Genocide Day

Catching a tuk-tuk early in the morning, we ride a few kilometers outside Phnom Penh to Choeung Ek, finally arriving at a tall white monument surrounded by rippling green grass.  An Asian tour group poses perkily for a group picture in front of the monument, which as we approach it, reveals itself to be filled with shelves and shelves of human skulls.  Nine thousand of them.  The field around it ripples because it is pitted with mass graves.  These are the killing fields.

It's quiet here, and a few other somber tourists meander through the fields.  Matter-of-fact signs posted here and there tell of the horrors that happened here.  "Mass Grave of 450." (unbelievably small)  "Mass Grave of over 100 women and children, majority naked."  "Killing Tree against which executioners beat children."  We are told that the executioners sprinkled DDT over the mass graves, partly to cover the smell, and partly to kill any potential survivors.  To save bullets, victims were beaten to death with shovels, or sometimes suffocated with plastic bags.  How practical.

Wandering around the perimeter of the field, local children sing to us (specifically, Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls") and ask us for money, but I am not in the proper state of mind to be charmed.  Our tuk-tuk driver tries to rip us off on the fare to the next place.  I am used to people trying to shake me down for money while traveling in Asia, but it seems disrespectful to do it right here and right now.  He wants us to pay extra to go to a different destination afterwards instead of back to our hotel, except the other destination is actually a much shorter drive than going back to the hotel.  We refuse to pay on principle, returning stubbornly to our hotel and getting a different driver to take us to the next location: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, also known as S-21.

Before it became a museum, S-21 was a prison used by the Khmer Rouge.  More horrifying is the fact that before that, it was a middle school.  Asian schools are built quite differently than what we are used to, so to the Western eye, this place doesn't look very school-like.  If I had come here a year earlier, this fact probably wouldn't have registered much.  However, to a pair of Taiwanese elementary school teachers, the original purpose of this building is painfully clear.  Walking through rooms of cramped cells, I notice the marks where a blackboard used to hang, and automatically picture rows of desks where now there are iron beds and shackles.  Even the playground equipment has been transformed into tools for interrogation and torture. What was once a home for education was transformed into a place where the anti-intellectual Khmer Rouge imprisoned and tortured people for offenses like wearing glasses and speaking another language.  The absolute completeness of this perversion amazes me.

Walking through the complex, we come upon a series of rooms filled entirely with faces.  The Khmer Rouge were chillingly methodical about producing photo documentation of each prisoner that passed through here.  Each picture is a portrait of certain death: of the thousands of people who passed through this prison, only 4 ever survived.  In the walls and walls of pictures, all kinds of people are represented.  There are wrinkled old men, young boys grinning defiantly into the camera, mothers holding babies.  I find an entire wall filled with the faces of children, and my eyes begin to blur.  Vicky articulated it best later on: when there are so many faces, sooner or later some of them are bound to start looking like people you know.  Standing in front of that wall of children, I couldn't help but see in them the faces of my children in Kaohsiung, playing in the halls of a school just like this one.

Leaving the museum, my sadness was mixed with a sense of anger and indignation.  The atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge were so extensive; how is it that nobody had ever told me about them before?  I suppose members of older generations know more because they lived through it, but before going to Cambodia, all I knew were the names Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, and that there had been some kind of genocide.  I didn't know when, or why, or to what extent.  I only knew the names because I had seen them somewhere or heard them offhand (Eddie Izzard does a little bit about Pol Pot); in years of history class we never really touched upon these things.  I know we learned about that time period, because I've definitely studied the Vietnam War, which was at the same time.  I feel so ignorant about Cambodia; was I just not paying attention?  How come nobody ever brought up the fact that while we were trying to beat back communism in Vietnam, the Cambodians were busy slaughtering a third of their country's population right next door, in the name of communism no less?  The genocide in Cambodia took 1.7 million lives, leaving the population decimated (and a whopping 70% female) and the countryside dotted with countless land mines, as well as around 20,000 mass graves.  Children were brainwashed to become killers.  People were executed indiscriminately, for all kinds of seemingly minor offenses.  The question plagues me: how did it get so far?  We learned about the Holocaust multiple times in school, and the motto "Never Again."  Well, genocide happened again, and again, and still happens.  How is this getting swept under the rug?

We were told that even in Cambodia, people aren't really being educated about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.  At the museum, we ran into a group of Cambodian high schoolers, part of a new program to educate Cambodian youth about the atrocities of their nation's recent history.  Aside from that, however, most visitors to these places are foreigners, and most of what the locals know about the Khmer Rouge era comes from stories they've heard.  In contrast, however, Cambodia is completely plastered with references to its less recent past: bus companies, hostels, and the country's most popular beer all bear the name Angkor.  I can understand why Cambodians are so quick to embrace their Angkorian heritage.  It's not like the recent past has given them too much to be proud of.