Travelling overland from Saigon, we crossed the border with Aoife and Mark to Phnom Penh. As we stepped out from the arctic bus, the heat hit us straight on, bam! And we hadn't learnt our lesson; we hadn't booked any accommodation. Fending off the very articulate tuk tuk drivers - calling us "man" in phony American accents - we started our ascent to the city's guest house area with 15kg on our backs, snaking from place to place, upstairs, downstairs, round in circles, to find the cheapest deal. This kind of arrival into a city can only be likened to some kind of punishing military training - I'm pretty sure after 12 months of this I'd sail through army recruitment.
It might have a sad history, but Phnom Penh is a lively, energetic city. The riverside bustles with people, day and night. You'll find Hindu and Buddhist worshippers going about their devotions at one of the many temples, families enjoying a stroll together, children playing football, barefoot, with wicker balls (takrah) and large numbers of people group dancing to music blaring from portable stereo systems. This was my favourite part of the riverside: watching (and attempting to join in with) the evening aerobics and hip hop classes that had as many devotees as the neighbouring temples.
With all the living that's going on around you, it's easy to forget what happened here and across the whole country.
After the Vietnam War, on the 17th April 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over the city, and the people cheered in the streets thinking that good things were finally to come for them. But just three hours later their cheers turned into tears as they were told they must pack only essential belongings, leave the city at once and walk for days in the dry heat to become rural peasants. The entire population was forced to labour in agricultural work camps and many families were split up, never to hear from or see each other again.
Money, foreign objects (and all foreigners - some were killed), brightly coloured clothing, all forms of media, religion, school and everything that makes for a civilised society was forbidden. The Khmer Rouge were the dictators, and the peasants were dispensable.
During these four short years between 2 and 3 million people died, either as a direct result of torture and executions (an estimated 1.7 million), or from the starvation and diseases which were rampant during this time. There were no doctors or medicines so the sick were left to die alone in old warehouses.
People worked long hours in the fields and had very little food (they were trading most of the rice the workers grew with China to buy ammunition to fight against the Vietnamese) so they went hungry every day, especially the small children, many of whom just stopped growing. The people were not allowed to talk to each other or show any signs of affection towards each other. Doing so would either have you moved to another site or to a 're-education camp', which normally meant death. Lies were used to remove suspicious individuals from camps and they were never seen or talked about again. They just became ghosts in people's trodden memories.
Anyone with any type of previous education and deemed to pose a threat to the Khmer Rouge, which meant teachers, doctors, ex-government works and lawyers, were usually brought to S-21 (or Tuol Sleng prison) if they were discovered, where they would be tortured for information on anyone else they might know. After that, not only would they be killed, but their whole family would be massacred - including the children - as it was thought that if the children were left alive they might grow up and seek revenge on the Khmer Rouge. Even wearing a pair of glasses was a sign of education and punishable by death. Those with lighter, 'foreign' skin disappeared. And those with soft hands also suffered an untimely death. They were simply no good for the peasant society.
This is only a small part of the story - and I thoroughly recommend the book 'First they killed my father' by Loung Ung - a first hand account of a young child who narrowly escaped with her life, despite her parents and sisters being brutally murdered. I bought my copy off a man whose legs have been blown off by a Khmer Rouge land mine, just to put things into perspective a little bit.
Alongside the mental scars and personal accounts, Cambodia still shows the physical scars of the genocide, no more so than in the many killing fields across the country, used for their discreet locations by the Khmer Rouge. One of the biggest killing fields is just outside of Phnom Penh, Choeung Ek. More than 17,000 innocent people were brutally massacred there -and we were to walk around the fields to try to gain a small understanding of the horror of those four years.
A heaviness descended over all of us right from the start as we had to walk past beggars, all missing limbs, to get to the entrance gate. I had a lump in my throat from that moment; it hit me that we had just made the journey that 17,000 people made to their death less than forty years ago. Did they know their fate? Or did they clutch to the lies they were force fed, too hungry, too tired and too frightened to consider the reality.
Victims were brought here by the truck load, up to 300 in a day, where they were bound and forced to kneel down in front of one of the mass graves, already seething with rotting corpses, which will have been sprayed with DDT to disguise the smell from anyone passing by.
As we walked around, we listened to the voices of real survivors of the Pol Pot regime via an audio guide, showing us the many mass graves that were discovered here (some of which were purging teeth and bones), the piles of clothing that emerge every year when the river levels drop, and, worst of all, the tree against which the children were smashed to death in front of their mothers.
Pol Pot did not want to waste money on bullets, so the common method of killing was beating to the back of the head with hammers, axe handles and bamboo sticks for adults, while children were either beaten against a tree or thrown in the air and speared on a bayonet. They even used the leaves of a razor-sharp palm tree to cut throats of certain victims, and many were beheaded completely. We walked around the site in stunned silence, everyone's emotions as tangible as the bones and clothes before us.
After paying a visit to the commemorative stupa, filled with over 5,000 skulls of victims, we then made the reverse journey back to the city, something the 17,000 innocent people were never lucky enough to do.
We headed to where the atrocities began: S-21, formally a public school in the centre of the city, but transformed immediately by the Khmer Rouge into a high security prison where detainees, thought to be enemies, were systematically photographed, interrogated, tortured, and eventually sentenced for execution. Enemies included professionals, monks and anyone who were considered a threat to the ultra-paranoid regime - all forced to sign a false confession for crimes they didn't commit.
In the cells they were shackled together on the ground without any kind of bedding or mats underneath them. Once here you were not allowed to talk or make any noise. Doing so would result in lashes or electric shocks. If you needed to adjust your position on the floor, you had to ask permission first, as doing so without permission would result in punishment.
Visiting S-21 was another sombre experience. Walls are lined with rows upon rows of photographs. Old men, pregnant women, and small children - the faces of the dead whose eyes bore into you. Cabinets are filled with skulls, and cells still have rusting devices of torture within them.
The most harrowing image of the all was an old exercise structure in the school's playground. It had been turned into a torture device where prisoners were strung up, their wrists tied behind their backs, and were dunked in huge tubs of water and suspended in mid air at intervals until they gave the name of other 'enemies', probably their own family and close friends.
Out of an estimated 17,000 people imprisoned at Tuol Sleng, there were only seven known survivors.
I don't think I can get across the extent of what we saw that day in words. And I was frustrated that Europe or America didn't step in to prevent the four year mass genocide. It was the Vietnamese, in the end, who saved thousands.
One of the other things I can't get my head around is that even though this was all discovered in 1980, only now, in 2011, are the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders standing trial in the hands of the UN. In fact, the UN continued to recognise Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge as the leaders of Cambodia until 1997. Justice still hasn't been served for the millions who suffered and died in the hands of evil, and his army.
The effects the Khmer Rouge rule can be still observed in the population today. Families are still struggling to re-stabilise themselves after losing a high proportion of their male members, and jobs are still a hot commodity in a country where many of the cities were completely destroyed. The lack of jobs is not the only factor affecting the recovery of Cambodia's economy, another debilitating factor is the complete lack of education received by children growing up during and shortly after the Khmer Rouge period. What's more, physical disabilities caused by torture, land mines, and chronic hunger still affect many people today.
As a result, Cambodia is still one of Asia's poorest countries. But rather than viewing the country with pity (despite being reduced to tears at times during our time there), I'm in awe of how they have recovered from the scars caused by the Khmer Rouge.
Years of suffering have crippled the country, but they show so much pride in what they do have: the greatness of Angkor, incredible natural beauty and kind, forgiving hearts. It was the incredible people that really made our time in Cambodia.
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