I have to say a few words about this dark part of the history of Cambodia, because many of the things you will see later are related to the regime that killed more around 1.7 million people in Vietnam AND this was only ~50 years ago.

Pol Pot was a dictator, who was very well educated in Europe (Paris). While in Paris, he was part of the Communist party in Fance and he really fancied their ideologies and decided to return back to Cambodia and to follow the Marxist-Leninist movement and to apply the communist ideologies via the Khmer Viet Minh organisation. He was part of the communist movement in Cambodia, called Khmer Rouge. Via Khmer Rouge, he managed to formalize the movement into a political party called the Communist Party of Kampuchea. But to be able to apply the ideologies he wanted, he needed to get rid of the president of the democratic moment Sihanouk. So, he launched a war against the president and in 1970 there was a coup that took the president down. The Khmer Rouge basically transformed the country into a one-party state by 1975 after which the genocide began. Between 1975 to 1979 between 1.5 and 2 million people died from the regime of the Khmer Rouge, which was supported by the Chinese Communist Party. This number of people was almost 1/4th of the population of the country at that time. The massacres ended when Vietnamese troops entered and won over the Khmer Rouge.

Now back to what guides told us about the regime, we went to see a killing field, that was a place (there were many places like that) where they threw the prisoners to die. Since they didn’t want to use their bullets for this, they’d rather stab the victim with a bamboo stick or any other makeshift weapon, before that the victims were tortured to “admin” the crime, often times leading to confessions that weren’t even true, just for the tortures to stop. The regime killed literally anyone who seemed even remotely educated, including anyone with glasses, no matter that they wore glasses because they couldn’t see, it was a sign of intelligence and that meant death. Starting with professors, journalists, monks and then continuing to anyone else who seemed intelligent in some way.. At one of the killing fields we visited (see the Battambang section for photos), there were not only the skulls of the victims, but also stonework with scenes of what sort of horrendous crimes the regime was doing. Things like mass forced marriages, boiling people alive, bringing them to the killing field all in a rope, threaded through a hole in their arms to prevent them from escaping, cannibalizing their organs, kids killed in front of their parents to make the parents watch before being killed themselves, slitting throats of victims with the sharp edge of a palm leaf, etc etc etc.
So i just had to buy a book i saw at the airport, about a man, Chum Mey, who survived the Khmer rouge regime because the was a handyman and he could fix sewing machines and cars – they took him and spared him because of this skill of his. He managed to survive, the book tells his story and that of his family – how they ran, how they had to hide and couldn’t trust anyone and how his family was killed before his eyes, the book is very short but really, really interesting. It’s a tragic and sad story, but a better one than that of anyone who ended up in the killing fields… 🙁
Most, if not all, of the monuments and statues that you will see in the Cambodia-related posts, are related to the horrors the Khmer Rouge regime causes to people and animals.