The Killing Fields (warning- some details may be graphic)

The following day we took a tuk tuk to the central market and after an obligatory thongs purchase, we were off to, Choeung Ek, the Killing Fields near Phnom Penh which were mostly used for prisoners from Tuol Sleng (see earlier post from February). The tuk tuk driver had picked up his kids from school whilst we were at the market and dropped them home on the way. They were so polite, giving us a sompiah (Khmer greeting with hands together like prayer) on greeting and farewell (with a little nudge from their dad!)

The tuk tuk driver's children who shared part of the ride with us

Pagoda that houses the exhumed bones

I had imagined the killing fields to be acres of sparse, treeless fields surrounded by rice paddies. In reality, Choeung Ek is actually an eerily peaceful and small tree-filled glade that has sinister undertones. The area used to be a Chinese cemetery, before the Khmer Rouge dug it up to create mass graves for prisoners and enemies of the state (intellectuals, the educated and anyone who was a threat to the new regime of creating a purely agrarian based communist society). We paid our $4 entry and recruited a couple of other tourist for a tour so that it was more affordable.  We were led around some shallow ditches which had been exhumed in 1980. There had been a total of 89 mass graves interred out of 129 in the area and 8,985 skeletons removed. One grave had been entirely full of decapitated men, another naked woman with their children, and another filled with victims who were still bound and blindfolded.

As we walked around the maze of graves, the guide pointed out half exposed pieces of human bone, teeth and cloth fragments beneath our feet which get washed up to the surface in the rains. A central pagoda, built in 1989 now houses the skulls, femurs and pelvis' in a tiered display. The lowest tier is a pile of their clothes, and the bones are sorted into gender and age of the victims. Often the skulls are cracked or pierced, as the Khmer Rouge saved on bullets by clubbing people to death, piercing their skulls with bamboo spears or sawing off their heads with sharp palm fronds. 

Skulls displayed in the pagoda

Remainder of a human humerus revealed in the rains

It is so hard in this day and age to fully comprehend the atrocities of genocide, yet this only happened 30 years ago, just before I was born! Inundated with graphic war images through our televisions, newspapers and magazines, I’m sure we protect our psyches by disassociating from human tragedy. I believe we cannot even come close to understanding the capacity for evil (or even good for that matter) in human beings. How can one justify being responsible for extinguishing the lives (the personalities, the hopes, the dreams, the futures, the potentials, the possibilities) of 1.5 million people? And what is truly terrifying is the power people have in influencing other people’s psychology, the capacity for brainwashing others to stand for corruption, supremacy and victimization. How is it that we are never content with our heterogeneous composition of the human race? Prejudice thrives no matter which part of the world we live in, the type of victim just varies from people with a different skin colour, to Jews, to Americans , to  people who wear glasses in the case of the Khmer Rouge. 

What is this seed inside human beings that sprouts suspicion, jealousy and discontentment with who we are, that pollinates the very fear centres of society? The simple truth is that we collapse the stories that we create about ourselves and our relationship to other people with the actuality, until we believe in our own version of reality. This how we develop factions in society, whether simple social exclusion or full on graphic war and genocide.