750 victims remembered

A sightless skull peers out from inside the genocide stupa at Wat Kompong Tralach

En route to visit a couple of cave temples outside of Kampot and Kep last week, we called into Wat Kompong Tralach, a fairly typical pagoda along the road to Kompong Trach though this wat holds a reminder of the Khmer Rouge geonocide in the form of a stupa housing the remains of 750 victims of the Khmer Rouge regime of the 70s. Our tuk-tuk driver Pipi was the perfect guide as he had spent five years of his life as a monk at this very pagoda. In the south-east corner of the pagoda compound is a shabby-looking cement stupa with the remains of the disinterred victims arranged on two shelves inside, with skulls on one side and bones on the other. Pipi told me that a couple of mass graves had been discovered next to the wat and had been dug up in 1979. The wat's vihara had also been used as a prison and the walls of the pagoda were smeared with blood before it was repainted a few years earlier; "to scare away the ghosts" reported Pipi. It's believed that the bones of some 500 victims were brought to the stupa from another mass grave site at Prey Trapeang Sdao, a couple of kilometres away in the rice fields, where eleven graves had been uncovered immeditaely after the ousting of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. There are a couple of other memorials for victims in Kampot province, though on this trip I didn't have time to visit them.

The shabby-looking stupa at Wat Kompong Tralach

The victims bones are arranged onto two wooden shelves inside the stupa

Some of the skulls from the 750 victims of Wat Kompong Tralach and Prey Trapeang Sdao

The leg and arm bones of the victims at Wat Kompong Tralach

Skulls and money, left as offerings to the dead spirits of the victims

The renovated main vihara reflected in the large pond at Wat Kompong Tralach