History

Killing Fields (Cambodia)

Not to be confused with The Killing Fields, the 1984 film.
A tall white memorial tower with a tiered, gilded roof and spire, glass doors at the top of a short flight of steps, among trees
The memorial stupa at Choeung Ek, south of Phnom Penh, 2013

The killing fields are the sites across Cambodia where people were executed and buried under the Khmer Rouge (ខ្មែរក្រហម), which ruled from 1975 to 1979.[1][2][3] They lie in 170 districts and in nearly every province of the country.[4] Among them is Choeung Ek, outside Phnom Penh, where the national ceremony for the victims is held each year.[3][5]

Name

The photojournalist Dith Pran first used the term killing fields for the country's massacre sites.[1] He gave the name to the corpses and skeletons he came upon as he escaped.[6] His story was told in the 1984 British film The Killing Fields, which was based on a magazine article by the journalist Sydney Schanberg.[7][6]

Death toll

Estimates of the deaths under Khmer Rouge rule differ. Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program puts the toll at about 1.7 million people, 21 percent of the population.[8] News coverage in 2020 and 2025 also put it at about 1.7 million, and the Associated Press in 2025 put the loss at about a quarter of the population.[2][3][5] A Documentation Center of Cambodia essay has the same 1.7 million and also a quarter of the people.[9] Coverage from 2008 has higher figures: some 2 million in Al Jazeera's story, and nearly 2 million in KPBS's.[7][1] In the Associated Press obituary of Dith Pran, the regime of Pol Pot was blamed for nearly 2 million deaths among Cambodia's 7 million people.[6]

People were executed or died of starvation, disease, forced labor and torture.[9][2][3] Thousands were executed for showing signs of intellect or Western influence, such as wearing glasses or a wristwatch.[6]

Mass graves

Vietnamese-led forces invaded in late December 1978 and drove the Khmer Rouge from power. They found wide evidence of mass death.[9] Across the country, most of the bones in the graves were left where they lay, open to the weather.[9]

The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) mapped the sites from 1995 to 2007 through interviews, fieldwork and satellite positioning.[4][10] The Royal Netherlands Government and the United States Department of State paid for the project.[4] It produced a map of the country with the locations of mass graves, former prisons and memorials.[4] In the mapping, a mass grave is any pit holding 4 or more bodies; some hold over 1,000.[10] Many of the sites hold, or once held, the remains of thousands of people.[4]

The totals differ by source. DC-Cam's mapping found 19,733 burial pits, 196 prisons and 81 memorials, and its project page puts the sites at over 388.[4][10] A footnote to the DC-Cam essay has over 380 sites with more than 19,000 graves, 189 prisons and 80 memorials.[9] Yale's Cambodian Genocide Program, which assisted DC-Cam from 1995 to 2005, has 309 mass-grave sites with about 19,000 pits, 158 prisons and 76 memorial sites.[8] In DC-Cam's view, the sameness of the prisons and pits across the country, backed by witness accounts, shows that crimes against humanity were carried out systematically.[4] Almost no one buried in the killing fields has been identified from the remains.[9]

S-21 and Choeung Ek

In the museum's own account, the S-21 prison at Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh was the center of a prison network across the country.[11] People the regime saw as political enemies were held there in secret, questioned, tortured and killed.[11] Documents found at the prison show at least 14,000 people held there, while the museum puts the number imprisoned from 1975 to 1979 at 15,000 to 20,000.[9][11][2] The DC-Cam essay has fewer than a dozen prisoners alive when the Vietnamese reached Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979; the museum puts the survivors at 12.[9][11] The prison's outlying sites included Prey Sar (S-24), a reeducation center in Phnom Penh's Dangkor district.[11]

Prisoners who lived through torture were first killed near the prison, and later taken to Choeung Ek to be killed.[11] Its distance is about 15 kilometers in each account, but the direction differs: south of the capital in the Associated Press story, and west of the city on the museum's site.[3][11][9] The site was found about a year after the invasion.[9] At least 20,000 people were put to death there, most of Tuol Sleng's prisoners among them.[9] Prisoners were often made to dig graves for themselves or for others before they were killed with crude weapons.[11] Victims were usually made to kneel at the edge of a grave, and guards struck them on the back of the head or neck with a hoe or spade.[9] Children were killed by being slammed against a tree at Choeung Ek.[2] Duch, who oversaw the killing at Tuol Sleng, took criminal responsibility for the deaths of babies but blamed his subordinates for beating their bodies against trees.[2]

In 1980 about 89 of the roughly 130 mass graves at Choeung Ek were opened, and nearly 9,000 skeletons were taken out with the help of forensic specialists from Vietnam.[9] Preservatives were applied to the remains, which were then kept in an open-sided wooden pavilion.[9] Officials also laid out bones in decorative patterns for photographs, which dismayed many people.[9] In June 1988 a new memorial went up at Choeung Ek; its concrete stupa holds about 8,000 skulls behind sealed glass.[9] The site has a memorial with skulls of victims and mass graves where thousands more were buried.[3]

