The Killing Fields

At the fall of the Khmer Republic and the ascension of the radical Khmer Rouge regime in April 17, 1975, all of the city dwellers were first asked and soon forced at gunpoint to hastily leave their residences. They were told that they would return home in a few days. That was one of the first vicious trickeries of Khmer Rouge to effectively prevent and disable any large-scale resistance.

An invisible wall seemed to have fallen around the border of Cambodia, imposing a total and ominous silence on Cambodia, lasting almost four years. The Khmer Rouge kept such a tight seal on the border and a complete control over the population that the outside world knew nearly nothing about what exactly took place inside. The isolation ceased all of a sudden at the end of 1978 when the Pol Pot regime was defeated by the Vietnamese invasion.

What happened was so horrific that Cambodia was described as having gone back to Year Zero, and a movie entitled the “Killing Fields” was produced to portray the living hell of the Cambodian people under the Khmer Rouge rule. Evidence of deaths, brutal killings, and unimaginable tortures was everywhere including widespread mass graves, the prison-torture center in Toul Sleng, Cheoung Ek Memorial, and thousands upon thousands of personal testimonies of survivors.

Most reliable sources gave an estimate of 1.7 millions on the number of perished souls out of a total population of about 7 millions as an outcome of the ideology based on a well-known Khmer Rouge’s motto concerning human life: “there is no gain to keep and no loss to take away”. The Cambodian survivors, who lived through the killing fields and who lost many of their loved ones, knew that this estimate was no exaggeration, for they can simply do the number based on the loss of their family members. Even today, over a quarter of century later, the survivors can still remember vividly and recount with great details the memories of their horrendous years.

Now that the Kingdom of Cambodia is politically stable for several years, an international tribunal for the judgement of the Khmer Rouge has been set up and the trial is scheduled to begin later this year (2008).