Choeung Ek Killing Fields

Choeung Ek Killing Fields
Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge sought to revert Cambodian society into an agrarian egalitarian utopia. To this end, the paranoid regime executed an estimated 200,000 of its own people. Two million more starved in the famine resulting from its policies. The victims at Choeung Ek were the cities’ intellectuals: past government officials, professionals, school graduates, multilinguists, skilled laborers, and wearers of spectacles were tortured and executed for having knowledge that would pollute the new society.

Van tires crunch the gravel parking lot and pleasant sunshine casts playful shadows on the chickens clucking in the clean grass. If it were any other place, there would be children, food, and games. But this is a city park fresh with death. Pits of exhumed mass graves interrupt the lush lawn. Wooden signs narrate in broken English a short walk among the pits on paths of bone and clothes eroding out of clay. Here, children were beaten to death against this tree. There, 450 bodies were removed from that pit. Some skulls still wore blindfolds, others wore plastic bags. A tour guide sketches the history and recites the numbers, but comes alive explaining why Cambodians forgive, but never forget; that the younger generation must learn to stop history from repeating. The familiarity of the clichés disappears in the passion of his message. Beyond the path and exhumed graves sprawl the killing fields and an estimated eleven thousand buried dead. Most of the field is flooded now and the government lacks the money and reason to uncover the rest. It would be a grisly task: hundreds of killing fields and hundreds of thousands of victims rest similarly across Cambodia, identifiable only as shallow pits breaking the flat green fields.

Cement memorials cannot encompass killings on that scale. But they still try. Here, the small square building hides nothing: past the tended garden and the sweet incense, visitors confront the dead directly. Stepping into the gaze of eight thousand skulls, everything else stops. Starring. Blinking. A sea of eye sockets addresses each individual, compelling a response. There is none. Someone has sorted the skulls by age and sex, a gesture that seems appropriate but completely inadequate. There is nothing to do but walk, look, and leave. Outside, the tour guide is waiting.