At the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, to remember

Before setting off again, one should always pay one’s respects at the Killing Fields, the sites just outside the capital’s boundaries, where the centres of repression once stood, now converted into places of peace and reflection, and where the horrific human rights abuses perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime between 1971 and 1979 took place. These consist specifically of the former M-13 prison  where the initial phase of the repression took place, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which served as a prison, and the Choeung Ek Genocide Centre, the notorious site of the executions – all of which were transformed into memorials after the fall of the regime. The Tuol Sleng Museum allows visitors to consult its extensive archives and collections of artefacts relating to this period, documented primarily by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. They are protected by UNESCO, which wishes to ensure that the security apparatus established at national level to repress political opponents and thereby impose a classless agrarian society based on agricultural collectivisation is remembered. So that such atrocities may never be repeated.