The Killing Fields

Please welcome Guest Blogger Jeff. For obvious reasons, we did not think this trip was suitable for young children, so Jeff went by himself.
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Cambodia was ruled by the Khmer Rouge for 4 years (1975 – 1979).  They are classified as a totalitarian communist regime. In that short time, it is estimated that 1.4 to 2.2 million people out of the population of 7 million died directly from execution (maybe around 200,000) or indirectly by disease or starvation caused by their rule.

In their reign of terror, anyone with connections to the prior leadership or even any prior contact with a foreigner was subject to execution.  In a theory that only truly evil minds can devise, the family of those executed were executed too so that those in power did not need to worry about the children or family of those killed seeking revenge.

When we arrived in Phnom Penh, Ellen and the children headed for the pool and I negotiated a deal with a tuk-tuk driver to take me to Choeug Ek, which is a memorial park dedicated to those killed and buried there which is better know as the Killing Fields.  It’s the site of a former orchard and on the surface looks like a nice place for a picnic.  When you look a little closer you see that the ground is anything but level with many large divots missing.

The dips are the excavated pits that the bodies were buried in.

The first building you see is a tower type building.

When you get to the building you find that the inside is a glass chamber filled with human skulls.

After seeing this display, I found myself wandering around the former orchard wondering about people.  And then I came to a large tree with this sign on it.

This sign was close to one more pit that had contained babies, children and women.  As I moved on I thought about other sites that we had been to in the last decade or so.  The memorial at Hiroshima, the USS Arizona Monument in Pearl Harbor, the still smoking ruins of the World Trade Center, the death camp of Buchenwald, the makeshift memorials to children hanging from the fence surrounding the ruins of the Federal building in Oklahoma City, the memorial to the 900-Day Siege of Leningrad, the Rape of Nanjing Museum, the Korean DMZ and the everyday reminders in China of Mao’s madness which killed something like 30 million Chinese came to mind. 

When I thought “how could someone beat a baby’s head against a tree”, I came back to the evil that people have been doing through history. Not being able to explain such madness, I came to the conclusion that every once in awhile, evil takes over a group of people.  I can’t explain what I can’t understand.  I can understand death in war.  Understanding and agreeing are two different things.  But how do you even begin to understand the killing of such masses of your own people?  How do you even begin to figure out how people (supposedly human) can randomly kill large numbers (or one) of babies and children?

I walked out of the memorial and found the tuk-tuk driver who was waiting for me as I knew he would be since you pay at the end of these rides. I said to him that it was so sad.  He corrected me saying that it was sadder for the Cambodian people.  I stood corrected by my wise tuk-tuk driver. 

While it was sad as a member of the human species to see something like this, it is in many ways worse to see where Cambodians killed Cambodians if you are Cambodian.  Comparing evil acts seems sometimes like trying to nail jell-o to a wall. But it was somehow more upsetting to me to see the smiling face of a 3 year old girl looking at me from a picture hanging on the fence in Oklahoma City than to see the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center.  She was a little American girl that was randomly killed by a deranged American. The results of the 19 fanatical terrorists who took down our World Trade Center could be an act of war.  It was them that did it, not us. It was a cause of immense anger, fury, sadness and ultimately revenge similar (but different) to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Oklahoma City for the US and the Killing Fields for Cambodians is more like looking in the mirror which can be less pleasant.

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Tomorrow: Reflections on visiting the U.S.

Comments

[Susan/ChocoMare]

Alas, satan is alive and well..... and working over time because he knows his time is short!

[citydog]

Thanks for that, Jeff.

When visiting places where atrocities like these have happened, I have always found it jarring how nature is generally unaffected. The grass grows or the weeds take over, the birds still sing, the orchards bear fruit. Those craters are particularly haunting, I think, because they look to be putting up a fight to not be reclaimed by the earth and forgotten.

[Debbie Hanson]

citydog said it best.....it is haunting. Rational people can not rationalize such evil.