Killing Fields

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Skull inside the Choeung Ek stupa

The Killing Fields are a number of slightly more than three hundred sites in Cambodia where at politically motivated mass murder is estimated that more than 100,000 people by the Maoist - nationalist Khmer Rouge were killed. The Khmer Rouge mass murder of its own people in Democratic Kampuchea was committed from 1975 to 1979. According to current estimates, the total number of victims of the genocide in Cambodia was over two million.

Mass killings

Bones of slain children in Choeung Ek

The mass murders of the Khmer Rouge in Killing Fields like Choeung Ek have been well documented by them. From Tuol Sleng 4000 confessions of the tortured inmates are received. Here alone, 14,000 Cambodians were imprisoned, tortured and forced to confess, and all but half a dozen survivors were killed. Pol Pot's conspiracy theory behind the interrogations and murders was similar to that of the show trials in the Soviet Union during the Great Terror and the Rootless Cosmopolitan Campaign of 1948–53. In order to satisfy the party leadership, on whose order the Killing Fields had been established, camp leaders like Kaing Guek Eav developed particular bureaucratic zeal and documented their mass murders with written confessions from the tortured and subsequently executed victims. The camps dutifully sent the reports on Son Sen to the party headquarters K-1. There these texts were compared with one another, alleged conspiratorial networks with Vietnam or the CIA were identified and their members were executed in the killing fields, which resulted in further confessions. From 1975 to the beginning of 1976 it was mainly soldiers from the former Lon Nol regime and Cambodians with connections to North Vietnam who fell victim to the killing fields.

After some soldiers had fired ammunition in May 1976 and were arrested for it and interrogated in Tuol Sleng, the political cleansing began, which was primarily directed against the party cadres from the east of the country, which, under the leadership of Sao Phim, advocate a more lenient stance against Vietnam had. The elimination of Pol Pot's longtime political companions, Saran and Keo Meas , was followed by the elimination of the ambassador in Hanoi, Sien An, and his wife, as well as the former member of the Central Committee Keo Moni, by the end of the year. Even functionaries of the former front organization of the Communist party of Campuchea , the Pracheachon , now fell victim to the killing fields. In December 1976 Pol Pot called a leadership seminar for the party, where he spoke of enemies and traitors as microbes within the party who, if left unchecked, threatened the very existence of the Cambodian communists. In order to put pressure on the party cadres in the east, which are supposedly more susceptible to treason, and to be able to replace them with communists from the southwest, the leadership decided at this meeting for the eastern administrative zone to set particularly high standards for rice production.

Shortly after the leadership seminar in January 1977, high party officials Touch Phoeun and Koy Thuon, followed in April by Information Minister Hu Nim , were arrested and tortured and interrogated in the killing fields. In order to destroy their alleged CIA network in the party, many people were subsequently eliminated from the personal circle of Phoeun and Thuon, who made up a large part of the party's intelligentsia . Many party cadres in the north also fell victim to this wave of purges and were replaced by communists from the east. While Phoeun and Thuon were dying in Duol Sleng, Pol Pot visited the northwestern administrative zone. After that, the local party leadership in the Killing Fields was killed here and replaced by party members from the southwest who were under the control of Ta Mok . He represented Pol Pot's line with particular brutality, and in addition to party cadres, his murders also fell victim to the urban population deported to rural forced labor , the "new people", who did not meet the utopian harvest specifications. Until mid-1977, the Killing Fields were an essential part of Pol Pot's government work, which developed an unstoppable dynamic of its own due to the confessions under torture and the increasing number of alleged conspiracy networks that were exposed. In the years 1977-78, alleged conspirators in the direct vicinity of Pol Pot and other leaders were exposed and murdered along with their families. This in turn intensified the fears of persecution of Pol Pot, who from then on hardly pursued any goals other than purifying the party, while the base of the Communist party of Campuchea became increasingly narrow due to the mass murders. Pol Pot even put alleged errors such as a failure of the electricity or water supply in his office in a conspiratorial context and had the corresponding supervisory staff killed. Overall, analysis of the Tuol Sleng confessions suggests that three quarters of the victims were abducted to the killing fields not because of their activities but because of their personal connections. There are different estimates of the number of victims on the killing fields, the American historian David P. Chandler considers a number of over 100,000 to be likely. According to the most popular estimates, the genocide in Cambodia killed more than two million people, most of them due to disease, hunger and a lack of medical care.

Reports about the Killing Fields reached the outside world more and more from 1977. The French missionary François Ponchaud published the work Cambodge année zéro that year , which was based on analyzes of the statements of Cambodian refugees and reports from the radio program of the Democratic Kampuchea. This book has been criticized from some quarters because it serves the purpose of anti-communist rhetoric. From 1979, after the Khmer Rouge was ousted, most of Ponchaud's statements turned out to be true, so that in the same year Tuol Sleng was rededicated in a genocide museum. A year later, the first confessions from Tuol Sleng reached the western world, with the exception of a few staunch supporters no longer doubting the crimes of the Pol Pot regime.

