Choeung Ek

This is a tough post to write, because today's road trip was a tough one to make.  In more ways than one, it turns out.

Choeung Ek is about 15km outside Phnom Penh.  We had about three hours of heavy rain last night, and the road to Choeung Ek -- or half of it, anyway -- is under construction, so while those driving into the city rolled along on pavement, those of us in the outbound lane plowed through mud. At some points I wondered if Seiha, his tuktuk and both of us in the back would simply vanish into a murky pothole, never to be seen again.

Choeung Ek was once a fruit orchard, and it's once more a green and pleasant break from the city, but it's also the site of the Cambodian Genocide Memorial.  This two-hectare orchard is pocked with the now-excavated mass graves of nearly 9,000 Cambodians whom the Khmer Rouge bludgeoned to death with farm implements, pieces of wood or bamboo, or in the case of infants, simply bashed against the trunk of a massive tree (bullets being too costly) in this, one of the country's 300-odd killing fields. 25% of Cambodia's population perished under the Khmer Rouge -- one person in four died of illness, starvation, or murder.

My new friend, Deanne, is volunteering as a CPA for an NGO in the city, and we decided that we would make this trip together. She visited Toul Sleng, the former high school turned interrogation prison, last week, and I had been through it twice before in years past. I'd toured Toul Sleng when I was in Phnom Penh for a short time, and it left me too emotionally devastated to even consider going out to Choeung Ek. I believe, however, that anyone who wants to live in this country for any significant amount of time (like, say, more than a month) should go to both of these sites. You simply cannot comprehend what this country suffered in the years 1975-1979 and the impact it had upon the survivors and the subsequent generation unless you do.

There has been some grumbling that the Cambodian government gave a concession to run the Choeung Ek Memorial to a Japanese company.  It hardly feels like an overly commercialised venture, though -- the audio tour was outstanding:  Thought-provoking, informative and dignified, yet far from flat, and it included testimony from a few who survived the Pol Pot regime, as well as from a couple of cadres who participated in the executions at Choeung Ek. The audio tour allowed visitors to move around the site at their own pace, pausing to look, to reflect, to cry, to pray.  The narrator quietly noted, "This is a memorial site. Please dress modestly, speak quietly, and do not smoke during your visit."  No, I think the Japanese company has set exactly the right tone.

It took us about two hours to tour the site. As we started, I happened to notice a lizard perched on a flowering shrub, and I paused the audio player to look at it, then to photograph it. I knew what was ahead of us, and it seemed like a gift to spend a few minutes with something living and beautiful.

Although the wooden buildings that stood on the site at the time of the executions are now gone, the narration explained where each stood and what purpose it served.

Dozens of mass graves have been excavated; others, now filled with lake water, will be left alone.  Knowing that almost 9,000 people were killed there, Deanne marvelled that the area is relatively small -- they dug most of the mass graves to a depth of 15 feet. Skulls and the larger bones were removed from the graves, and they underwent thorough DNA testing and cataloguing in the past decade. Smaller bones were left behind, and many still surface during the rainy season, as do fragments of cloth, refusing to remain silently buried.

Some of the mass graves are simply open pits, and visitors walk around the rims; others are surrounded by bamboo post fences. We paused at one to listen to the audio narration, which happened to be the testimony of a young man who survived the dark years in rural villages, then managed to walk to Thailand, from where a refugee organisation flew him to Texas. The thought of that journey made my head spin. As he spoke of the psychological scars, he expressed gratitude for his survival (most of his family perished) and for his life since his escape, but he added, "I am damaged. I am like a broken glass...  yes, like a broken glass."  I looked at the woven bracelets that Cambodians have left on the bamboo staves of the fence surrounding the mass grave, and as I looked down, a broken pair of glasses lay at my feet. So many Cambodians are still broken glasses. It's purely impossible to come through horrors like this unscathed. As a mere visitor, I found it ghastly that some 30 years on, rainstorms still produce harvests of bones.

A gorgeous tree still standing in the middle of all the mass graves once held loudspeakers which blasted the Party's anthems at night, powered by a diesel generator. To those nearby, it probably sounded like a Khmer Rouge meeting, but the purpose of the music was to drown out the screams of those being executed by very crude methods. And Pol Pot's many slogans provided lyrics for these anthems -- gems such as:

• There is no gain in keeping you; there is no loss in weeding you out.
• Better to arrest ten innocent people by mistake than to free a single guilty party.
• He who protests is an enemy; he who opposes is a corpse.
• If you wish to live exactly as you please, the Angkar (the State) will put aside a small piece of land for you.

The skulls and larger bones which were removed from the mass graves are now housed in a tall stupa:  17 levels of skulls, organised by the approximate ages of the victims. You can shed your shoes and enter the stupa. It has all the hushed sanctity of a shrine, but unlike a cathedral which houses the relics of saints, this shrine houses the remains of 9,000 murder victims. I found myself wondering, which would be worse -- never knowing what had happened to a loved one, or knowing that his or her skull is now on display here?  Still, despite the gruesome contents, the stupa -- the whole site, in fact -- feels serene today. If this memorial had never been established, it would be quite easy to forget about the slaughter that took place here. And once again, you will never understand Cambodians in 2014 (especially those of my age and older) if you don't know what happened here in 1974.

When I told him that I was going to Choeung Ek today, Meng, my 57 year-old Khmer teacher simply said, "It is a very sad place."