Penance in Southeast Asia

Posted Wednesday, April 30, 2008, 4:43 AM by Lonely Planet

It was going to be a fairly typical travel-blog entry: a horrific series of bum-busting bus rides and sloooow boats, complete with mosquitos and leg paralysis and drunk Scottish backpackers.

That was before we went to the Killing Fields.

For an American, exploring Saigon can be confronting. The War Remnants Museum, just north of the buzzing backpacker area, is graphic and brutal. One feels hot in the languorous sunshine; then one sees the tiny prison where hundreds of women were stuffed for months without fresh air. One flinches at the pain from a cramped boat ride; then one views the pictures of torture and the maiming resulting from chemical warfare - wounds that carry over into a new generation of Vietnamese.

But terrible as this place is, it cannot prepare a traveller for the Killing Fields of Cheuong Ek, Cambodia. About 15km outside Phnom Penh, this is where Pol Pot set up his death camp. Millions of innocents were slaughtered here, sometimes several thousand a day. A stupa filled with the skulls of the slain looms over the entrance. One tries to imagine faces on the bones staring back, seeing the features of men, women and children. There is a tree nearby against which Khmer Rouge guards smashed children until they were broken corpses.

Back in the capital, the Tuol Slang Genocide Museum continues the horror. It was a school once, and in the breezy open air one can almost hear the children running about at playtime. Enter the classrooms, though, and the voices of the ghosts change to wails and moans. The Khmer Rouge cadre brought people here to be questioned, tortured, and massacred. Out of the tens of thousands of prisoners who entered the compound, seven survived. The faces of the dead stare out from photographs - mugshots and torture photos taken days, or hours, before and after their deaths.

Why, I wonder, do we go to these places? Is it some macabre instinct we have - the same draw that leads one down the path of dark tourism? I'm not so sure: I haven't wanted to visit the torture dungeons of Europe since I got out of my teens, for example. I prefer to think that we have to live through these experiences to remember. Sometimes I wish that these spots had been razed, and eradicated from human memory. But then we would learn nothing.

Part of me imagines that I'm comforting myself by insisting that it's not some vile voyeuristic urge that draws travellers to places such as the Killing Fields or the Nazi death camps in Germany and Poland. But I think back to the description written next to the old death shed in the Killing Fields: "These men had human bodies, but they had the hearts of demons."

The horror is that it's not true. These were people like you and me. I cannot forget.

- Vivek Wagle, Site Editor

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