Hey everyone. Something happened in our world’s recent history that you most likely don’t know about. I certainly didn’t. Many of my travel companions didn’t. My parents who were alive when this history was a present weren’t entirely aware of it. This looming it I’m speaking of is the Cambodian Khmer Rouge genocide of the late 1970’s.
Before traveling to Cambodia last week, my friends and I cracked open our Lonely Planets and checked out which cities were big-ticket items in our neighbor to the east. Phnom Penh, the capital city, was of course listed. It claimed to be full of historical museums documenting the Khmer Rouge events that occurred in the city thirty-some years ago. I glanced over the descriptions of the events and skipped right to where to eat & sleep in the city. Some of my travel buddies read up on the Khmer Rouge and even watched a documentary the night before leaving. I opened the wikipedia page but quickly clicked over to Facebook instead, and I passed on watching the documentary as well. Describing me as ignorant doesn’t even scratch the surface.
Once we got to Phnom Penh, we booked a day of Khmer Rouge historical activities. We went to Tuol Sleng (a former high school turned secret torture center) and The Killing Fields (the actual fields on the outskirts of town where millions were taken to be brutally murdered). Confused? So was I. Let me back up a bit.
The Khmer Rouge was a Communist Party formed by men in the late 60’s who idolized and lusted after the idea of a completely self-sufficient agricultural society. The KR leaders wanted to purify the existing society and saw anyone who wasn’t on board as a threat to their idyllic future. These alleged “threats” included educated people, industrious people, anyone who associated with foreigners, and, most tragically, any of the listed people’s children. The reasoning behind eliminating these people and their families, children included, was that if anyone was left after the mass extermination they could grow to seek revenge upon the Khmer Rouge. KR leader Pol Pot felt it was better to sacrifice an innocent by accident than to spare an enemy by accident.
Between the years of 1975-1979, The Khmer Rouge took people from their home villages, interrogated them in places such as Tuol Sleng, aka S-21, accused them of crimes of treason they’d never committed, tortured them until they admitted such fabrications, and then sent them to The Killing Fields where they fell victim to mass execution. The KR felt bullets were too valuable to be wasted on these mass murders, so instead they ordered their soldiers to kill the victims with anything possible--gardening utensils, sheer beatings, palm branches, anything available in the fields. One of the most horrific additions to the death toll was babies. There is a tree among The Killing Fields where Khmer Rouge soldiers would take babies by their feet and smash their heads into the trunk of the tree.
Gut-wrenching brutalities such as this occurred for four years in near secrecy. At the time, the Khmer Rouge was recognized by the United Nations as a legitimate political party of Cambodia with the simple purpose of re-educating their nation; the UN even gave the KR money to support its efforts. Finally on January 7, 1979 the Vietnamese army ousted the Khmer Rouge and put an end to all genocidal activity. Many KR leaders fled the country in attempts to avoid punishment--and they nearly succeeded. Pol Pot, a main KR leader, died at age 86 on house arrest after living to see his grandchildren born and raised. Another former KR leader with the alias of Duch has since admitted to his hate crimes, but admits to them in such a way as if he were Frankenstein--creating a monster that grew beyond his control. Duch and other former Khmer Rouge leaders are still on trial for their crimes.
One of the hardest things to hear during an audio tour amongst The Killing Fields was a concluding statement about the reasoning for turning the fields into a museum. The voice through the speakers described the urgency for education on the Khmer Rouge genocide, the need to spread this museum to future generations, because such atrocities have happened and keep happening in our world. He described how no one ever thinks it will happen to their country. Then he listed the previous genocides of humanity’s history: Germany with the Nazis, Russia with Stalin, and...The United States. I had forgotten how our country started. I’d never thought of the discovery of the Americas as a genocide upon the Native Americans. Apparently you never think genocide will happen to your country and occasionally you (or just me) fail to acknowledge that it has already happened.
Bracelets and a plumeria offered at a mass grave in The Killing Fields
Cambodia was an eye-opening experience for me. In the middle of the audio tour in The Killing Fields, the headset tour guide spoke the word ‘ignorance’ in his accented way which emphasized it as ‘ignore-ance’. Despite ‘ignore’ being the root of the word, and me having a degree in English & Linguistics, I’d never thought of it that way. But that’s exactly what’d I’d been doing with the Khmer Rouge--ignoring it. So please, don’t follow in my footsteps of ignorance, but rather take it upon yourself to read the wikipedia pages you open, listen to your history educators, and go beyond the classroom. You’d be surprised what secrets the world’s been keeping.
More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
http://www.cambodiatribunal.org
http://www.yale.edu/cgp/
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