Remains and memorials

The Vietnamese-installed People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) set out to keep the skeletal remains.[9] In the DC-Cam essay by Wynne Cougill, the PRK first meant to show that China had been behind the killings, and later saw the remains as proof of genocide and as grounds for its own rule.[9]

Soon after the capital fell to the Vietnamese, S-21 was turned into the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum: in late 1979 on the museum's site, and in 1980 in the DC-Cam essay.[11][9] There the PRK built a map of Cambodia 12 meters square from 300 exhumed skulls.[9][11] Its designer was the Vietnamese general Mai Lam, the museum's archivist.[9] He said that keeping the remains was "very important for the Cambodian people – it's the proof."[9] The map was on show until 2002, when it was taken apart, and DC-Cam put a satellite map of the prisons and mass graves in its place.[9] The DC-Cam essay, written about 2004, has the map's skulls in a glass-fronted wooden case; on the museum's site, they were buried or are kept on show in a glass cabinet as forensic evidence.[9][11] In the museum courtyard, white concrete graves stand for the last 14 torture victims found there.[11] Tuol Sleng, once a high school, is a memorial to the crimes committed inside it.[2][11]

Many national and local memorials were built across Cambodia in the ten years after the Khmer Rouge fell.[9] Survivors put up memorials next to many of the sites.[4] In late 1999 a senior monk began a memorial in Kandal province for the dead of Sa-ang prison.[9]

Most Cambodians, the government and the clergy among them, appear to favor keeping the skulls and other remains, in Cougill's assessment.[9] In late 2001 Prime Minister Hun Sen told local authorities to study the remaining grave sites so that each could become a memorial.[9] The main opposition came from the former king Sihanouk and some members of the royalist party FUNCINPEC.[9] On February 23, 2001, Sihanouk asked Hun Sen in a letter to have the skulls removed from the Tuol Sleng map and "cremated in the Buddhist way", so that their souls might find peace.[9] He proposed that the ashes be kept in a stupa at Udong, the former royal capital.[9] Hun Sen later offered a national vote on the matter once any Khmer Rouge trials were over.[9] On April 17, 2004, the 29th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge, Sihanouk called for the victims of the killing fields to be cremated.[9]

In 2003 DC-Cam gave many skulls, from Choeung Ek and elsewhere in Cambodia, to a team of North American forensic specialists, and in February 2004 it held an exhibition of the skulls at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.[9]

Day of Remembrance

In 1984 the Vietnamese-installed government declared May 20, taken as the day the genocide began, a "National Day of Hatred".[3] In 2018 the day was renamed the National Day of Remembrance, to honor the victims.[3] The official ceremony is held at Choeung Ek.[3][5] In 2025, 50 years after the Khmer Rouge came to power, about 2,000 people, among them several dozen Buddhist monks, watched students act out scenes of torture and execution there.[3][5]

The tribunal

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia heard Case 002/02 against Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan.[12] The crime sites in that case included four security centers: S-21, Kraing Ta Chan, Au Kanseng and Phnom Kraol.[12] Judgment in the case came on November 16, 2018, and the case against Nuon Chea ended with his death in August 2019.[12]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 KPBS, Cambodian Photojournalist Dith Pran Dies at 65 (March 31, 2008)
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 ABC News, Khmer Rouge prison commander Comrade Duch dies in Cambodia at 77 (September 1, 2020)
  3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 CTV News, Cambodia's 'Day of Remembrance' marks the 50th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge genocide (May 20, 2025)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 Documentation Center of Cambodia, Mapping the Killing Fields (undated)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Euronews, Cambodians remember Khmer Rouge victims 50 years on (May 20, 2025)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 The Daily Herald, Dith Pran, journalist of 'Killing Fields' dies at 65 (March 30, 2008)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Al Jazeera, Killing Fields photojournalist dies (April 3, 2008)
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Yale University Genocide Studies Program, Cambodian Genocide Program (undated)
  9. ↑ 9.00 9.01 9.02 9.03 9.04 9.05 9.06 9.07 9.08 9.09 9.10 9.11 9.12 9.13 9.14 9.15 9.16 9.17 9.18 9.19 9.20 9.21 9.22 9.23 9.24 9.25 9.26 9.27 9.28 9.29 9.30 9.31 9.32 9.33 Documentation Center of Cambodia, Buddhist Cremation Traditions for the Dead and the Need to Preserve Forensic Evidence in Cambodia (undated)
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Documentation Center of Cambodia, Mapping of Cambodia Killing Fields (1975 to 1979) (undated)
  11. ↑ 11.00 11.01 11.02 11.03 11.04 11.05 11.06 11.07 11.08 11.09 11.10 11.11 11.12 Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, History of the Museum (undated)
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Trial 002/02 (undated)
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This page was last edited on 14 November 2026, at 18:11.