Some films stay in your mind long after watching them. The Killing Fields is one of them. The Oscar-winning 1984 film depicts the atrocities of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. We see this through the eyes of two journalists, Cambodian Dith Pran and American Sydney Schanberg. Dith Pran said the film came nowhere near the true horrors his country experienced.

Pol Pot was a Cambodian communist revolutionary who became the leader of Cambodia (then known as Kampuchea) on 17 April, 1975. He led a dictatorship that enforced a radical form of agrarian socialism. He believed his once great country had grown weak and needed to return to its agricultural roots. This belief translated into a brutal policy that saw all those who lived in the cities forced to move to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labour projects—a relocation that spelled death for many, including people like doctors, teachers, and office workers.

Pol Pot took his inspiration from Mao Zedong’s recent Cultural Revolution in communist China. He wanted the same revolution in Cambodia. The results were devastating. Those not immediately killed on arrival lived in constant fear of execution, forced labour, malnutrition, and poor to non-existent medical care. The dictator’s instrument of brutality was the Khmer Rouge. They formed in the late 1960s, fought a guerrilla war against the Cambodian government, and gained huge support after a 1970 military coup and U.S. bombing campaigns. They captured the capital, Phnom Penh, in April 1975. Many of the Khmer Rouge soldiers were teenage peasants rounded up from remote villages by the regime and brainwashed.

Choeung Ek is one of the best-known preserved killing field sites of Cambodia today. There are around 300 in total. It’s estimated that more than 1.3 million people in total were executed in these killing fields between 1975 and 1979. The mass killings are regarded as state-sponsored genocide. British sociologist and academic Martin Shaw describes the genocide as “the purest genocide of the Cold War era.”

The total number of estimated deaths at the hands of the Khmer Rouge ranges from 1.7 to 2.5 million. This includes deaths from disease and starvation. In 1975, Cambodia had a population of roughly 8 million, meaning approximately one out of every four people lost their lives. Many did so in barbaric ways. Some of these are documented at Choeung Ek.

At Tuol Sleng (S-21) in Phnom Penh, the doomed faces of men, women, and children dominate the museum today. It was the country’s largest detention and torture centre. Nearly all died here. There is also a dark irony. As the insanity of the Khmer Rouge regime intensified, as suspicion and paranoia boiled over, the hunters became the hunted. Many of the executioners and torturers died at the hands of those who took their places. At its peak, S-21 claimed an average of 100 victims a day. There were only seven prisoners alive at S-21 when the Vietnamese army liberated the city in 1979. The prisoners had stayed alive using practical skills that proved useful to their captors, including painting and photography.

Unlike today when we have rolling news and round-the-clock documentation and multimedia sources, in the 1970s, the rest of the world had little awareness of the genocide in Cambodia. The full extent of the horrors was only revealed towards the end of the Khmer Rouge regime when people like Dith Pran escaped and were able to tell their stories to the world. Films like The Killing Fields would later bring those stories to an even wider audience. I saw the film many years before my trip to Cambodia.  

Pol Pot fled to the jungles of southwest Cambodia in 1979. His Khmer Rouge government collapsed. From 1979 to 1997, he clung to power with another member of the old Khmer Rouge regime near the border of Cambodia and Thailand. Pol Pot allegedly committed suicide in 1998 while under house arrest, although the exact cause of death remains disputed. One thing we do know is he was never brought to account for the crimes he committed. The shadow of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge continues to cast itself over the country politically, socially, and psychologically. It is a country that remains tethered to its past.