Phnom Penh

Before visiting PP, i had a lot of misconceptions and i wasn't particularly looking forward to embarking on the hassle and seedy undeground.

YES .... there are middle aged white western men hanging around the red light district!

YES... poverty is everywhere you look

and YES the roads are insane! (Asia have no concept of a give way at a roundabout!! )

But once you look past this, you find sweet caring gentle people with a horrific past, that was not so long ago.

On April the 17th 1975, the Khmer rouge stormed PP and began its extermination of the "new people" (people who were modern thinking, educated, had soft hands and wore glasses). The leader of the regime was Pol Pot (brother number 1), he had a deluded Maoism communistic idea of returning the land to the "base people". This day was called year zero.

The new people were arrested, with there families and tortured until they confessed/lied that they were involved in crimes against the state, as soon as the confession was signed, they were taken to the killing fields and murdered.

3million of the 8 million population of cambodia were killed and the rest were worked like slaves in the country side.

This went on for 4 years with no intervention until 1979, when the Vietnamese army liberated PP and the Khmer rouge fled to jungle on the Thai border.

i don't really want to use my blog to preach and to go into to much detail, but what me and tam found so shocking was that the UN still gave these murderer's, the Khmer rouge a seat in the UN until 1991!!!!

I did feel quite uncomfortable visiting the places of torture and death, but how i made it seem okay was that it educated me and now others, so their deaths were not in vain, to prevent this from happening ever again.

I haven't included any pictures out of respect, as i didn't take any.

We lay a flower at the memorial garden.Read more