The Killing Fields

Yesterday morning I woke up early (again) and caught a 7am bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. Based on my recent experience on the Cambodian roads, I feared the worst. But the ride was surprisingly smooth and comfortable in the big air-conditioned bus—despite the low-budget melodramatic kung fu movie with nonsensical English subtitles that was played over and over again during the 6-hour ride.

I arrived in the Cambodian capital with the entire afternoon in front of me. Thanks to the recommendations of former Fellow Julia Geggenheimer who had a placement here last year, I had a lovely luncheon at a pretty riverside café and then embarked on some sightseeing. I sped through the sights in town and decided, after some initial hesitation, to head out to the Killing Fields. The Choeung Ek memorial is built on the grounds of the mass graves of Tuol Sleng prison, where tens of thousands of political prisoners and other innocent people were tortured and killed under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.

This memorial site was somber and grand and the air of solemnity and serenity struck me. In the center of the grounds stands a tall glass-sided Buddhist stupa in which thousands of skulls, found during the excavation of the mass graves in the area, are neatly stacked. Surrounding the memorial stupa are offerings of flowers and incense. As I examined the tower and walked around the grounds, my initial thought was that the Killing Fields felt sterile—too tidy and too pretty to truly commemorate this place of suffering and death.

My mind naturally drifted back to Rwanda and the genocide sites I visited there, the churches where thousands of Rwandans sought refuge but were instead mercilessly butchered. Those churches smelled like death. They were dusty and still scattered with bones and some personal belongings of the victims: scraps of clothing, torn books, broken rosaries, deserted stuffed toys… You could almost taste the tears and hear the lingering screams. In Rwanda, innocent women and children were slaughtered like animals and their bodies were left to rot in piles of mutilated corpses. It is impossible to walk around those sites and not imagine the horror of what happened there.

In Cambodia, the process of the 4-year genocide was different. The Khmer Rouge indoctrinated, enslaved, and slowly starved the population. Cambodians who questioned or rebelled against Pol Pot or had the misfortune of being privileged or educated were summarily executed. But the regime had the time and the necessity to bury their victims in mass graves. They cleaned up after themselves. And 30 years later, it was easy to walk around this well tended to memorial site and nearly forget the reality of the horrors that occurred in this place. But the families and loved ones of the millions Cambodians who were killed in the genocide will not forget and, although my brief trip to Cambodia ends tonight, neither will I.