Killing Fields

Today we visited the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum and the monument at Choeung Ek, the largest and most well known of one of over 400 killing fields in Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge era. As it happens, today some of the Khmer Rouge leaders were being put on trial in an international tribunal now almost 30 years after the regime ended.

Even though I have seen photographs of the monument at Choeung Ek, which houses hundreds of skulls and bone fragments of some of the victims including children, I was not prepared for the sight of all those skulls or the feelings triggered by the empty eye sockets looking back at me. They seemed to ask me how human beings are capable of such acts of great violence against each other. What is it that allows us to reduce one another to something less than human, less than animal even, to consider others as little less than insects that can be exterminated? Just as an insecticide was used in the Nazi gas chambers for the purpose of murder, so too, in the killing fields was insecticide used. DDT was used to cover the stench of death and to hasten the death of those thrown into the graves, but not quite dead.

It is a surreal and unsettling experience to be standing in the midst of what at first appears to be lush green fields and then to hear of the horrors committed there. I will spare you the details here. There are many good films and books that document the violence committed. In the courtyard, a hen and her brood scavenge for food. On the path in the middle of the killing fields the guide points out teeth and part of a jaw bone emerging from the ground. With each heavy rain, new remains are found, new sorrows emerge.