In the Shade of the Killing Field Trees

 

 

When broken glass floats, a nation drowns,
Descending to the abyss.
From mass graves in the once-gentle land,
Their blood seeps into mother earth.
Their suffering spirits whisper to her,
"Why has this happened?"
Their voice resounds in the spirit world,
Shouts though the souls of survivors,
Determined to connect, begging the world:
Please remember us.
Please speak for us.
Please bring us justice.

- Chanrithy Him, “When Broken Glass Floats”

The human skulls were neatly stacked on top of each other, labeled according to gender and age. The simple proclamation of the label, “Juvenile Female Kampuchean 15 to 20 years old,” belied all the horrifying atrocities that were the stories behind the skulls. Some skulls lacked jawbones. The sight of those jawbone-less skulls, with the remains of one skull’s set of teeth resting on top of another’s head, created a surreal image of one head biting the head beneath it. Each large shelf held a couple hundred skulls from a specific age group. The shelves extended upward – shelf after shelf, thirty-five feet in the air, encompassing eight thousand skulls.

This small stupa is the sole memorial to the two million Cambodians who were brutally slaughtered in the late 1970’s by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The glass-encased memoriam, its skulls on full display, rests on the site of the Cheung Ek Killing Fields, located about 9km outside of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. To get there, I hired a motorcycle taxi to drive me through small villages over bumpy, dirty back roads. The dust was so thick that it made me cough; I had to tie a bandanna over my mouth.

Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge. Cambodia. All vaguely familiar terms from the single half-hour I spent learning about the Cambodian genocide in high school. I’d taken an elective called “Global Issues” which covered topics of international importance. The information I had memorized for the test – dates, names, places – was promptly forgotten a week later.

After graduating from high school, I spent time traveling around Southeast Asia. I trekked from the islands and beaches of Thailand to the sleepy Mekong River in neighboring Laos. From Laos I took a motorcycle through the rice paddies of North Vietnam, experienced the culinary delights of Hanoi (snake, dog, and goat testicles), and headed south to Saigon, stopping at major cities, temples, and historic battlegrounds on the way. From Saigon I crossed into Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, and took a bus to the archeological marvel of Angkor Wat in Siem Riep. Upon my return to Thailand, my route was almost a perfect circle.

While in Vietnam, in anticipation of my arrival in Cambodia (travelers constantly look forward to the next country), I bought a book about Cambodia from a street seller doing brisk business in photocopied books. It was called “When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge” by Chanrithy Him. Like all photocopied books sold on Vietnamese street corners, the low-quality ink would smudge off with the touch of a finger and the occasional page was completely faded out. Sometimes, I’d have to turn the book slightly sideways because a page had its lines printed at a diagonal. The cover of the book stands out vividly in mind; it is a picture of a twelve year old Cambodian girl wearing a black and white checkered shirt; her face paralyzed in terror, her black hair flowing behind her as she tries to escape something.

The book told the story of the skulls, the story that had been summed up for me in just thirty minutes in a high school elective class. In stunning detail, Chanrithy tells the story of how, when she was just nine years old, the Khmer Rouge came into power and evacuated the entire city of Phnom Penh. Chanrithy and her family of twelve were separated, scattered throughout Cambodia and forced into backbreaking labor. Terrified, starving villagers were herded from harsh labor camps to the Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge’s favorite method of slaughter was to smash in heads with hoes and spades.

When Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge rose to power in 1975, they declared it “Year Zero.” Chanrithy explains Year Zero as “the dawn of an age in which, in extremis, there would be no families, no sentiment, no expression of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music: only work and death.”

Chanrithy describes how her dying (yet still breathing) mother was chucked in a deep well along with other freshly killed bodies, and how her sister’s body was so starved that it became swollen with edema. Her mother and father – Pa and Mak, as she calls them – were both murdered. Five of Chanrithy’s siblings died of starvation, overwork, or lack of treatment for minor infections. Chanrithy miraculously survived, moved to Oregon, and became a doctor. She had vowed to do so after watching her older sister Chea die of a fever in 1978. She describes how she wept behind a makeshift hut after Chea’s death, and cried out: “God… Doesn’t the world know what is happening to srok khmer [Cambodia]? Doesn’t it care about us, want to help us?”

Chanrithy’s story was overwhelming; this was the first time I had really read about the Cambodian genocide. I was horrified.

