Pol Pot – Hitler of The East

K S Kanakasabapathi

There are innumerable temples that can be visited by one interested in archaeology but the common tourist gets “templed out” after three or four days of temple tour, visiting ruins and learning about the glorious past of a country now reduced to utter poverty. Here is a country that has no electricity except through diesel generators, no railway systems and no highways of standard equal to its neighbours. We had decided to reserve one day for the capital Phnom Penh where we could visit the Genocide Museum otherwise known as the Killing Fields. Tough this was covered by us during the first part of our stay, I have made it the last part in my write up to give prominence to the past glory of the country.

Siem Reap is closer to Thailand border and is north of Phnom Penh. We had taken a flight to Phnom Penh from Bangkok and took a bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, which is close to the Angkor Temples. The bus journey was very tedious and consumed over six hours through a “Highway” which was as good as a bad city road. Miles of paddy fields and small towns without electricity lined the route. Hence we decided to seek other means of transport for our return to Phnm Penh. There were two alternatives. One was hiring a van as we were seven people and the other was taking a boat which would take us along the Mekong River to Phnom Penh. This river is the border between Cambodia and Vietnam. We found that the boat service was only once a day and would be leaving early morning. Since we wanted to cover Banteay Srei before going to Phnom Penh, we had to opt for a van only. The van took about four and a half hours to reach Phnom Penh.

No visit to Cambodia can be complete without a personal view of the dark ages of the 1970's when Pol Pot ruled the country. Anyone can get first hand information about Pol Pot through Wikipedia and hence I am avoiding the details of his life history etc., to concentrate on what we saw in the Killing Fields.

Here is a brief information on Pol Pot before I proceed further:

Saloth Sar (19 May 1925 – 15 April 1998),better known as Pol Pot, was a Cambodian Maoist revolutionary who led the Khmer Rouge from 1963 until his death in 1998. From 1963 to 1981, he served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. From 1976 to 1979, he also served as the prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea. Pol Pot became leader of Cambodia on April 17, 1975. During his time in power he imposed agrarian socialism, forcing urban dwellers to relocate to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labor projects. The combined effects of forced labor, malnutrition, poor medical care, and executions resulted in the deaths of approximately 21% of the Cambodian population.In all, an estimated 800,000 to three million people (out of a population of approximately seven million) died under his three-year premiership.


The Killing Fields in Phnom Penh is one of the sites where such executions were carried out. The present government has made this a museum exhibiting the horrors along with a display of weapons used and a video show.

This picture of the display at the entrance shows how truck loads of victims were brought to the site

The executions were carried out using weapons like axe etc. To prevent the crying of the victims from being heard, a loudspeaker was fixed on a nearby tree with loud music being played. The victioms prior ro execution were to dig pits for mass burial. The bodies were thrown into the pits with a DDT spray to ensure that anyone still alive would be dead and also to prevent spreading of infections. Here are one mass burial pit and the tree from which a blaring loudspeaker was hung:

Here are some of the weapons used for killing:

Even children were not spared as could be seen from this picture. One is reminded of our own Krishna story in which Kamsa killed the children of his sister Devaki in a similar way:

The skulls taken out from the mass graves are exhibited in a tower. The skulls are seggregated agewise and genderwise. These exhibits were in a thatched shed earlier, and now have been placed in a multistoried tower. The upper decks contain other bones.

This picture shows an ex-school teacher who assisted Pol Pot's men in executing many people. After the fall of Pol Pot, he quietly went back to his school. Years later, he was identified and tried in a court of law. The people feel that the punishment of a few years in prison was nowhere equal to the crime.

A visit to the Killing Fields has the same effect as visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC or the Peace Park in Hiroshima. It shows how low can humans descend in their hunger for power.

With this post I am concluding the visit to Cambodia and shall move on to some other topic shortly. I hope thet the viewers found the posts useful and interesting. I shall just add a a few pictures of Samudra Manthan statue at Bangkok's Suvarnabhoomi Airport, which I was keen to see to make sure it was real. This statue was in the departure area after checking in and the people in arrival area were unaware of its existence. This will help to end the post in a happy note.