The Killing Field

Choeung Ek was only one of many killing fields during the Cambodian genocide, but its pagoda full of skulls has become the most poignant symbol of justice delayed.

Note: Though Cambodia is not an active conflict, Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone believes it is important to examine the country's brutal past under the

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - The staggering crime of 17,000 murders could not be buried in the orchards of Choeung Ek for long, although the Khmer Rouge did try.

Here in a quiet field 15 kilometers from Phnom Penh, the ground is pitted with 129 mass graves where men, women and children were tossed after most had been killed by bludgeoning with rifle butts, bamboo stakes and logs — to save bullets.

It is difficult to fathom, but some who were there and survived describe babies being tossed in the air and caught on the end of rifle bayonets by sadistic Khmer Rouge executioners.

Tour the killing field » View

But nature, it seems, was a witness to these deeds, not an accomplice. The shallow graves easily exposed the horrors beneath. One year after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, 86 of the graves were eventually dug up and the bodies of 9,000 people exhumed. Most were blindfolded and bound.

Forty-three other graves have been left untouched to this day.

The people that were executed here primarily had been transported from the infamous S-21 prison, a former high school in Phnom Penh that the Khmer Rouge transformed into a gallery of horrors, photographing their captives for documentation, then shackling them together or placing them in stalls like animals. They tortured them horribly to extract confessions, then sent them here, to Choeung Ek, to be executed.

From 1975 to 1979, until they were driven from power by the invading Vietnamese Army, the Khmer Rouge killed an estimated two million people in killing fields like this across Cambodia.

To this day no Khmer Rouge leader has ever seen the inside of a courtroom for these crimes. An international tribunal, long in the making between the Cambodian government and the

So justice, it seems, painfully slow to be served, must be buttressed for now with symbols of remembrance and respect for the suffering of so many. In that effort, Choeunk Ek, like S-21, has been turned into a memorial to the genocide. It has become the nation's most unforgettable, because of the brutality that was done here.

Mao Thel lost his mother, father and uncle in the Khmer Rouge killings. He says it's possible that his own family is among those that were killed and buried here.

He has worked for years at Choeung Ek, giving tours to the dozens of people who visit here every day: foreign tourists mostly, who, like at Auschwitz or Buchenwald, are quickly confronted by the magnitude of the inhumanities that took place here.

Standing amidst the shallow pits, now covered with grass, is a white pagoda covered by glass on all four sides. It looks to be at least 70 feet high. Inside the pagoda are ten separate wooden platforms, stacked to the top of the structure. Arranged on these platforms, according to sex and age, are the skulls of eight thousand of the 17,000 victims murdered at Choeung Ek.

"This one was killed by electric wire," says Mao, pointing out skulls on the first platform of the pagoda to six young men and women from the United Kingdom. "This one was killed with a bamboo stake through the head and this one by a (garden) hoe."

He raises the last skull to show how it was split completely in half.

Here, skulls tell the story of horror. » View

The tourists look at the skulls in stunned silence. It is almost impossible to stop looking at them, to first take them in as a whole, a mass of textures. Rows and rows of round, brown, white and gray are an army not of soldiers but of victims — an army of death.

I watch the tourists as they look up and down the platforms, trying to comprehend that there are nine more levels above the one in front of them — the skulls of children and adults, girls and boys, women and men.

On the floor beneath the first platform are some of the clothes the victims were wearing when they were killed. It reminds me of a memorial at a school in Rwanda I visited early in the Hot Zone project. There, victims' clothes were hung across a wire near where their bodies were exhumed following that genocide. The smell of the clothes somehow forced me to see people when looking at the remains — not just bodies, not just victims.

Inside the glass-lined pagoda, the clothes and skulls are open and exposed on their platforms. You can touch them, pick them up and stare closely if you feel the need. There is little separation from the living and dead.

Standing inside the pagoda I begin to understand that whether intended or not, this memorial is not a museum piece. Detaching yourself from this tragedy is not an option.

Here, inside this place, while you look at them, eight thousand skulls look back at you from empty eye sockets, asking you to see more than just their deaths, but their lives.

They once knew laughter and breakfast, the feel of rain and the taste of tea. It was these things they were robbed of and these things they seem to ask you to remember, so that they are more than statistics of a heinous crime, more than skulls on a platform.

In the landscape around the pagoda, other visitors walk between the graves from small shrines filled with bones and teeth to placards, explaining in Khmer and English what took place at the specific locations.

One placard reads that a tree stump is the site where Khmer Rouge soldiers smashed the heads of children. Another, called the "magic tree", reads that microphones were draped over the branches to amplify the moans of agony from those being killed.

It is hard to walk away from Choeung Ek unmoved, to know what has happened here, to see the evidence, to honor the loss — but also to wonder, almost three decades later, if justice lies amongst those bones.

Email Story IM Story

RECOMMEND THIS STORY

Recommend It:

Not at All Somewhat Moderately Highly Very Highly

Average (Not Rated)

ALSO ON YAHOO!