Tales From a Female Traveller

The Killing Fields

http://au.blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-a6zLd1M9bqXYFufi8VqDDClTLg--?cq=1&l=1&u=5&mx=25&lmt=5

Just over 30 years ago Cambodia was closed to all foreigners. The Khmer Rouge and the Pol Pot regime were taking over and a huge change was underway. Until February 1975 the Cambodian people had lived relatively peaceful lives. The main ingredient to Cambodian living is family, religion and food. Pol Pot and his regiments had entered the capitol Phnom Penh on New Years Eve where celebrations were already being had (Khmers celebrate such things by firing guns or any other weapons they have into the sky) so the entry of the Khmer Rouge made things so chaotic… the country barely recovered.

Pol Pot’s intention was to turn back time to “the year zero” and create an Indentured Agrarian society, free of all modernity. Within hours of take over, the Khmer Rouge had murdered anyone in cahoots with Lon Nol (who came to power when Sihanouk fled the country after screwing up relations with Vietnam and the USA) and forced men, woman, children, the elderly and sick to the countryside to undertake various forms of back breaking labour. If disobedience was observed in any form, those responsible were taken to camps to be executed… effective immediately, and pure exhaustion was not an excuse.

Over the 3 years, 8 months and 21 days of the reign of the Khmer Rouge close to 1 and a half million people were slaughtered in the name of “the year zero”. There was not only an ethnic cleansing of the minorities (Vietnamese, Muslims and Chinese), but a social cleansing as well. Anyone with the slightest bit of education was executed and this meant doctors, teachers and artisans, so disease set into the camps and thousands more died from ailments such as malaria and dysentery. Education and religion of any sort was halted and people were torn from their families. All forms of currency were abolished and there was no electricity or any form of transport that did not have 2 or 4 legs. All flights (except a daily flight from China, because they were supporting the KR) were stopped and Cambodia was locked down completely. In such a short period of time it’s hard to believe that such a horrific thing could happen.

With all of this floating through my head the day Byron and I visited the Killing Fields (15 mins outside of Phnom Penh) I didn’t really know what to expect. We paid our $2US entry fee and made our way inside the gate. The first thing you see is a massive monument and as you get closer you realise that thousands of human skulls are stacked wall to wall, floor to ceiling in glass boxes. You make your offering, take off your shoes and suddenly you are in a place of the dead. As I walked around the glass cabinets I wasn’t sure how to feel. All the skulls, jaw bones and clothes are organised by age. Anything from 5 to 60 can be seen and just as you’re wondering how real this all is, you see the stitches on the skulls.

During the 3 stages of life the stitches that join the plates that make up our skulls close and suture themselves according to what stage of life our bodies have reached. So when we are born and right through infancy and the teenage years, they are relatively open, during young adulthood and middle age they start to close up a little and during old age they close and smooth over. So as I am walking around looking at these skulls it occurs to me just how horrible this event was, and just how much it affected the way Cambodia is today. I hadn’t prepared myself for this, and even though I had read so much about what happened in the recent past, I could have not known that I would be overcome with emotion and have to leave. I just could not help myself. But seeing skulls of 5 year old children with big holes bashed into them was just too much for me and I broke down. And it’s not just the fact that people of all ages and ills were brutally murdered, it’s also that it was done by their own people. Khmers raped, pillaged, enslaved and murdered their own people. It really makes you think about how evil works. We, as westerners who have never truly known war in this lifetime, have a preconception that evil is reserved for others… others like the Taliban. But when you come to a place like the Killing Fields and you stand amongst the mass graves (that they left un filled after they exhumed all the bodies) and bear witness to the scars and breaks in the bones, your whole idea of evil flies out the window and you wonder whether evil is reserved for who we dub “the baddies” or whether it is in all of us. Are we all actually capable…deep down… of committing such things?

It all became too much for me walking around the graves so we returned to the gate where there was a gift shop and our hearts went out to a man that had had his leg blown off by a mine (which the Vietnamese laid after they raided and threw out the KR). Every single moment you are in a place like that you want to throw away every material possession you have ever had, you want to give every cent you have ever earned and you want to buy everything in that gift shop. We knew we couldn’t of course… but that’s what it feels like, so much anguish and heartache. Even thinking back as I write this now I am getting upset. There are so many beggars and it blew us away when a little boy came to us and didn’t beg for food or money as we expected… but for a pen so he could go to school... I think I almost cried again then. That little boy’s face will be with me forever. So when we got back to Phnom Penh, we stocked up on some pens and pencils to hand out.

After the Killing Fields our Moto Drivers took us to an underground military operated shooting range (they had to go underground a few years ago when the government decided it was a bad form of tourism, for a few dollars you can hire and M-60 and a couple of grenades and have your go at killing a cow or a few chickens). We didn’t really have a choice with this one. The Moto Drivers get commission for petrol and food from every place they take you, and if you end up participating or buying something then that commission is higher. So when we pulled into the shooting range we were shocked (but not all that surprised really) to find a bunch of Americans standing with guns in their hands and posing for photos with big stupid grins on their faces. Why is this so bad I hear you ask? Well… imagine experiencing everything I have just described, the emotion of it all (if you actually let it affect you or if you actually cared) and then put yourself in that image holding an AK-47 at the exact site it was used to execute innocent children. See how effing great you look then. Needless to say, Byron and I refused to condone this abhorrent form of tourism by participating and asked to be taken back to Phnom Penh where we slept for about 4 hours, emotionally drained.

Today, Cambodia is still recovering from the time of the KR and trials are still happening to bring those involved to justice. Yet it’s amazing just how warm and friendly the Cambodian people are. Everywhere you go you are greeting with the biggest smile you’ve ever seen. It’s true these people live in relative poverty, but you know… when it all comes down to it… they have back what they treasured most of all, family, food and religion. Even after it was ripped from their very arms by their own people, and through foreign help (funding of guns by the US and what not, and being “saved” then “damaged” again by the Vietnamese)… they are still the most warm and inviting people I have met thus far… and I don’t think that anywhere I go will come close to that. When comparing it to our way of life… if anything like that had happened in Australia… we would be even more Xenophobic than we are now of foreigners. Yet here, they know it all happened, they know who was responsible…but somehow… it’s all a little forgiven… but never forgotten. They just get on with it. They truly are the most admirable people.

posted by Lucyspeak @ 8:48 pm