The Killing Fields

We drove back to Phenom Penh by taxi, early, through the country, through rice-like paddies of morning glory with shanty-houses held up on stilts, through narrow streets lined with food vendors with corrogated metal homes, through the morning and into the city. We left time to visit the killing fields 'museum,' before catching our flight to Vietnam.

What I imagined to be some sort of documented journey through the destruction of the Khmer Rouge (like an extremely scaled down Tolerance or Haulocast museum) actually proved to be a much more raw experience. Much more bare.

The Khmer Rouge killed (through outright brutality combined with policies that caused famine) around 3 million Cambodians: 15 percent of the population. The King, who had ruled for decades, Sihanouk, was going to 'side' with the Vietnamese and the Chinese, in other words, the King was in support of communism during the Cold War. The US government secretly helped the Cambodian military overthrow the King who fled to China. The King, joined forces with a man named Pol Pot and his party, the Khmer Rouge, to fight back against the US supported military coup. When they succeeded, the Khmer Rouge overthrew the King and conducted a Mao-like cleansing of the nation: the year would be forcibly returned to zero. Cambodian 'city' culture would be destroyed. All people with an education, all teachers, all persons wearing glasses were killed. And their families and neighbors were killed. First, they were tortured, then they were killed. Vietnam 'saved' the country by taking control back from the Khmer Rouge. Then the UN took over -- unfortunatly due to the political climate of that time, the UN still backed Pol Pot's regime. Anyway, democratic elections were overseen by the UN in 1993.

We visited, just outside Phenom Penh, one of the camps were killings took place. We walked around an odd structure containing tens of thousands of skulls and then began to walk around the grounds. During the rainey season, each year, the mass graves flood, and new bodies emerge. So as we walked, we nearly stumbled over shiny white emerging bones, all over the pathes. I bent down and picked up a tooth, which had newly emerged from the path ahead of me. I held the little tooth, with its root still attached, thinking that it must have been a young person's as it was so healthy and clean.

We wondered how much longer the experience of visitng the killing fields will remain so raw. We literaly tripped over cloth caught around bone in the dirt: the clothing of victims seeking some final acknowledgment. It was incredibly odd and incredibly sad.

I'll write more tomorrow, and about Vietnam...love to all!