Those could be the skulls of Chanrithy’s mother or father, I thought as I stared at the bleached white skulls in the Killing Field’s memorial stupa. I tore myself away from the skulls’ hypnotic gaze and walked around the flat, lifeless ground of the Killing Fields.

Vast expanses of barren fields stretched out before my eyes, interrupted by occasional large pits that took the shape of bowls sunk into the ground. Closer to the memorial those large pits were everywhere; I had to walk along the raised middle ground between the pits. Some pits had signs on them; others did not.

“MASS GRAVES – 450 WITHOUT HEADS” read the sign on one pit. At first glance, it appeared to be just any old pit, full of dirt. However, as I strained my eyes a bit more, I made out some white shards of bone protruding from the dirt. Bits of brown and navy cloth – soiled by twenty five years spent in the mud – which at first blended into the brown dirt of the pit, came into focus. A red-checkered cloth, the typical Cambodian hair-covering, lay caked in the mud. I even saw what appeared to be a long femur bone, mostly intact. Chea, I thought.

I walked to the outskirts of the fields, where the ground became completely level – no more pits. Strange-looking palm trees dotted the landscape; I had seen these trees all over Cambodia. Like all palm trees, their trunks were long and thin. However, instead of a coconut palm’s long, droopy leaves, the jagged leaves in the Cambodian tree-tops formed a sphere-like shape. From a distance, the trees looked like withered dandelions, their circle of seeds waiting to be carried off by the wind.

To one side of me lay the pits of mass graves, to my other, those strange palm trees stuck up out of the flat horizon. Those trees were the strongest living thing to stand testimony to the horrors that had been committed in their shade.

I sought refuge from the sweltering June heat in the shade of one of these trees. A sign, written in Cambodian, stood at the entrance to the killing fields, next to the glass stupa holding the skulls. It was translated into such poor English that it might have been comical had the subject matter not been so serious.

THE MOST TRAGIC
WITH THE COMMEMORATIVE STUPA IN FRONT OF US, WE IMAGINE THAT WE ARE HEARING THE GRIEVOUS VOICE OF THE VICTIMS WHO WERE BEATEN BY POL POT MEN WITH CANES, BAMBOO STUMPS OR HEADS OF HOES. WHO WERE STABBED WITH KNIVES OR SWORDS WE SEEM TO BE LOOKING AT THE HORRIFYING SCENES AND THE PANIC. STRICKEN FACES OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE DYING OF STARVATION, FORCED LABOUR OR TORTURE WITHOUT MERCY UPON THE SKINNY BODY, THEY DIED WITHOUT GIVING THE LAST WORDS TO THEIR KITH AND KIN.
THE METHOD OF MASSSACRE WHICH THE CLIQUE OF POL POT CRIMINALS WAS CARRIED UPON THE INNOCENT PEOPLE OF KAMPUCHEA CANNOT BE DESCRIBED FULLY AND CLEARLY IN WORDS BECAUSE THE INVENTION OF THIS KILLING METHOD WAS STRANGELY CRUEL SO IT IS DIFFICULT FOR US TO DETERMEN WHO THEY ARE FOR: THEY HAVE THE HUMAN FORM BUT THEIR HEARTS ARE DEMON HEARTS.

I walked over to my motorcycle driver who was sleeping on the motorcycle, his head on the handlebars. I shook him awake, and we drove away from the pits, back to Phnom Penh.

Vietnam, too, had pits. The pits in Vietnam, however, were not a repository for skulls; these pits were the results of America’s B-52 bombers. The bombs would fall to the jungle floors and leave giant craters in their place. American bombs decimated entire communities, villages, and cities.

In the southern jungles of Vietnam, just outside of Saigon, I saw the bomb pits. The odd thing was that the jungle was actually growing back, in its own bizarre way. Dense underbrush and leaves were growing at strange angles out of the craters. The roots of the trees were deeply entrenched in the pits, and their trunks leaned toward the center of the pit for balance. The jungles were green, wet, and alive.

I first crossed the border into Vietnam on a crowded twenty-four bus from the bordering country of Laos. Wendy, the Vietnamese woman who sat next to me – and the only other English-speaking person on board – explained to me that the huge, twenty pound bags sitting in the aisles (stacked all the way up to ceiling) were drugs being smuggled from Laos into Vietnam. There was nearly a ton of heroine or cocaine – Wendy didn’t know the name of the drug in English – on board that bus, which apparently was the vehicle of a choice for a large smuggling ring.

