Confronting Cambodia

Arriving in Cambodia we were struck by the absolute chaos. We liken it to a large flock of birds, they move in all and any direction yet never seeming to collide. Young toddlers balance precariously on the front of scooters that zigzag in and out of streaming traffic where there appears to be no road rules. There were no limits to what was deemed acceptable to put on the back of ones scooter: 50 chickens, 5 people...a bar fridge.

We meet our tour group, an eclectic group of Irish, Scots and Australians (originally English). We had been told today might be confronting, it was. We started the day visiting Sleng Genocide Museum (S_21). This was a former school transformed into a torture camp during the Pol Pot regime.

Hard to believe this happened in our lifetime. 3 million Cambodians were killed merely for being educated. very few people survived, a couple of these we met today. They were very small children at the time but vividly recall their ordeal. Our tour guide for the day lost most of his family during this time.

People were tortured to give up the names of their family and friends who might have likewise been educated. They were given promises of government positions before taken off to the "Killing Fields" to be slaughtered and buried in mass graves, our next stop.

Our moral compass is inadequate, or perhaps inadequately tuned, to clearly think through this history. What constitutes justice? Is that actually worth pursuing, when the cost ($200M and counting, to try five people through the courts) is so high and could meet so many other needs? Perhaps the Buddhist view, trusting karma to mete justice, would be comforting. But we aren't Buddhists, and find ourselves conflicted by competing impulses. In some ways, confronting our own morals seems as hard as facing the facts of the past. 

Our guide today was exactly the same age as Andrew. For him, ages 6-10 were forced labour and witnessing terror. We marvelled at his equilibrium as he described the horrors. When I asked him about the challenge of talking about this every day, he conceded that there are moments when he literally cannot talk.

S_21 was just one of more than 150 such camps run by the Khmer Rouge in the mid 70's where men, women and children were tortured before being killed, either there or trucked to the 'Killing Fields'. If we thought this had been emotional, visiting the location where so many have been slaughtered and buried in mass graves was the next level again. Here we saw the evidence of bones and clothing, more of which is revealed after every rainfall, washing away their dirt cover. The clear brutality of what occurred here is evident. Even on the paths you walk are shards of bone, teeth and clothing of those murdered. We won't go into vivid detail of some some of the stories told but we find it difficult to understand how this happened in our lifetime.