‘Killing Fields’ survivors mark 40 years since evacuation of Cambodia’s Phnom Penh

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Cambodian relatives of the Khmer Rouge victims hold a ceremony to pray for those who died during the rule of the Khmer Rouge regime. Photo: EPA

Published: 12:22pm, 17 Apr 2015

Tearful survivors on Friday marked 40 years to the day since the black-clad Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, ending a civil war but heralding a terror that killed a quarter of Cambodians and turned the capital into a ghost town.

A few hundred people, including monks and elderly regime survivors, gathered at Choeung Ek - the most notorious of the regime’s ”Killing Fields” on the capital’s outskirts - burning incense and saying Buddhist prayers at a memorial stupa housing the skulls and bones of victims.

A Cambodian prays for her relatives who died during the Khmer Rouge regime during a ceremony at a victim memorial in Kampot province. Photo: EPA

The event commemorates the April 17, 1975 triumph of the hardline communist Khmer Rouge over the US-backed republican army of Lon Nol.

Initially, as the soldiers entered Phnom Penh astride tanks, their distinctive red-chequered scarves fluttering behind them, they were given a cautious welcome by the city’s war-weary residents.

That warmth swiftly turned to horror as the cadres evacuated the city of two million people at gunpoint, in one of the largest forced migrations in recent history.

The sick, elderly and very young perished, their bodies littering the roadsides, as the “bourgeois” city dwellers were marched into the countryside to scratch a living from the parched, over-used soil.