Coming into Vietnam I had the same feeling you get when you’ve heard a lot about a certain person, and then you finally get to meet him. Vietnam was that person, I’d heard about him through all the books and movies and art and stories that flood the American media. Seeing the straw-cone hats dotting the green rice paddies, I thought to myself, Wow, this is it, I’m in ‘Nam. An hour later, I realized how different that person – Vietnam – really was from the American conception of him.

In America, the mention of Vietnam still conjures up images of young Vietcong in black silk pajamas, stealthily creeping through the jungle and planting booby traps. In today’s Vietnam, young men wear the latest Asian fashions and cruise around on Honda Dream motorbikes while talking on their cell phones. The war ended thirty years ago, and Vietnam’s had ample time to move on. The drug-smuggling bus dropped me off in Hanoi; and with it went my previous impressions and expectations. Hanoi had put its history behind it; it was a modern city like any other with telephones, TVs, cars, movies and modern music.

Of course, there still are gruesome testimonies to the tragedy of the “American War,” as they call it, the most horrifying being at the War Remnant’s Museum (formerly called the American War Crimes Museum) in Saigon. I had stood in shock as I stared at two jars with mutated fetuses. They were in a section of the museum that documented the effects of Agent Orange, a powerful herbicide that American crop-dusters had sprinkled over ten percent of southern Vietnam.

Mutations I had never thought physically possible manifested themselves in the fetuses floating in those jars. One fetus had a pair of legs growing out of its hips. The other fetus had one head, a body with several feet and arms growing out of its stomach, and a head in place of its genitals. Those were the kinds of congenital birth defects that still lingered decades after the crop dusters had gone home.

Across from the Agent Orange section was a photographic documentation of the My Lai massacre. There was a photograph of a US soldier triumphantly holding the remains of a dead body that had been blown to pieces; a look of pure happiness on his face. The caption underneath read: “US Soldier laughing as he holds a dead Vietnamese.”

Whenever I think of Saigon, I still vividly see that soldier’s face, and that black and white photograph of glee continues to haunt me.

We know a lot about Vietnam. Popular films like Apocalypse Now and books such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried tell the story of Vietnam to a generation who did not live through the war. Many of us college students have parents who were either drafted into the war or protested against the draft, and maybe we’ve heard about the war from them. Every so often there is a news article about Vietnam vets documenting their current psychological state or disputing the amount of enough compensation they receive from the government. Today, the media is constantly comparing modern military invasions - like Iraq – to past invasions like that in Vietnam. We spend weeks, sometimes months, learning about the Vietnam War in both high school and elementary school.

It was in Saigon that I’d read Chanrithy’s story. Within a week, I’d be taking the nine hour bus from Saigon to Phnom Penh, and I wanted to be fully prepared. Chanrithy’s tale of horror in itself was enough to make me sick; but what shocked me the most was my lack of knowledge. Why was I taught extensively about Vietnam, but not taught about the Cambodian genocide that killed two million people and destroyed twenty percent of the Cambodian population?

Cambodian children, in the early 1970’s, were learning about America. In the Tuel Sleng school, young girls like Chanrithy took classes in math, science, and English. The school, in the heart of Phnom Penh consisted of several concrete buildings set in a “U” shape; enclosing a pretty courtyard with a state of the art playground that had swing-sets and parallel bars. In primary schools like Tuol Sleng, children learned about how the Americans had come to Vietnam to help the South Vietnamese fight the Northern Vietcong. All the commotion and fighting was happening less than one hundred miles away from their school.

Then, America started bombing Cambodia and helped bring Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to power. The school in Phnom Penh that had once encircled a beautiful grassy playground was converted to the Khmer Rouge’s torture chamber. Classrooms become sites of unspeakable torture to the 20,000 mostly political prisoners who passed through its gates.

After we left the Killing Fields, with the images of bones and pits and skulls fresh in my mind, the motorcycle taxi dropped me off at the Tuol Sleng school/torture chamber, which had been converted into the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Most of the site has been left untouched, to preserve the horrors of the torture chambers for tourists to see. Entering through the courtyard, the first thing I noticed was the playground, eerily still intact. A large wooden barrel lay next to the parallel beam bars; for what, I wasn’t sure. Later on, in a different section of the museum, I saw a painting of the Khmer Rouge torturing a Cambodian on the parallel beam bars, and I only then did I understand what the barrel was used for. The Khmer Rouge would hoist a prisoner up on the parallel bars, and they would stretch and distort his body until he lost consciousness. Immediately after the man would lose consciousness, they’d dunk him head-first into the barrel full of water. The prison body would fight to breathe under the cold water: coughing and sputtering, the man would regain consciousness. As soon as the prisoner had regained consciousness, the guards would hoist him up again, tie a noose around his neck, and hang him until he lost consciousness. Again, they’d hold his head underwater, repeating the process until they got the desired “information” from their prisoner.

