The Killing Fields

(By Dermot)

Detail from the central memorial Stupa

Early on in my tour of Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre my audio guide explains the rationale behind the genocide, “To keep you is no gain. To lose you is no loss”, so went the Khmer Rouge slogan. Pol Pot had deemed those who were killed as having no benefit to Kampuchea.

Between 1.5 and 2.5 million people slaughtered, minority ethic groups, intellectuals, religious people, anyone that might challenge the new paradigm – the paradigm to create a sustainable agrarian society. People dragged from the cities to create farms, without skills or training.  One in four people murdered, many, many more starved to death. This is why the scar is still visible on the people of Cambodia.

Beauty poignantly bloomed along the paths

Meticulously, the murderers recorded their victims. Faces on dingy photographs and brief biographies of the murdered stare out of the walls of the museum. I follow the trail around the park-like memorial, at each stop my audio guide explains the atrocities committed. Around the now shallow pits butterflies flit, birds sing, one ‘book books’ constantly. Small bones are visible around some of the pits. I listen to stories of survivors and of guards. Equally. Gruesome.

Just a fraction of the many shallow pits around the memorial

The Killing Tree, a beautiful, large, tree where small children were swung around and bashed to death against its tall trunk then thrown in the adjacent pit along with the bodies of mothers who had watch the same fate befall their own children. “Pull out the grass by the roots” the slogan went.

The tree, and other sites, were decorated with offerings and remembrances of handwoven bracelets and bands

Detail from the tree

The centre of the memorial park contains the Stupa, modelled on a Buddhist Temple. Within, hundreds of skulls stare out at me from behind the glass. Mostly bleached white. Some darkened and stained. Many display the evidence of blows that brought death. Each skull carefully numbered like a museum specimen. Are they honoured here or are they a mirror reflecting the possibilities that lie within all of us?

The central Stupa

There are no words

Genocide. What makes societies find people within to blame, people ‘not like us’ to whom we can assign guilt and punish for all our ills.

And what about the killers within, capable of killing and torturing hundreds, thousands of people? Slaughtering people until it becomes normal. Why the torture? To take away hope?

Perhaps, for a while, humanity has triumphed here? Perhaps.... The Khmer have honoured their dead and exposed and acknowledged their own ‘shame’. The shame that, amongst their own people, they were capable of this atrocity within this society. This horror was perpetrated by themselves, against themselves. Who among us would admit this of our own society?

Bones.  Fragments.  They still rise to the surface.

Perhaps, for a while, humanity has triumphed. Until the next person rises to point at people who are ‘not like us’. Genocide in the name of a cause whether it be political ideology, religion, wealth .... Cortez, Cromwell, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot... sadly, to name but a few.

The ‘shame’ is that many perpetrators have still not been brought to trial. Pol Pot died in comfort. The major governments of the world, including Australia’s, long recognised his government in exile.

How does it go? Evil happens when good men do nothing?

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”.  Edmund Burke.

Offerings

How far from it are we? We can incarcerate refugees in a ‘shit hole’ camp in Manus Island or on a pile of fossil bird shit, Nauru, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean – locking up children and refusing entry to independent witnesses.  Label them criminals to dehumanise them. It’s a starting point on the slippery, slippery, slope of pointing at people who are ‘not like us’.

This evening we meandered through the hectic streets of Phnom Penn peering into shanty stalls that create the aroma of smoke and chargrilled food. We end up on the roof-top of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, the former haunt of journalists, now perhaps more of a tourist trap. It’s hard to truly picture what it was like in the 60s and 70s, smoke-filled bars, western correspondents madly filing stories on the war in Indochina.

Life’s a lottery. I’m sipping cocktails contemplating the senseless deaths of 2 million people.

The twists and turns of a tree that has seen too much.