After the withdrawal of the Vietnamese occupation forces in 1989, the Khmer Rouge regained control of smaller towns on the Cambodian-Thai border in the far north and west of the country. According to locals, there was another killing field near their main base, Anlong Veng . According to the Documentation Center of Cambodia , around 3,000 people were murdered here between 1993 and 1997 - long after the actual rule of the Khmer Rouge.

Choeung Ek

Memory stupa in Choeung Ek

The most famous site of the Killing Fields is in Choeung Ek , near Phnom Penh , where up to 17,000 people were killed. The images of thousands of skulls and other human remains that littered the fields of Cambodia are particularly memorable. The skulls are now partly kept in a stupa that was erected in memory of the dead on the site in Choeung Ek. Other crime scenes are also located near the Phnom Sampeou near Battambang .

In order to save ammunition, the doomed were not shot in this execution center, but rather beaten to death with iron bars, axes or the like. Children were beaten against trees until they were dead. The dead were buried in mass graves, which are still clearly visible on the site today. Due to heavy rain and erosion, clothing and bone fragments are still emerging from the ground, which the memorial staff collects every two to three months.

Since sometimes more people arrived per day than could be killed, the people were temporarily locked in a "waiting room". So that the people waiting for their death could not hear the screams of the dying, the system was filled with music.

Most of the murdered people are believed to have come from Tuol-Sleng Prison (S-21) in Phnom Penh, which served as a torture and interrogation center. Before that it was a high school, now it's a museum .

filming

The crime became the basis for the British anti-war film The Killing Fields - Crying country from the year 1984 , which on the true story of a friendship between the Cambodian Dith Pran with the American journalist Sydney Schanberg based during the revolution in Cambodia 1975th

literature

Information board at the Killing Fields
  • Elizabeth Becker: When the war was over. Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution . Public Affairs, New York NY 1998, ISBN 1-891620-00-2 .
  • David P. Chandler : Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Revised Edition). Westview, 1999 Boulder (CO). Silkworm Books, Chiang Mai (Thailand) 2000, ISBN 974-7551-18-7 .
  • Erich Follath : The children of the Killing Fields. Cambodia's path from a terror country to a tourist paradise . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt et al., Stuttgart et al. 2009, ISBN 978-3-421-04387-0 .
  • Ben Kiernan : The Pol Pot regime. Race, power and genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. 1975-79. Yale University Press, New Haven CT et al. 1996, ISBN 0-300-06113-7 .
  • Haing S. Ngor : Surviving the Killing Fields . Warner Books, New York NY 1989, ISBN 0-446-38990-0 , (Report from a doctor who survived the torture of the Khmer Rouge and was able to flee to Thailand. Ngor received an Oscar for his role in The Killing Fields (1984) ).
  • Dith Pran : Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields. Memoirs by Survivors . Yale University Press, New Haven CT et al. 1997, ISBN 0-300-06839-5 , ( Yale Southeast Asia studies monograph series ).
  • Manfred Rohde: Farewell to the Killing Fields. Cambodia's long road to normal . Bouvier, Bonn 1999, ISBN 3-416-02887-2 .
  • Sydney Schanberg : The Death and Life of Dith Pran . Viking Penguin, New York NY et al. 1985, ISBN 0-14-008457-6 , ( Elisabeth Sifton books ).
  • Luong Ung: First they killed my father. A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers . Harper Collins Publishers, New York NY 2000, ISBN 0-06-019332-8 .

Web links

Commons : Killing Fields  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ David P. Chandler: Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Revised Edition). Pp. 123-129.
  2. ↑ Ben Kiernan: The Pol Pot Regime. Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (2nd Edition). P. 336.
  3. ↑ Ben Kiernan: The Pol Pot Regime. Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (2nd Edition). Pp. 350, 351.
  4. ^ David P. Chandler: Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Revised Edition). Pp. 130-132.
  5. ^ David P. Chandler: Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Revised Edition). P. 146.
  6. ^ David P. Chandler: Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Revised Edition). Pp. 159-160.
  7. ↑ Helen Jarvis: Cambodian Genocide Overview . In Paul R. Bartrop  & Steven Leonard Jacobs (Eds.): Modern Genocide: The Definitive Resource and Document Collection . (Volume 1). ABC-Clio, Santa Barbara 2015, ISBN 978-1-61069-363-9 , p. 441.
  8. ^ David P. Chandler: Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Revised Edition). Pp. 159-160.
  9. ^ Kelvin Rowley: Second Life, Second Death. The Khmer Rouge After 1978. Yale University Genocide Studies Program (GSP) Working Paper No. 24, 2004, p. 214.

Coordinates: 11 ° 29 ′ 4 "  N , 104 ° 54 ′ 7"  E