It is inappropriate to ROFL

Rabia and I went to the Killing Fields (Choeung Ek Genocide Center) on Saturday morning. The site is about 13km from Phnom Penh in the midst of farms, open green space, and factories. There is a tall glass and concrete stupa and a small information pavilion and the rest is open pits, pieces of people, and painted signs pointing out which tree was used for beating children's skulls in and which was used to slice open people's throats. I didn't realize the experience of thirty-year old murder would be so immediate. The stupa has nine stories of skulls from the 9000 odd people who have been exhumed from the mass graves since the early 80s but many thousands of bodies were left in the graves and bones are still visible all around you, sticking out of the mud, collected in a pile near a tree. Not buried, not behind glass or barricades of any kind. Even weirder is the half buried clothing that's everywhere. You don't know if it's just the sleeve of a shirt, or the shirtsleeve plus the ulna, if it leads to another skull just under the dirt.

Our guide, Sol, expertly rattled off the highlights: here is the steel bar used to bind people into a line so they could wait to be bludgeoned one by one; here is a skull with a machete fracture; here is where all the naked women's bodies were found together with their young children; this is where the loudspeaker was hung so the screams of the victims could be drowned out by louder noises.

Though we were too shy to ask him about his own experience from the Khmer Rouge period, we gleaned some of the local perspective on the genocide from Sol's comments. He expressed bewilderment that such a thing could happen, that a people would kill themselves instead of an outside enemy in a "normal" war. It sounded as though he felt shame that this regime could come to power in Cambodia and frequently explained why people did not think to escape or fight back. I asked if people in Cambodia studied genocides in other countries as part of their history classes and he seemed vague on the relevance. It was as though the Nazi genocide campaign could be explained because it was against an "other," while Cambodia's killing was brother on brother and wholly less rational.

The pictures will go up someday.