The Killing Fields

In Cambodia now, and today I visited the Killing Fields of Cheung Ek and Tuol Sleng museum, which was a school that the Khmer Rouge converted into a prison. Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge ruled for almost four years at the end of the 1970s after winning a civil war. The movement was communist despite initially being backed by King Sihanouk, and very Orwellian seeking to ban possessions, education and all kinds of individualism. The killing fields are just outside Phnom Penh. The only way for me to get there was to get a lift by taxi or motorbike and inevitably the person who takes you would have lost friends and relatives during that time. About 2 million people are believed to have died - a quarter of Cambodia's population at the time - although some historians put much of that down to US bombing during the Vietnam war. Either way the killing fields are chilling. There is a large monument in the centre filled with 20 shelves full of human skulls, about 80,000 in all. They are grouped by age and sex. Dotted around the outskirts are hut structures surrounding pits filled with weeds and muddy rainwater, where mass graves had been dug up.

Much of Tuol Sleng is given up to mug shot photos of Khmer Rouge victims, staring back at their captors; emaciated, defiant and terrified. There are also stories from those who survived and relatives of those who didn't. There is a floor of brick cells and a floor of wooden ones, none were big enough for a person to lie flat. Aside from that there are more skulls and the instruments of torture used by the Khmer Rouge.

Generally, I'm in favour of this kind of morbid tourism, such as Ground Zero and the River Kwae Bridge, as they stop people forgetting things that shouldn't be forgotten and honour the dead or people who made huge sacrifices. But I feel sorry for Cambodians and people living in Phnom Penh because they are so reliant on tourism and the tourism is reliant on the killing fields. They are trapped by their own horrific recent history.