The soil under our feet was full of dull white fragments, some long and thin, others round or splintered. Everywhere we stepped we stood on them. They are recent history coming up out of the Earth. They are, in fact, human bones, and mixed among these gray-pale pieces are shards of cloth, the victims' clothing. The shards look as though they were recently planted there like flowers and not, like the bones, surfacing slowly thanks to erosion. They are memory erosion in reverse: with each bone pulled from the ground, with each filthy remnant of a shirt or pair of trousers freed from its shallow grave, the story of the Khmer Rouge becomes more impossible to forget.
Ten miles outside of Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh, lies the Choeung Ek Killing Fields. The name doesn't leave much to the imagination. It was on this couple of acres of land that approximately 17,000 Cambodian men, women, children, and babies were executed by the paranoid and ideologically bankrupt Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. It's not the only site of mass graves in the country, but it's the largest and most famous. Only 9,000 of the victims have been removed from the ground thus far and their remains are encased in a tall memorial stupa, or Buddhist structure, but they are not hidden away.
In order to conserve bullets, executions were carried out with knives, machetes, and hoes. Babies were smashed against trees in order to prevent future revenge killings.
The grounds around the memorial stupa are cratered with evacuated mass graves. The path winds its way around these shallow holes, itself littered with bone fragments. Next door to the Killing Fields is a primary school; during our visit the silence was broken only by the sounds of children at recess.
Nearby is the former detention center (built as a high school) known simply as S-21, where prisoners of the regime were brought for torture and interrogation. Those who survived the electric shocks and water dunking were typically then moved along to the Killing Fields. Today, most of S-21 stands as it did the day the Khmer Rouge fell--barbed wire, cells with metal beds and chains, and a high wooden bar from which prisoners were hung from their arms. One building, though, has been turned into an effectively chilling remembrance of the victims of S-21. Hundreds of pictures line the walls and stories spill forth from panels.
The Khmer Rouge--essentially a rather small collection of often well-educated amoralists who seemingly would not or could not see their social experiment for what is truly was--controlled and used the nation's peasantry like a blunt tool. Through fear they forced many young people from the countryside into assisting their horrific program and left a generation with PTSD of the conscience.
A cell at S-21
I suppose, as an American, the appropriate utterance here is "never again." It's our requisite response to such slaughter, whether that be the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia, or Darfur. Cambodia between the years 1975 and 1979 certainly belongs on that list and this country will be dealing with the scars for many more years to come. As I looked over the piles of skulls in the monument and the bones underfoot on the grounds and the manacles on the beds at S-21, I couldn't shake the feeling that horror happens and no matter how many times we tell ourselves that "never" shall it transpire again, mankind is still a long way from finding the antidote to mass murder.
