One eventful day! We made our way for hundreds of miles through rural Cambodia, a lot of it on dirt roads. For the first time on our trip, my cellphone did not work and our GPS navigation system did not have any maps of the area available. As we finally approached the country's capital, Phnom Penh, we detoured to the Genocide memorial center at Cheung Ek.
In 1975, the Khmer Rouge and their leader Pol Pot ("Politique Potentielle") took power in Cambodia. Pol Pot and his communist party believed in the Maoist idea of the supremacy of the agrarian working class, the "agrarian communist utopia". In order to achieve his idea of the perfect agrarian state, Pol Pot forcefully evacuated all major cities and executed more than 26% of the Cambodian population. Every teacher, doctor, lawyer, scientist or person affiliated with the former government was captured, hauled off to a nearby killing field, forced to dig their own mass graves and then hit in the head with steel bars or farming tools until they were dead. Bullets were considered too "capitalist" to be used for this purpose. Babies and children were held by their feet and their heads slammed into a tree, which is still standing there, until they perished. At Cheung Ek, where we were today, 20000 humans were exterminated in this incomprehensible manner and the traces of these relatively recent events are still visible. 300 were killed every day until the Vietnamese liberated the place in 1978. Some had to wait until the next day in nearby shacks because the killers were exhausted for the day. Bone fragments, clothes of victims half buried in mass graves, a building stuffed with 9000 skulls, most of which show fractures and other signs of blunt force. After all that, there were no teachers, doctors, lawyers or educated citizens left in Cambodia and it took until now that these systems are established again.
How is it possible that a human loses all humanity? We found a few answers. The killers were mostly indoctrinated teenagers who didn't know better. Plus, if you did not want to do the killing, you were killed yourself. But still...it appears that mankind has this potential to turn into animal stored somewhere, readily available.
This is a very current topic, as some of the surviving perpetrators ("Duch") are now on trial at a UN war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh. We are here for two days in Phnom Penh and I'm sure we will learn more about this.
Pol Pot died from "natural causes", guarded by the Thai military in his own home, age 72, in 1998. Well done indeed.
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