PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte is in Cambodia to start a two-nation trip that will end with a visit to Singapore. Cambodia is a small country that shares borders with Thailand to its west and northwest, Laos to its northeast and Vietnam to its east and southeast. To Cambodia's south and southwest is the Gulf of Thailand. Duterte has already been to Cambodia's neighbors Laos and Vietnam.
A news.abs-cbn.com report listed some of the President's itinerary that includes an arrival ceremony at the Royal Palace where he will also have an audience with King Norodom Sihamoni and offer a wreath at the monument of the “Father of Cambodia,” King Norodom Sihanouk. He will meet with Prime Minister Hun Sen at the Peace Palace. I don't think sight-seeing is in the itinerary.
A National Geographic Today article written by Zoltan Istvan in 2012 (news.nationalgeographic.com) quoted a traveler from Australia, Scott Harrison, thus: “There are two things you must see in Cambodia. Obviously, one is Angkor Wat. But the other is the killing fields outside Phnom Penh.” Angkor Wat is a 162-hectare complex of temples in Siem Reap province. Phnom Penh is Cambodia's capital.
The article noted: “In Cambodia, nine miles (14.5 kilometers) from Phnom Penh, the 'killing fields' of Choeung Ek have become a tourist attraction, horrifying and fascinating. Choeung Ek is one of thousands of other such sites around the country where the Khmer Rouge practiced genocide during the late 1970s.” A feature in that “killing fields” museum are 8,000 human skulls in a glass shrine.
Those skulls were dug from an area the size of a football field that contained mass graves of Cambodians, many of whom were tortured before being killed by the Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge that ruled the country from 1975 to 1979. “The killing fields document death,” Istvan wrote. Estimates of the total number of Cambodians who died in the genocide ranged from 1.7 million to three million.
The “killing fields” was the subject of a very powerful movie of the same title released in 1984. It told the story of New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, who covered that Southeast Asian country during the rise of the Khmer Rouge (or Red Khmer, also known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea) with the help of Dith Pran, a local journalist who also did the interpreting for him.
I remember watching the film with my jaw dropping at the scene where Pran, who was captured by the Khmer Rouge and made to undergo forced labor (Schanberg was among those kicked out of Cambodia), stumbled into the killing fields and walked gingerly amidst hundreds of human skeletons. Invading Vietnamese troops toppled the Khmer Rouge but the damage its rule wrought on Cambodia was devastating.
Pol Pot (also known as Brother Number One) and the Khmer Rouge were adherents of the principle that the end justifies the means. After seizing Phnom Penh, the new rulers, according to the article “The Cambodian Genocide” posted on the website endgenocide.org, “immediately began emptying the city’s population into labor camps in the countryside, where physical abuse, disease, exhaustion, and starvation were extremely prevalent.”
In 1976, Cambodia was renamed Democratic Kampuchea and Pol Pot declared that year as “Year Zero” to signify the start of the rebuilding of the country into their version of a rural utopia that only had place for people working in collective farms and kills intellectuals, professionals and upper class members.
Decades after, the “killing fields” stand as a monument to human folly.
(khanwens@gmail.com/ twitter: @khanwens)