I looked up from the playground and noticed barbed wire covering the façade of all the concrete buildings. A sign on one building read:

BUILDING C
GROUND FLOOR: SINGLE CELLS MADE OF BRICK
FIRST FLOOR: SINGLE CELLS MADE OF WOOD
SECOND FLOOR: MASS DETENTION
THE BRAID OF BARBED WIRE PREVENTS THE DESPERATE VICTIMS FROM COMMITTING SUICIDE

The Khmer Rouge had built square, four-foot cells in the middle of classrooms. The prisoners held at Tuol Sleng had been constrained to these tiny brick enclosures before being sent off to their deaths. Each barrack reminded me of a dog-house: a rusty white water bowl with a red flower on it sat in the center of the cell. A single chain was attached to the cell’s brick wall at one end; the other end had been tied to the prisoner’s ankles.

Shocking black and white photographs covered the walls of Building D. The Khmer Rouge carefully photographed each prisoner before his death. One photograph stood out; a man, no more than twenty, had a look of sheer terror on his face. It was an expression of utter panic; a look that none of us, growing up in America, could ever begin to comprehend. This man knew he was about to die. He was not prepared to part with life.

After I came back from America, that photograph remained in my mind and blended in with the images of the bones in the pits of the Killing Fields. My original outrage at the gap in my knowledge of the Cambodian genocide – why wasn’t this material taught in school? – soon disappeared, buried beneath the problem sets and calculus classes that made up my workload at college.

My outrage resurfaced recently, when I read a book called We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Children by Phillip Gourevitch, which detailed the Rwandan genocide. The name “Rwanda” was familiar to me, but as with Cambodia, I hadn’t really known the details of the mass genocide that occurred there in 1994, how nearly a million Tutsis were slaughtered over the course of one hundred days. And again, I was shocked at my ignorance and lack of awareness about such an important event. Finishing the book, I vowed that this time I would not let my outrage drown in the deluge of papers, problem sets, and school.

I designed a survey to gauge exactly how much MIT undergraduates know about world genocide. I predicted, accurately, that most of us knew nothing about world genocide. Although I have only just begun to analyze the surveys, the results are already staggering. Out of nearly seventy-five responses, only ten people displayed any sort of knowledge of the mass genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Of all the students surveyed, on average, 85% of people in their high school had attended college; showing that most attended a school with high standards of education. According to collegeboard.com, the average SAT score of MIT students is 1460. Even extremely smart, supposedly well-educated MIT students – the “future leaders of America” as we’re sometimes called – know almost nothing about mass genocide.

School is supposed to be the center of our education. The point of education is to learn about the progress of the past; whether it be in mathematics, literature, physics, philosophy, art, history, or writing – so that in the future, we can expound on what we have learned and progress even further. The philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We are taught about World War II and the Holocaust. The theme of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. is “Never Forget.”
But we have forgotten. Or maybe, we don’t even know in the first place. Mass genocide is not a relic of the past; it is still occurring today. As I write this, in Sudan, hundreds of thousands are being slaughtered as the rest of the world ascribes fast to their complacent ignorance. Millions were slaughtered in Rwanda and Bosnia during our lifetimes, less than ten years ago. We learn a tremendous amount about Vietnam in the early 1970’s, but we don’t learn a single thing about the Cambodia genocide that occurred next door in the same decade. Although education alone is not sufficient to stop mass-murder – political action is obviously necessary – awareness of global genocide is certainly the first step in preventing the reoccurrence of such epic tragedies.

Dust will continue to gather on shattered bones in the pits deep in Cambodia. Fragments of clothes, already brown with mud, will continue to blacken. The white skulls piled high in the Killing Fields memorial will remain motionless, frozen forever in a lifeless pile. Photographs of tortured men will continue to haunt. The palm trees protruding from the flat, barren fields will refuse to let their seeds be carried off by the wind.