounts of the unimaginable cruelty perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.

It is estimated that by the end of the regime, when Vietnamese troops captured Phnom Penh nearly four years later on the 7th of January 1979, about 1.5 to 2 million people, roughly a third of the population, had died. As a result, you don’t see all that many old people these days in Cambodia. Those that you do see, either had most of their families exterminated, or were themselves part of the Khmer Rouge. A strange idea to have when you are actually there …

Pol Pot died in the village of Anlong Veng in 1998, never having been tried for the crimes and atrocities he committed. The other leaders are on trial now, though it is not unlikely that they also die of old age even before the end of the trial, which could last for years.

I visited the infamous “Killing Fields” south of the capital, but that was just, I don’t know, weird. The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum however, was a totally different story; a seriously moving experience. This former school was turned into a prison during the years of the Khmer Rouge rule. You can still see the different buildings like they were when they were discovered after the Khmer Rouge fled, blood stains on the floor on all. The cells they built in the class rooms were beyond tiny and you cannot imagine the horror of being locked up there.

The strongest item on display though were the hundreds of photographs of the prisoners. Despite their fate, many of the prisoners pose with determination in their faces, some even manage to produce a hint of a smile. And in a weird way, some of the pictures look like they could be in a contemporary photo exhibit, rather than being documents of a pitch black page in Asian history.

Maybe they are a symbol of the people of this country, who despite decades of civil war and misery, manage to be some of the friendliest, smiling people I’ve come across on this trip. Cambodia is still dirt poor, lagging behind strongly compared to its neighbours, but the people seem more determined than ever to look at a bright future.