It is said that Phnom Penh is the ‘Pearl of Asia’. I’m not sure I’d agree with such an elegant description, as Cambodia’s capital city is anything but elegant, though our journey here was certainly worthwhile.

Phnom Penh is a bustling capital city in the developing world, so it is hot, dirty and smelly, anyone who says otherwise is bending the truth. It is also inescapably Cambodian, meaning that the people are kind, friendly and working for a better future for themselves and their country. The reality is that we, like most people, didn’t come here for the food or architecture, but for something more grim.

As the capital, Phnom Penh was at the centre of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, and the city now hosts two sites which memorialise that cruel time.

I hope you can forgive me for the inevitable lack of nuance as I attempt to summarise a big chunk of history in a few paragraphs.

After its conversion to Buddhism was embedded, Cambodia in its many guises became a pawn, and its people became passengers to their own destinies. They were ruled by their neighbours until the French arrival in Indochina made Cambodia a colony.  To give the French a slight break, this seems to be a rare case of a nation benefitting from colonialism, as the French protected them from the instability of invasion by their neighbours.

In the WWII era the Japanese army came then went, for the French to return then leave. The US – Vietnam war then spilled into Cambodia, as the US sought to disrupt Vietnamese supply chains which were running through the Cambodian jungles. American bombing of rural Cambodia, known as the ‘secret war’, took the lives and livelihoods of swathes of Cambodian people. The establishment of a US ‘puppet government’ in Phnom Penh firmed up rural resentment of America and western values.

This paved the way for the emergence of the Khmer Rouge, a communist group led by Pol Pot and sponsored by Vietnam, who overthrew the US backed government in 1975. It appears to me that Pol Pot was as brutal a dictator as Hitler or Stalin.

The Khmer Rouge immediately evacuated all cities, under the rouse of US bombing threats. Within 3 days the capital city was totally deserted. The population were pushed into the countryside, initially with reluctant agreement, though it soon became a march forced at gunpoint. The population were forced to build agricultural work camps where the Khmer Rouge would given them only scraps of rice for 18 hour work days, selling the produce overseas.

Anyone from an intellectual background, anyone who might have held authority, whether as academics, teachers, military, police, artists or tradesmen, all were rounded up. They were tortured until they confessed to false crimes or to being members of a CIA network, then executed.

This continued from 1975 to 1979 when the Vietnamese army invaded and liberated Cambodia, leading to a mostly free and to some extent democratic country. The West wasn’t big fan of communism or the newly independent state of Vietnam, so refused to recognise the new Cambodian government. Instead, the UK, USA and other western states continued to recognise the now expelled Khmer Rouge government as the true government. The British government sent money and arms to support Pol Pot’s brutal leadership. Only in the 1990s was the true government of Cambodia recognised by the West and the UN. As a British citizen, I find this embarrasing, and a reminder to question the policies of my government.

Since the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian democracy has been a single party state., with the prime minster having served since 1985, and being an ex-member of the Khmer Rouge himself. Nonetheless, the lives of the Khmer people are as free and as safe as they have ever been, feel a sense of control over their destinies, and recent elections are bringing a new more liberal party into contention.

Whilst in Phnom Penh we visited two sites of significance, the first was the prison known as Tol Sleung, the second was Choeung Ek, known as the Killing Fields.

Tol Sleung was a school, turned into a prison when the Khmer Rouge evecuated the city. Prisoners were brought here to be tortured until they would confess to whatever the regime wanted them to admit. This ranged from being a part of the CIA to having wasted fabric in their textiles factory. People who didn’t know what the CIA was were made to confess to being a part of it, and implicate members of their communities as well.

The torture methods were ingeniously cruel. I won’t repeat them here, but I think I’d confess to anything they wanted.

Once a signed confession was obtained and signed off by the prison manager, known as ‘Dutch’, the prisoners were held until being taken to the killing fields.

The prison conditions themselves involved being tied to the floor for 24 hours a day, and beaten if you moved or made a noise. Prisoners were fed just enough to keep them alive, as if a prisoner died before being ‘found guilty’ then the guard would likely become a prisoner himself.

Meticulous record keeping shows that many members of the Khmer Rouge regime became victims themselves (I feel little sympathy), as did Westerners who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. An Englishman and a Kiwi were sailing around the world when they stopped in Cambodia, unaware of the revolution. The story was excruciating to listen to. They were imprisoned and tortured until they confessed to being a part of the CIA. One had the humour to name his supervisor in the CIA as Colonel Sanders (‘the colonel’ of KFC), and named members of western pop music bands as CIA leaders. They were then executed.

It was a harsh reminder of the brutality that humans can inflict on each other, so recently that people younger than our parents were there in person telling stories of their imprisonment.

The most crushing visit was still to come, as we visited the killing fields.

Literally a field with some huts on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, this is now an open air museum to Pol Pot’s equivalent of the final solution. Once the Cambodian citizens who had knowledge or skills had been rounded up and made to confess to ficticuous crimes, they were taken to killing fields.

They were normally told that they were being moved to a new prison overnight. They were blindfolded and driven in a truck to the field, where loud revolutionary music was played to drown out the screams of the people ahead of them in the queue.

Meticulous administration complete, each person was walked blindfolded to a ditch. The Khmer Rouge did not want to ‘waste’ bullets, so used far more brutal methods. These were generally fairly agricultural, involving bamboo sticks to the head, machettes, hoes, clubs and bayonets. Many were not actually dead when they fell, so chemicals were poured over them to burn their bodies and cover the smells, and they were buried.

One terrifying revolutionary saying was that to remove weeds you must pull them out with the roots. This meant that if they murdered one person then they would murder the whole family to avoid attempts at revenge. Countless children, including infants, were murdered. Babies were held by the legs and beaten against a tree before being tossed in a hole. The inhumanity is hard to comprehend.

When Pol Pot first came to power, a handful of people a day were murdered here. By the end of the regeime, as leaders began to panic, over 300 people a day were killed in this place.

This small site, only a few acres, saw the murder of 17,000 people. Across the country there were around 300 such sites. The Khmer Rouge regeime led to the deaths of around a quarter of the population, whether in killing fields or by disease and deliberate malnourishment.

A beautiful monument has been built at Choeung Ek, commemorating the people whose lives were stolen. It contains the skulls excavated from the site, sorted by age and method of murder. The tiny skulls of infants can be seen in rows. Aside from the emotional pain, I initially found this almost disrespectful to the people whose bodies are displayed, people who should be alive today, some would be as young as 41. I then realised that this is a tribute to them, and serves to say what they would no doubt want to say themselves; that such brutality is still very real in the modern world, and that we must recognise it early and stop it, lest our own families end up with the same fate, wherever we may live.

While I rationally knew most of this already, my visit to Phnom Penh has pushed the lesson deep into my soul, in a way I shall not easily forget.

Many leaders of the Khmer Rouge are now dead, and the remaining few are standing trial in a Cambodian led international tribunal. This has taken a painfully long time to bring about. ‘Dutch’, designer and manager of Tol Sleung, was the first to be sentenced. Having converted to Christianity, a religion which gives forgiveness if sins are confessed, he showed remorse and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The search for justice and reconciliation continues.

We did not fall in love with Phnom Penh, nor hate it, but we did fall in love with the Khmer people. Their warmth and kindness has made our stay here a wonderful one, and we are sad to leave, but it is time for us to move on to Vietnam.