Standing on bones

Today we went to the killing fields.  

This was one of hundreds of sites of mass murder during the rule of the Khmer Rouge.  Their four year reign of terror lasted from 1975-1979, during which they killed millions of people, a quarter of the population.  Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, saw himself as a sort of Marxist, but with his own special agenda.  Instead of collectivizing the economy in an attempt to maximize production and distribution, he took the educated, the middle class, and the city-dwellers and moved them to rural areas to work in the rice fields.  He then took the farmers and the uneducated and moved them to the cities to do the work of governing.  The rural areas were starved.  The normal rations were two tablespoons of uncooked rice per day, and if you were caught eating weeds or small animals it could mean death.  And then there was "reeducation."  This was torture, forced confession, and then murder.  People were forced to denounce others, who were then picked up for reeducation and so on and do on.  What started as a trickle ended up a torent as more and more people were denounced.  The killing fields were the final stop. So many innocent men, women, children, and even babies died there.

There were no survivors of the killing fields, and only 7 people who survived the prisons where the torture and confessions were extracted.  In the last days of Pol Pot's rule, the Khmer Rouge tried to cover their tracks.  They almost succeeded; many of the sites were buried and hidden, and many records were burned.  

The largest killing field is outside of Phomn Phen.  It's called Choeung Ek, formerly a cemetery for Chinese immigrants.  It's an open field with a large pond ringed with trees.  One old tree at the center is called the killing tree--this is where babies and small children had their heads smashed.  Now the tree is covered in small colorful memorial ribbons and string bracelets.  

At first people were killed by being hit with sticks and, while stunned, had their throats slit one by one.  Later, as the genocide expanded, they needed more efficient means.  They began clubbing people quickly and then dumping pesticides into the pits for a kind of quick horrific chemical death.  At peak operation this place killed 300 people per day. 

Some of the death pits have been excavated, while many have not.  There is no precise number for how many died there, although they have found the remains of tens of thousands.  There is no way to know who died here and most people--including our guide, who lost his father to reeducation--will never know what happened to their loved ones.  

At the center of the site, they have constructed a memorial.  This is a tall, modern stupa.  Inside, they have built large shelves for the bones.  The stupa is filled with the skulls and bones of the dead, stacked layer upon layer on shelves reaching up at least 30 feet into the dome.  There are the remains of more than 9000 people interred in the memorial.  The outer walls of the stupa are very close to the cases, so you are never more than 2 feet from the bones.  It's close, claustrophobic, horrible, and moving.

As we walked on the dirt paths, we could see places where bones or cloth were poking up from the dirt.  This is a place where to understand the past, you literally have to walk on the bones.

Cambodia itself is such a country.  To come past this horror, to be whole again, they have to walk on the bones.  Very few of the perpetrators were brought to justice.  Pol Pot never answered for this crime.  Some former high ranking Khmer Rouge are actually members of the government today. The former King, who threw his support to Pol Pot, was allowed to come back to the throne later.  And so many families will never get justice--or even a body to grieve.