The countryside on the way to Choeung Ek.
The 17 layered stupa
An excavated mass grave
Bones protruding from the ground
Remains of some of those who were killed here.
The killing was done in such a calm and pretty place... being there today, even with all the evidence around, it is completely unimaginable what it was like 32 years ago.
I have just got in from a grueling day of Khmer Rouge History.
there has been a tuk-tuk driver parked out in front of the guest house trying to get business from people going in and out. I told him yesterday if we were both lucky I might take his tuk-tuk today. He was there when I went outside so I asked him to take me to 2 Khmer rouge sites - Choeung Ek Memorial and Tuol Sleng Prison - and the Russian markets.
We stopped off for breakfast on the way out - I had pork noodles similar to Vietnamese pho, he had rice and something (rice tends to be the lunch meal rather than the breakfast meal but I guess he was hungry).
Choeung Ek is one of many 'killing fields' in Cambodia. Prisoners of the Khmer Rouge were taken there to be killed and piled into mass graves - dug by prisoners themselves. It is about 30 min or so outside of Phnom Penh, past rice fields and vegetable gardens that are tucked behind houses and markets on a tarred but dusty road. Like all places that foreigners visit, there was a row of beggars, mostly landmine victims. Like most places in Asia social security isn't kind to the sick, old and unemployed. I have taken to accumulating 500 riel notes - which is perhaps 15 c and giving them to any landmined beggar. It's not much, but in any place there might be 5 or 6 beggars. One of the complaints of tuk-tuk drivers here is that there are so few jobs for men. Companies prefer to employ women in textile factories and shops.
I opted for a guide, which was probably worthwhile but he was young - born in 1980, the year after the Vietnamese ousted the Khmer rouge and his knowledge was much less deep than the guide that I had in Battambang who had survived. There is a 17 level stupa (tower of remains) as the main feature of the place. 17 is symbolic as the date in April that the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. The bottom layers were skulls. Skulls missing teeth, in some cases with bullet holes, in most cases with fracture lines.
The Khmer rouge were primitive and brutal - in general people were killed with blows to the head or neck, killed with sharpened bamboo spears to the throat or with knives and axes.
They didn't want to waste bullets.
The Khmer Rouge were strongly influenced by Maoist ideology - much of their rhetoric is similar. The aim was for an agrarian utopia - ironically the KR had propaganda poster of rice fields with a factory in the background ... they didn't even try to build factories..... Consistent with communist ideology they needed an enemy - "four legs good, two legs bad''. Ho Chi Minh worked on the principle 5% of people needed to be eliminated (a figure that Giap was remorseful about later). For the KR society it was new people and old people. New people were the city, the educated, the Vietnamese, the Chams, the foreign language speakers, the Buddhists, the Christians, the Muslims, the eye-glass wearers, the fortune tellers. They along with members of Lon Nol's government were two legged - Bad. "The four legged'' good were uneducated, countryside, pure Khmer. Like most communist govts. there were wild inconsistencies. Pol Pot for example was educated and spoke French, he also spent time in the monastery.
Apparently it took quite a lot of time for people to start to be willing to be educated, post KR era. Education = bad and dangerous. In Nazi Germany in contrast doctors who went to concentration camps survived longer.
I had some misgivings about taking photos there, but I did, because I thought they are useful in teaching. It is the kind of thing that is too hard to believe without seeing. The stupa, the focal point has more than 5000 skulls inside it. More than 8000 bodies have been exhumed from mass graves and there are assumed to be a lot more that are yet to be exhumed. (At this stage there are no plans to exhume more - the priority is on conducting trials of KR leaders.)
The wikipedia site has some information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choeung_Ek
I asked the guide, and I asked the guide in Battambang and asked another guide today a question that I can't get a satisfactory answer to.
