Time To Catch Up

   We have been on the go with morning and afternoon excursions so time to update has been sparse. Today is a cruising day. As I write we are departing Phnom Penh. Around midday we will cross the border back into Vietnam. I will take advantage of this “day off” to try to catch up with the past few days. 

  We have seen a combination of beauty and ugliness since my last big update. I will do one entry on the ugliness and then have another on the beauty. I am happy to say the beauty exceeds the ugliness.

  Three days ago I went on an excursion to one of the hundreds of killing fields in Cambodia. The killing fields are mass burial sites where the Khmer Rouge executed 1,500,000-2,000,000 Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge reign of terror lasted from 1975-1979. Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge and his vision of society was that Cambodia should be an ideal agrarian society. Anyone who did not fit the mold or who resisted was to be eliminated. Former government officials, intellectuals, teachers, resistors, and even Khmer soldiers who were thought to be disloyal were tortured and executed. The killing field we visited had a memorial Stupa, a Buddhist structure that contains the skulls of around 8,000 victims. It is sacred ground. As one approaches the steps, the extent of the slaughter becomes very evident. After the rainy season, it is not unusual for more remains to be unearthed from the shallow mass graves.

  I believe in the inherent goodness of human beings, so it is difficult if not impossible to reconcile the slaughter that took place in Cambodia during the reign of the Khmer Rouge with my belief. In 1979 the Vietnamese Army defeated the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot retreated to Northeastern Cambodia with some of his cadre. In order to evade capture, he had his cadre plant land mines. In order to prevent his return, Vietnamese and Cambodian forces also planted land mines. There were no maps of where the land mines were planted and there are still instances of people stepping on land mines. African giant rats are utilized to this day to sniff out buried land mines and it is the hope that Cambodia will be cleared of land mines by 2030. 

  Pol Pot died in 1998. He never apologized because he denied he was responsible for the execution of millions of Cambodians. 

  After touring the killing field, we went to the Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, a former prison where people were interrogated and tortured before being taken to a killing field for execution. Suffice it to say that the Genocide Museum was shocking. There are rooms filled with photographs of former prisoners, all of whom were executed. The prisoners were confined to very small doorless roofless cells, but movement was impossible because the prisoners were shackled to the floor. We were given the option of viewing instruments of torture used by the Khmer Rouge, but were so shocked and emotionally drained by what we saw during our tour that we opted not to see them. Our trip back to the boat was silent and somber. We were all shaken and saddened. 

The men in the photo are seven of the eight survivors of the prison that is now the Genocide Museum. Only two of the survivors are still alive, one of whom we had the honor of meeting at the end of our tour.