A mother hen pecked on the grassy grounds with her baby chicks trailing closely behind. A gust of wind blew away some of the leaves from the surrounding trees. Hidden beneath the wild shrubberies, a stream gently flowed in the warm afternoon sunshine. At first glance, Choeung Ek seemed to us like a truly idyllic place with a distinct pastoral charm. Situated a few miles away from central Phnom Penh, the place was once an orchard full of longan trees and partly a Chinese graveyard as well. It’d be easy to get lost in a reverie while walking across this field set in an unspoiled countryside. This was until we found a smattering of dry human bones in between the grass and the dusty grounds. For a second, the hen pecked on what seems like a broken jaw before it became disinterested and moved on. All of a sudden, the past beckoned despite the place’s understated beauty. This was, after all, the Killing Fields.
As N and I rode in and out of Phnom Penh, we noticed how the city seems to be licking its wounds in silence. The Khmers spoke little of their painful history. They’d either try hard to forget or, in the case of the younger ones, knew nothing much to begin with. The wounds are still quite fresh, and it would be a few more years before they would be congealed into scars. Just shy of forty years ago, Pol Pot led Khmer Rouge to take over Cambodia into a reign of communist terror. Throughout the late 1970s, Phnom Penh remained a hushed ghost city. Its residents had long been driven out to work in many agricultural fields across the country to keep up with Pol Pot’s vision of an egalitarian society. The clock turned back to year zero. The Cambodians ploughed the fields with their bare hands out of fear and many succumbed to disease and eventual death. Those who reacted against the Angkar (the ‘big brother’ of Khmer Rouge) or accused of any counter-revolutionary act mostly ended up in Phnom Penh’s s21 prison and later met their end here in Choeung Ek.
We came to the place with a soft-spoken young man named Theng. He was our guide for the day and along the way, he told us the history of the Khmer Rouge from the point of view of a younger generation. His parents survived the ordeal and gave him personal accounts of the horrors they faced during Pol Pot’s regime. As the years progressed, the paranoia within Khmer Rouge escalated to a deafening hype. Anybody could be pegged as a traitor, even the most loyal cadres, and sent to be executed at one of the many killing fields.
We perused the nearby museum first to get a picture of what Choeung Ek used to be back in the day. These were the paintings produced by a survivor named Vann Nath (whom sadly passed away four years ago) to describe the order of executions made on the site. Bullets were scarce at the time and in economical fashion, the Khmer Rouge cadres turned to other murderous instruments. Hatchets, machetes, axes and even unassuming thorns from the palm branch were used to finish the deed.
The killings were systematic and done in an orderly manner: on a busy night, the cadres would have hundreds of prisoners on their list to be killed in only a handful of hours. To veil the excruciating wailings of the victims, a loudspeaker blasted songs of the revolution from the nearby Magic Tree. Once the execution was over, the cadres would heave chemical substances on top of the bodies and leave them to rot in the pit. The scent of death was undetectable. Not many souls knew of the place as a mass grave until the Vietnamese army unearthed the bones from the loose grounds in 1979.
Today what are left of the field are the many shallow pits and above all, a chilling silence that surrounds the site. Visitors rarely chatted as they walk from one mass grave to another, most of them concentrating on each site’s account through the audio tapes provided. We spoke less too in respect of the dead. Each mass grave had been built into an opened hut with a sign that bears the number of bodies found. One of them bore hundreds of decapitated bodies and the other filled entirely with murdered women.
The more we moved from one point to another, the more foreboding the stories became. We came upon a hefty tree at the edge of the field, standing bold and striking with the colorful handwoven bracelets hung on its bark. The Khmer Rouge used to ruthlessly bash the babies onto this tree, battering their spines in a split second. The mothers were at times forced to witness the death of their offspring.
Stalin used to say that there’s nothing tragic about a million deaths as they are only mere statistics. Killing Fields is a visual form of that quote as we traced more fragments of bones on the ground. Just like most Southeast Asians, Theng was superstitious and warned us not to step or touch on any of the bones for the fear of bad luck. After long heavy rains, the bones would sometimes emerge from the ground only to add to the numbers of the Khmer Rouge victims. The museum’s caretakers would gather the bones from time to time and place them elsewhere. We noticed some of these bones stacked neatly on top of a clear box stood near one of the mass graves. It was filled with torn pieces of clothing the victims wore prior to their deaths. Some of the shirts and dresses would only fit a child.
After a long day, the flickering sun scattered its last rays of light across the fiery sky and light up the entire field. We finally walked to the memorial stupa where thousands of human skulls were placed within the confinement of soft, paneled glass. A continuous Buddhist chant drifted in the small area to appease the dead. The skulls were stacked on top of one another and labeled with colorful stickers that indicate different execution methods. Some were blown with sharpened bamboo sticks and many were bludgeoned with blunt instruments.
We couldn’t help but to notice how homogenous death really looks when observed in this manner. The victims had all been reduced to numbers, their personal stories hushed and their remaining bones left for the few of us to ponder upon the true essence of severed humanity. The only thing we could offer the dead was our silence, and that alone felt obscenely selfish after knowing what had happened to the victims. Gone were the idyllic impressions we had of the place; the Killing Fields is a memento mori that illustrates the darkest pits that are buried within the hearts of humans.
