Choeung Ek – The Killing Fields
Ok, no more genocide shit for a while. I’ve had more than my fill…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rasea/sets/72157612892098230/
We went to what’s referred to as The Killing Fields. If S21 was a warehouse, this is the Khmer Rouge discount retail outlet.
Papa and Buff, remember the bomb and shell craters in Southern France? The ground looks like that. There are holes, everywhere which are mass graves that have been dug up.
They exhumed a smidge under 9000 corpses from this area. That means that there’s around 10,000+ people buried in the area still as they conservatively estimate between 17,000 – 20,000 people had been stabbed, hacked, bludgeoned, shoveled and -if you’re lucky – shot and buried around here.
You may have a visual of a large paddock, or field like at home, say a cow paddock or some expansive area. But you’d be very mistaken. This area is no bigger than a soccer field. That’s including the huge 3 story commemorative stupa that’s filled to the brim with human skulls.
Having 10,000+ people buried under your feet in shallow (for the volume of people) mass graves leaves more than a little trace. Huge sunken patches of ground where thousands of corpses have decomposed are very obvious and roped off with obvious signage like “Do not walk on mass graves”.
Clothing is EVERYWHERE. You could easily grab a full wardrobe of rotten, soiled and blood stained clothing if you scratched around for 10 minutes. You look down, and you can see coloured and black clothing sticking out of the ground, very rotten and sun-bleached.
Not only clothing is underfoot. I’ve read that “bone fragments” are visible, but that’s nothing like the truth. Entire bones are clearly visible, being kicked up as paths get more worn. You can see foot-long bones crumbling and being unearthed all over the shop and upon close inspection, you can’t walk a few feet without seeing large, unearthing bits of skeletons. I think if you dig down 20 cms, anywhere, you’ll hit nothing but bone and cloth.
There’s a tree which is stated to be used for killing children. It has kids bones piled up next to it to illustrate the point.
I’ve uploaded the photos I’ve taken today and put them into a set.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rasea/sets/72157612892098230/
There’s not much else I can say about this place really. Rose and I didn’t talk about it much there, actually, we kinda just bail on each other when we see places like this and meet up later. I think it’s too heavy to walk with someone else at these sites.
The thing that we couldn’t believe was someone actually had this job. It’s not like the Nazis that had a lot of technology for slaughtering and large, mechanized buildings to dispose of corpses and a lot of it was so impersonal. But this was different. Get off the bus, blindfolded, walked to a hole with a stench that can’t be imagined by me, then most of them had their heads caved in with axes or hammers.
It’s so more personal and hands on. Sometimes the victims had to be detained because they didn’t have enough TIME to execute them all by sundown. I mean, not enough time because there’s too many skulls to cleave open. They eventually got power to the site which allowed them to extend their killing and clerical hours.
As Dad tells me, there’s a sign at a concentration camp in Germany that reads “Never Again” but this obviously wasn’t the case and I still think it’s not the case.
Never again, until we say it’s ok. Cyclical, and i dont doubt a permanent feature of humankind, were suckers for waves of hardcore sadism. Idealism and progress can seem like such horseshit sometimes when you know that this kinda thing still goes all the time. I guess it’s aim is saying “take a good hard fucking look at yourselves people, you think your so far removed from this?”, maybe not. Confusing shit. I cant even remember why this all happened, not like it would make it any more reasonable. Which says something about the kurtzian insanity of this kind of human behaviour. beyond reason. Teh aw kun alright.