Our first stop in Cambodia was Pnomh Penh, the capital. Our first day we went to the Genocide Museum and the Killing fields, which covered the Cambodian genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. (Extremely quick overview: in 1975 the Khmer Rouge won the Cambodian civil war, emptied out the cities, and systematically massacred anyone they considered a threat - intellectuals, anyone who said anything bad about the government, and even other members of the Khmer Rouge (their leader Pol Pot was extremely paranoid). In the 4 years of Pol Pot's righ, up to 2,000,000 Cambodians (especially intellectuals) were killed, or died of starvation. We knew that facing this would not be fun, but was very important to experience.
We started the day off at S-21, a former school that had been converted to a Khmer Rouge prison / torture facility. The rooms were left exactly as they were when the Vietnamese liberated the facility (except that the bodies there had been buried). There were tons of pictures of the prisoners who had gone through, as well as paintings made by the surviving prisoners (the only survivors were the ones who were still alive when the Vietnamese came). Awful stuff. Our tour guide had been 12 when the Khmer Rouge took power, and at the end of the tour she showed us the scars on her leg from when she had been beaten for being "lazy."
The next stop was the Killing Fields, where the victims were taken, beaten to death (the Khmer Rouge didn't want to "waste" bullets), and buried in mass grave. A monument was placed there now which included all of the remains of the 9,000 victims that had been unearthed (many more are still buried). Extremely powerful.
So yeah, not a fun day, but very worth experiencing. Pictures below. (remember, several of them are quite disturbing. If you don't think you can handle it, don't scroll down!)
photos of the prisoners who came to S-21, one of Cambodia's secret detention/torure failities under the Khmer Rouge
shackles used on the prisoners
cells used for "normal" prisoners (high ranking political prisoners got larger cells)
a look out at S-21 from within one of the buildings
painting by one of the 7 survivors of an inmate in his cell
some of the mass graves at the Killing Fields (these ones have been excavated)
the "killing tree." Soldiers killed babies by hitting them against this tree. awful
bone fragments. The guide said that fragments regularly work their way up to the surfacecall over the Killing Fields, and are collected every few weeks
the Killing Fields Stupa (monument)
the skulls and clothes of all the victims who have been excavated from the Killing Fields are kept within the Stupa
Genocides appear as unfortunate and shameful... but frequent... punctuation marks in human history. Though the Nazis did not invent this mass sociopathy, their Holocaust is the best known example in the Western world. Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and uncooperative humans by the multi-millions were deliberately, willingly, remorselessly slaughtered by Nazi officers and their civilian cooperators. Less known is the slaughter and starvation of millions of expatriate civilian Germans after World War II. Have you heard of Stalin's infamous 1936 Great Purge? the purposeful and accidental extermination of millions of native American Indians by European invaders? the Ottoman (Turkish) extermination by ethnically and religiously motivated expulsion of Armenians, Christians, Jews and other undesirables? (...the Turks protest that these groups simply lost a civil war, so it's not genocide...) Then there are the more modern Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and their interlocking ethnically based murderfests.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, Cambodia is far from an unusual example. A horrifying enumeration and partial accounting of mass slaughters of one human group by others can be read in nightmarishly objective academic prose, in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history). Genocides blight the record of almost every European and American (North and South) country… don't forget the suffering and virtual extirpation of theTasmanian Aborigines… How about Genghis Kahn and the Mongol Hordes? The Bible cites example after example. Greek city-states were reprehensibly barbarous to each other; and genocide didn't start there… they disappear off into the haze of prehistory .
It is almost enough to make one lose hope in the human animal. Tragically, it is safe to speculate that humans have no great innate revulsion for slaughtering anyone who is not "one of us".
But as Adrian gently reminds us, if we seek out cause to remember, if we face the horror and recognize that the capacity for such inhumanity lurks within our brethren... and perhaps even ourselves..., then one day genocide may be found only in history.