CAMBODIA - A Brief Guide
Created | Updated Jun 21, 2003
The Killing Fields
As one pulls up to the gates of the Genocide Museum of Cheoung Ek one is struck by the ordinariness of it all. An open area of land on a slight plateau looking out over a wide flat valley. At the centre of the site is a tall white stupa, which dominates the scene.
I hired a car and driver outside my hotel ($15 for a morning, $25 for a whole day). Sad Am was not from Phnom Penh, he came from "the out country" but had moved to the city to make a living. We drove through the busy streets and then out of town along 8 kilometres of very rough road. I was told that, at the height of the rainy season last year, the road was impassable for days at a time.
Birds were singing and insects buzzing like they were in countless other fields around the world at that very moment.
It is only after paying the $2 entrance fee and walking up to the first signboard, which explains what happened there, that the full horror begins to seep through the pores of your skin.
Between 1975 and 1978 about 17,000 men, women and children were murdered in that innocuous longan orchard. They were interrogated and tortured at the S21 Security Prison in Phnom Penh and then driven out to the killing fields and unceremoniously slaughtered. They were beaten to death with clubs, garden hoes and axes so as not to waste precious bullets.
I took a long slow walk around, still finding it hard to accept what had happened not that many years ago. Certain of the mass graves were covered over and had signs proclaiming such things as "mass grave of 450 victims" or "mass grave of 166 victims without heads". In other places there were just pits the mute reminder that the bodies of hundreds of Cambodians had once lain there.
Finally I climbed the steps to take a look at the stupa. The scent of joss sticks drifted around making the memorial seem like any of the Buddhist shrines I have visited over the years; until, that is, one looks inside. The centre of the stupa is filled with shelf upon shelf piled high with the skulls of those recovered from the mass graves. Over 8000 skulls, categorised and filed.
Here a sign saying "female Kampucheans 12 to 15 years old" there one saying "male Kapucheans over 60 years old". Some of the skulls were smashed or had great cuts in them, a silent reminder of how the victims had died.
After I left the stupa I sat beneath the trees for a long time; not wanting to stay, but feeling that if I hurried away it would be treating the dead as just another tourist attraction to be rushed around, ticked off of the list, and then left.
Finally, with a deep breath, I got up, returned to my car, and headed back into Phnom Penh and what we laughingly call the modern world.
