Cheung Elk Killing Fields and Cambodia's Year Zero

Some seriously horrific shit went down in this country from 1975-79. Rebels from the countryside (many in their early teens) organized in the Khmer Rouge, brought down the government, took over the country, and committed genocide against the educated and elite. The idea (as best as I can deduce, for sound logic seems absent here) was to end suffering by wiping out individuality and social structure. People were marched out of Phnom Penh and into the fields, forced into labor camps. They were subsisting on a handful of rice per day, but not allowed to grow food, for Ankar (another name for Khmer Rouge) would provide for them. Family ties were obliterated, schools and hospitals destroyed, money disappeared from the system. "Criminals" resisting the regime were sent to prisions, the major one in Phnom Penh being S-21 Tuol Sleng, a converted high school where 17,000 people were interrogated and tortured for false confessions then sent to the outlying killing fields to be bludgeoned to death for lack of ammunition--only 7 survived imprisionment. There is a stuppa 17 stories high at Cheung Elk displaying the skulls of 8,900 people killed here. The bottom levels are organized by age, gender, and method of death--bullet wound, blunt trauma from an ax, blunt trauma from a hammer, electric schock, decapitation. My guide was 12 years old hiding in the rice fields during the regime. Both his parents were killed. He was working at Cheung Elk in 1980 when the mass graves were exhumed. He said the smell was terrible. Rain water pools in the cavities where graves were exhumed and a hint of its former stench remains. Shreads of tattered clothing and bone fragments remain on the pathways. There are still 42 graves in the outlying rice fields. I am not sure why they were not exhumed--perhaps because they are under cultivation now? Whoa. I felt nauseated more than I did at Auchwitz, perhaps because this place has had less time to heal?

It was heartening to see the grasses and milkweed growing over the grave sites, though. Butterflies and dragonflies flitted from place to place. There is healing here, too.