Choeung Ek, Tuol Sleng, and the Landmine Museum

Though nearly 30 years have passed since Vietnamese troops ousted Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge from power, Cambodia is still struggling to recover. Experts estimate that between 1.7 and 2.3 million people died as the direct result of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Pol Pot's goal, to make Cambodia into a peasant dominated Marxist society, involved the torture and execution of not only foreigners, intellectuals, and government officials but also their families and friends. These policies resulted in the almost complete decimation of Cambodia's human and physical capital base. Today, the country struggles to cope with insufficient infrastructure and a dearth of teachers. Unfortunately these problems will likely increase with the country's booming population, 40 percent of which are less than 15 years old and lack any education or skills.

Our first stop in Phnom Penh was the Choeung Ek killing fields - though there were many other execution sites around the country, Choeung Ek is believed to be the largest. Khmer Rouge soldiers executed about 17,000 civilians here during Pol Pot's four year genocidal regime. Walking around the site is a morbid experience as clothing and bone fragments still stick up from the soil. Nearly 8,000 skeletons have been disinterred from 89 of 129 mass graves on the site and the remains are housed inside a gleaming white stupa.

Our next stop was the Tuol Sleng Prison. The Khmer Rouge tortured between 17,000 and 20,000 people here that were accused of betraying the revolution. The site, a former high school, was named S-21 for Security Prison 21. The prisoners, if they weren't killed during interrogation, were invariably shipped to Choeung Ek afterwards to be executed.


Signs on the prison walls ask visitors to be quiet but they are unnecessary, the records of the atrocities committed there command silence.



If there was one bright spot among the many awful things we saw in Cambodia, it was Aki Ra, founder of the Cambodian Land Mine Museum Relief Fund. As a child, Aki's parents were killed by the Khmer Rouge who then forced him to become a child soldier and plant land mines. Later when Vietnamese forces took over Cambodia they forced him to lay land mines for them. After the Paris peace conference in 1989 Aki was able to leave the army and began clearing land mines with little more than a long handled hoe and a screwdriver.


In the years since, Aki's efforts have expanded to helping child victims of land mines with the support of a museum and international donations. The museum houses some 50,000 land mines, bombs, and mortars that Aki has cleared.
Though Aki's efforts are noteworthy, there is still a great deal of work to be done. Experts estimate that there are still more than 4 million land mines in Cambodia and each year they kill or wound hundreds, mostly children.