Choeng Ek Memorial

I sit in the shadow of the stupa looming up before me. The Choeng Ek Memorial houses almost 9000 human skulls of the innocent people who died under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime. With skulls grouped in age groups of 0-20, 20-40, 40-60 and above, there's surely no better place to study human anatomy and development. In the quiet of the early morning, their empty orbital sockets stare back at me. Hollow. Lifeless. Death.


Their mandibles are missing. But if we could find them and piece them back to their correct skulls; and if they could then speak, they'd shock the world with their stories: of being bound and blindfolded, of the brutal massacre of entire families and themselves by blows with farming tools. All that remains now of their stories are the cracks, holes and dents in their skulls - a blow by a hoe, a hatchet, a shovel perhaps - but I'm no crime scene investigator.


A fellow tourist slides up to me quietly from behind - obviously trying not to disturb me from my thoughts. She makes me jump right out of my skin and my heart stops beating momentarily as I suppress a loud curse. We both start laughing and the oppressive weight lifts for a while.


At the back of the memorial, tourists have left messages on scraps of paper wishing the victims eternal peace and promising that their deaths will never be forgotten. Back at the front, a bus-load of Korean tourists arrive and start laughing whilst taking photos of themselves in death poses - a mockery and a show of disrespect to the gruesome deaths here. To move on or to revisit the past? How does one answer such a question nearly 30 years since?


I leave my own message written on a piece of paper torn out from this very journal. Step 1: Know.


***


The fields are dotted with hollows - sites of excavated mass graves where the bones were uncovered - now overgrown with grass and weeds. The area of unexcavated graves is now overgrown with small low trees and shrubs even. To move on or to revisit?


Around the fields, pieces of cloth can be seen, half buried in the earth. I tread around them carefully, shuddering at the thought that they might have belonged to the victims.


What should be done with the physical evidence of the dead? Should the bones be cremated in accordance with Buddhist principles? Or should the mass graves and bones serve as visual evidence to the atrocities committed; functioning as a testimony to the crimes of the Khmer Rouge? In short, how could a community convey countless instances of inhumanity while being culturally, religiously and individually sensitive?