Into the Killing Caves, Cambodia

In 1975, the Communist Party of Kampuchea seized control of Cambodia, abolished the previous government, and began a rule of terror that was to sweep through the country during the next four years, eventually culminating in the deaths of approximately 2 to 3 million people. Similar to Mao Zedong’s China or Stalinist Russia, any person suspected of belonging to a category of supposed enemies was arrested for torture and probable execution. Anybody in contact with former or foreign governments, all professionals and intellectuals (to fall into this group, you needed to simply be literate or just unfortunate enough wear glasses), artists and musicians, ethnic groups like the Chinese, Buddhists and Muslims, former urban dwellers deemed guilty “by their lack of agricultural ability”, and others, were all targeted by Pol Pot’s government. After being detained and tortured in prisons like the infamous S-21 Tuol Sleng, a high school in Phnom Penh converted into a maximum security jail where electrocution was order of the day and women were forced to confess by having their breasts ripped off their bodies, “traitors” were then taken to obscure sites, far from public eyes, called killing fields. Here they would be routinely executed, often by pickaxe or other garden tools in order to save money on bullets, and buried in mass graves which were only discovered after the Khmer Rouge fell from power due to the Vietnamese invasion of 1979. 

The view from the top of Phnom Sampeu

During these years, Cambodia was subjected to a radical experiment in social re-engineering— sealed off from the outside world, newspapers and television stations shut down, money forbidden, religion banned, all businesses closed, health care eliminated, and unsupervised meetings between more than two people punishable by death. The major urban centers such as Phnom Penh or Siem Reap were completely emptied, with their citizens forcibly “evacuated” to the countryside; this was because cities, in Khmer Rouge eyes, were hotbeds for dissent, alliances to the previous regime, and bred dangerous associations between people. Millions were now made to work in slave labour, toiling the countryside (including any child old enough to walk), living in collectives and only allowed one meager ration of rice every two days; hundreds of thousands deaths during the regime were due to disease and pure starvation.

On our visit to Battambang, a sleepy rural town in northwestern Cambodia (a six hour bus ride from Phnom Penh), we were taken by our charming tuk tuk driver Mr. Kim to Phnom Sampeu, a picturesque limestone hill several kilometers outside of town and surrounded by verdant green countryside and towering palm trees. However, this cheerful approach hides a much more sinister side to the mountain—at the top of the hill were discovered killing caves, used by the Khmer Rouge to push their prisoners to death. Told they were going to work in the fields, victims were blindfolded and had their hands tied behind their backs before they were pushed over the edge of the steep cliffs into the dark caves below. Eyeing the caves from above, I shuddered as I imagined what happened to those who survived the fall, tumbling bodies slowly starving away with broken bones amongst decaying corpses, or suffocating to death as more and more bodies piled up above them. 

Inside one of the killing caves

Up until that moment, I had felt oddly disconnected from the shattering history of Cambodia, finding it difficult to really picture what had taken place in its recent history. But peering down into the depths of these gloomy caves, and later looking above at the openings where people had been forced to kneel down before their impending graves, it suddenly hit home. The crumpled bodies, the cries, the eerie quiet and dripping of stalactites. Skulls and bone remnants had been collected by a monk and placed in a small stone cage on one side of the cave, each identical set of sockets and jaws illuminated, some with bullet holes piercing the smooth bone. 

Skeletons gathered from the murdered "traitors"

The air around was thick with clinging humidity, stale and eerie, drops falling from stalactites above, and a solitary monk sat in prayer in front of burning incense. A separate cave next to it had also been used to kill children, babies and mothers. If a woman was pregnant, she would have been pinned against the wall and had the fetus sliced out of her before she and her baby were both killed.

The ominous pathway down into the cave

Even today in Cambodia, it is difficult to meet someone whose life has not been touched by the ruthless regime of 30 years ago. Our tuk-tuk driver had spent the first fifteen years of his life growing up in a refugee camp in Thailand, when his family managed to escape Cambodia but had nowhere to go. We visited an old lady’s traditional stilted Cambodian home (designed in order to optimize space, keep cool during the day and to reside far above the jungle animals below), and throughout her smiles, musical demonstrations and perfect French, we could never have anticipated the story she would tell us next. “This house was used as a communal kitchen under the Khmer Rouge regime, with 200 people eating downstairs every day; my three sons and daughter were sent to work in the fields. They are dead. I have never seen them since, they never came home… As my parents were lawyers and I was a French school teacher, I only survived by deserting my house and moving to a region far far away where I pretended to be a fruit vendor for many years.” Such a past is something that may have fallen to the backdrop in modern day Cambodia, where Western organic restaurants, shopping malls, stable village life and increasing development make the traumatic events of the preceding decades almost impossible to fathom. Time has moved on, thankfully, but dig a little deeper and you will invariably find that scars still remain.

 A peace monument erected in Battambang to commemorate
the end of Khmer Rouge rule. It is shaped in the form of the
mythical Naga god, symbolising peace and development, and
is symbolically made from melted weapons used during the war