Mirror.co.uk
KILLING FIELDS RECALLED 30 YEARS ON
Thirty years ago, the Daily Mirror's JOHN PILGER revealed to the world the horrors of Cambodia. Two million people had died in Pol Pot's killing fields and hundreds of thousands were starving. Pilger's awardwinning reports warned there was just six months "to save three million people". Mirror readers raised enough money for a plane load of aid, and the reports kickstarted a global humanitarian response. Here he recalls his horrifying trip into a country that had been closed to the outside world for four years.
The aircraft flew low, following the Mekong River west from Vietnam. Once over Cambodia, what we saw silenced all of us on board. There appeared to be nobody, no movement, not even an animal, as if the great population of Asia had stopped at the border. Whole villages were empty. Chairs and beds, pots and mats lay in the street, a car on its side, a bent bicycle. Behind fallen power lines lay or sat a single human shadow; it did not move.
From the paddies, tall, wild grass followed straight lines. Fertilised by the remains of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children, these marked common graves in a nation where as many as two million people - or more than a quarter of the population - were "missing".
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