THE KILLING FIELDS

I visited the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Before going I was expecting something deeply touching, moving, disturbing or life-changing. Meeting other backpackers enroute to Phnom Penh (Cambodia's capital) I heard all kinds of horror-stories. People brought to tears, needing a time-out, never seen anything like it, couldn't believe it, haven't been the same since, etc, etc. So I braced myself for the worst. Knowing virtually nothing about the Khmer Rouge or Pol Pot Regime, and having never seen the movie The Killing Fields, I did my best to read up a little on the subject.
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Pol Pot was the Prime Minister of Cambodia and ruler of the Khmer Rouge (an extreme Communist Party) from 1976 to 1979. Aiming for a Communist future he used his short period in rule to 'purify' Cambodia. Instigating an aggressive relocation program, anyone considered intellectual or 'bourgeois' was shipped to the countryside and eventually killed. Doctors, teachers, anyone with glasses or an education, or suspected of having been influenced by the West was soon exterminated. Buddhist monks and ethnic minorities were also killed.
Out of an eight million population, Pol Pot's regime exterminated almost two million. This was done in the most brutal and primitive methods you can imagine, with often times children doing most of the killing. Horrendous torture was carried out at the S-21 camp and hundreds of thousands of people were shackled and forced to dig their own mass graves (later to become the Killing Fields) as their country fell apart around them.
Eventually Pol Pot led Cambodia into a disastrous war with Vietnam, untimately leading to the collapse of the Khmer Rouge.
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When I finally got the Killing Fields I was surprised. From this one small patch of land alone thousand of bodies were excavated and it's still not complete. But what surprised me most was the beauty and tranquility I sensed. Home to disgustingly brutal murders of men, women and children, it looked more like a park than an execution site. Before the war it was an orchard and the day I visited was warm and bright with only a slight breeze. The crater-like holes in the earth just seemed unusual and not unpleasant. And even noticing pieces of bone and clothing sticking out of the earth, I still felt no real shock or sadness. I started thinking there must be something wrong with me to be so apathetic about the whole thing, but then guessed that maybe my natural defences weren't allowing me to realise the actual horror of what happened right where I stood. There is a memorial on the grounds in which eight thousand skulls are stacked on shelves according to age and sex. I was the only one in the building when I entered and was face to face with piles of skulls with not even a glass screen to separate us.
After a couple of hours wandering around here, I went to the S-21 musuem. An old school which was turned into a torture centre for the Khmer Rouge. Everything had been preserved from that terrible period and it is home to horrific tales. Stains on the walls and floors and rusted instruments of torture accompany hundreds of photos of victims and torture. But even here I felt very detached from what had happened and what I was seeing.
I'm very glad I went, but it scares me so much to know what we as humans are capable of, and have done so recently.