Semester at Sea docked in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam — still locally referred to as Saigon — for our eighth port visit. Although I was eager to explore a country that played a role in dividing the United States for 15 years, I chose to go to Cambodia rather than staying in Vietnam. Despite the heavy toll on both countries during the Vietnam War — known as the American War there — Cambodia paid an even higher rate of casualties. During the war, the Viet Cong frequently fled across the border to Cambodia to avoid U.S. forces. The United States pursued the Viet Cong into Cambodia, leaving a deadly aftermath. Cambodians workers, infuriated that their government was doing little to stop the American’s bombing raids, began supporting Pol Pot and his Communist Party, later known as the Khmer Rouge. The masses followed Pol Pot as he invaded the capital city, Phnom Penh, April 17, 1975 and seized control.
Pol Pot’s philosophy revolved around his idea of the “base people” and the “new people.” To him, the base people were the backbone of society — no one would survive without them — and the new people, who were thinkers like doctors, lawyers, monks, teachers or professors, exploited the base people. Pol Pot completely cleared out cities and marched the occupants far into the country to teach them the country life. Families were torn apart because the family was considered to be a part of the bourgeois mentality. Dissenters were killed. Schools were practically non-existent. Hospitals were practically useless because doctors were also victims of the Khmer Rouge. An estimated 26 percent of the Cambodian population died as a result of malnutrition, exhaustion, execution or disease during Pol Pot’s four-year reign. That number is equivalent to about 750,000 to 1.7 million people, though the people I talked to Cambodia estimated that were about 3 million victims.
The more time I spend in Cambodia, the more I am reminded of a class I took with History Prof. Jeffrey Rossman last fall called the History of Genocide. During the course, we studied the definition of genocide, its causes, the atrocities committed, survivors’ accounts and the social psychology of mass murder.
Still, nothing could prepare me for our visit to the killing fields I had read so much about. When we arrived at our destination and the bus jolted to a stop, I looked out of the bus window. I saw a fence of barbed wire. Behind it stood the infamous S21 Prison that I had learned about on a picturesque brick campus a world away.
S21, short for Security Prison 21, was originally a secondary school in Phnom Penh. Physical education equipment can still be seen on the front courtyard, as it later became torture equipment. During his reign, Pol Pot turned the school into a center of detention, interrogation and torture. Inmates were brutalized for their confessions and often died during torture sessions. They were kept in large rooms in shackles or confined to cells measuring 0.8-by-2-meters, and were subject to execution. Inmates, many of whom suffered from starvation, were considered political prisoners but usually were guilty of far less serious crimes, if guilty of any crime at all. The prison was not liberated until the Vietnamese invaded in 1979. Of about 20,000 people that entered S21, there were at most 12 known survivors.
We were taken to the killing field where most S21 inmates were killed. Prisoners knelt before mass graves, were hit in the neck with a steel or bamboo rod, slumped into the grave and covered in lime. Today, skulls are stacked in a Buddhist stupor or tomb in the field’s center. The open pits, clothes and bones remain.
Though Cambodia was the most violent genocide seen during the 20th century in terms of the rate of a population killed in a single period of time, many are ignorant of its occurrence. This is why I spent my time in Cambodia, not Vietnam. The Cambodians need to know that the rest of the world cares. About 58,000 U.S. soldiers died in Vietnam. More than 1 million Cambodians died because the rest of the world was too focused on American casualties to notice the atrocities next door. Don’t forget, we live in a world, not just a country.
Katie’s column runs biweekly on Tuesdays. She can be reached at k.rember@cavalierdaily.com.
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