THE KILLING FIELDS

My son, currently travelling around South East Asia on his gap year has just sent me a Facebook message:-

“Allll ok! We’re in Sihanoukville at the moment. We’re here for 3 more nights and then going to siem riep. Phnom Penh was so heavy for us. First of all we all fired AK 47’s and I fired a shot gun and then we went to ‘choeung ek‘ which are the killing fields and it was horrendous……brought morale down to its lowest point. It was incredibly moving because we had the headset that spoke English and they still have clothes and bones rising from the ground because of the rain and it was just very hard to take in…”

…I’m glad he went there and therefore has some understanding of Cambodia’s history in one of the worst genocides of modern times – I have heard that it is an incredibly harrowing experience. As much as a third of the population died at the hands of a Guerrilla movement called the Khmer Rouge. The communist regime seized state power in Phnom Penh just weeks before the communists triumphed in Vietnam in 1975. It was a brief but catastrophic period. Choeung Ek (The Killing Fields) is where the Khmer Rouge marched prisoners from Tuol Sleng to be murdered and buried in shallow pits and is also now a memorial to those who were killed by the regime. Under the rule of the Pol Pot led Khmer Rouge and their measures to cleanse the nation through genocide of “unapproved” Khmers it is estimated that 1.5 million people died before anti Pol Pot Cambodian Communists persuaded Vietnam to invade and stop the regime in 1979.

In Bosnia and Rwanda there have been international tribunals established to prosecute the perpetrators. I understand that this has not been the case in Cambodia. Apparently a lot of Cambodians know very little about what happened during this dark period of time and it is not covered in their history books. I wonder why. Perhaps they prefer not to talk about or do not wish to take revenge on their torturers because of their own culture and religion. Perhaps as Theravada Buddhists they prefer to move on with a positive message of forgiveness and compassion.