When teaching it, one of my students was perplexed and said to me 'Teacher - you don't understand that that is their karma'. Meaning according to his rationale - which fits with his interpretation of Buddhism - Cambodians had done something bad - presumably in a previous life - to bring on the suffering that they experienced. I'm not sure how Buddhist theologians deal with / rationalise this kind of tragedy. I think rather than speaking to tour guides, I need to speak to a monk who understands western thinking not just English.
there has been a tuk-tuk driver parked out in front of the guest house trying to get business from people going in and out. I told him yesterday if we were both lucky I might take his tuk-tuk today. He was there when I went outside so I asked him to take me to 2 Khmer rouge sites - Choeung Ek Memorial and Tuol Sleng Prison - and the Russian markets.
We stopped off for breakfast on the way out - I had pork noodles similar to Vietnamese pho, he had rice and something (rice tends to be the lunch meal rather than the breakfast meal but I guess he was hungry).
Choeung Ek is one of many 'killing fields' in Cambodia. Prisoners of the Khmer Rouge were taken there to be killed and piled into mass graves - dug by prisoners themselves. It is about 30 min or so outside of Phnom Penh, past rice fields and vegetable gardens that are tucked behind houses and markets on a tarred but dusty road. Like all places that foreigners visit, there was a row of beggars, mostly landmine victims. Like most places in Asia social security isn't kind to the sick, old and unemployed. I have taken to accumulating 500 riel notes - which is perhaps 15 c and giving them to any landmined beggar. It's not much, but in any place there might be 5 or 6 beggars. One of the complaints of tuk-tuk drivers here is that there are so few jobs for men. Companies prefer to employ women in textile factories and shops.
I opted for a guide, which was probably worthwhile but he was young - born in 1980, the year after the Vietnamese ousted the Khmer rouge and his knowledge was much less deep than the guide that I had in Battambang who had survived. There is a 17 level stupa (tower of remains) as the main feature of the place. 17 is symbolic as the date in April that the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. The bottom layers were skulls. Skulls missing teeth, in some cases with bullet holes, in most cases with fracture lines.
The Khmer rouge were primitive and brutal - in general people were killed with blows to the head or neck, killed with sharpened bamboo spears to the throat or with knives and axes.
They didn't want to waste bullets.
The Khmer Rouge were strongly influenced by Maoist ideology - much of their rhetoric is similar. The aim was for an agrarian utopia - ironically the KR had propaganda poster of rice fields with a factory in the background ... they didn't even try to build factories..... Consistent with communist ideology they needed an enemy - "four legs good, two legs bad''. Ho Chi Minh worked on the principle 5% of people needed to be eliminated (a figure that Giap was remorseful about later). For the KR society it was new people and old people. New people were the city, the educated, the Vietnamese, the Chams, the foreign language speakers, the Buddhists, the Christians, the Muslims, the eye-glass wearers, the fortune tellers. They along with members of Lon Nol's government were two legged - Bad. "The four legged'' good were uneducated, countryside, pure Khmer. Like most communist govts. there were wild inconsistencies. Pol Pot for example was educated and spoke French, he also spent time in the monastery.
Apparently it took quite a lot of time for people to start to be willing to be educated, post KR era. Education = bad and dangerous. In Nazi Germany in contrast doctors who went to concentration camps survived longer.
I had some misgivings about taking photos there, but I did, because I thought they are useful in teaching. It is the kind of thing that is too hard to believe without seeing. The stupa, the focal point has more than 5000 skulls inside it. More than 8000 bodies have been exhumed from mass graves and there are assumed to be a lot more that are yet to be exhumed. (At this stage there are no plans to exhume more - the priority is on conducting trials of KR leaders.)
The wikipedia site has some information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choeung_Ek
I asked the guide, and I asked the guide in Battambang and asked another guide today a question that I can't get a satisfactory answer to.
When teaching it, one of my students was perplexed and said to me 'Teacher - you don't understand that that is their karma'. Meaning according to his rationale - which fits with his interpretation of Buddhism - Cambodians had done something bad - presumably in a previous life - to bring on the suffering that they experienced. I'm not sure how Buddhist theologians deal with / rationalise this kind of tragedy. I think rather than speaking to tour guides, I need to speak to a monk who understands western thinking not just English.
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