The dead were mass buried in holes dug for the purpose. They were crowded into trucks and forced into the holes before being shot. Then, chemical or poison was sprayed on the dead bodies to eliminate the stench as well as to make sure none was still alive. There were holes meant for men, women, and children. Almost thirty years later, the local people are flocking to these killing fields not to appease the troubled souls with prayers but to steal any treasure they can find in these shallow graves.
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The Killing Fields were a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge communist regime which ruled the country, as Democratic Kampuchea, from 1975 to 1979. Estimates of the number of dead range from 1.7 to 2.3 million out of a population of around 7 million.

‘Everyone was rushing there to dig for gold, so I went, too,’ a fifty-year-old woman explained. The poverty-stricken villagers are flocking to the killing fields before the researchers could get there in time. Records show that 1.7 million people died from starvation, torture, overwork, and disease under Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia. Today the living descendants are still struggling to make a living. Who are more pitiable? The restless spirits who were tortured and now have their bones dug up by their fellow countrymen? Or the people who lived in the shadows of their dark past and now are looting the dead with disregard for what happened under Khmer Rouge reign. Cambodia is a land with a dark history and a people who are to poor to care about this history except to make easy money out of it. It is a land of the restless whining of millions of ghosts and a people who lead a ghostly existence eking out a living from their dark past. It is a fascinating land; the rich and grandiose Angkor Wat buildings in Siem Reap which survive to this day and attract millions of tourists every year, contrast darkly with the evil and brutality of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. It is a land which makes you want to go back again and again. But it also makes you want to weep for both the beauty and bestiality that human beings are capable of.