A living memorial to the killing fields

By Amit Baruah

CHOUENG EK (CAMBODIA), JUNE 6. You have to pay two dollars to enter. No, it's not one of Cambodia's many wonderful Wats or temples, this is the Choueng Ek ``extermination camp'', the site of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge's experiments with death between 1975 and 1979 in this poor country.

Fifteen kilometres from the capital Phnom Penh, a total of 8,985 corpses were found at this mass grave and where now a stupa has been constructed as a memorial to the dead. A total of 17,000 persons - children, women and men - were sent to their death in Choueng Ek alone by the Pol Pot regime. As you enter the tall grey-coloured stupa, the visitor will be confronted with the sight of some 8,000 human skulls arranged neatly in as many as 13 levels or tiers. The skulls in these killing fields are arranged by sex and age.

Burnt-out incense sticks remind you that Cambodians are still in mourning for their dead, though the sight of tourists, many of them Western, taking pictures of this grotesque site, is a more common one. A more keen photographer was focussing on the skulls as this reporter went around the ``extermination camp'', as it is officially called. Below the many tiers of skulls are the clothes - tattered and many-coloured - which were worn by the persons sent by Pol Pot and company to their deaths.

Outside, in the still, green compound, 43 of the 129 communal graves that were found have been left untouched at the memorial which was set up in 1988. The communal graves themselves were discovered towards the end of 1980. ``A stupa has been erected to preserve their remains and also to commemorate the deaths of (1.7 million) people of the Kampuchean people under Pol Pot,'' a notice at the memorial reads.

Describing the killings as ``more cruel'' than the genocide committed by Hitler, the notice added: ``With the commemorative stupa in front of us, we imagine we are hearing the voices 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....'' As you walk around, the communal graves have been fenced off and provided with bamboo roofs. One notice outside a particular grave reads: ``Mass grave of 166 victims without heads.'' Most horrible is the note pinned to a tree: ``Chamkiri tree against which executioners beat children.'' That's the way in which they killed children and infants - by bashing their heads against trees. From Choueng Ek, the trail leads directly to what is now the Tuol Sleng genocide museum, once the Tuol Sleng high school. After April 17, 1975, when the Khmer Rouge (or Red Khmers) entered Phnom Penh, this school was turned into S-21 or Security Office-21, where several thousand peasants, workers, technicians, engineers, doctors, teachers, students, Buddhist monks, Ministers, Pol Pot's own cadres and even Cambodian diplomats were imprisoned. Some Indians were also said to have been kept here.

There was a direct link between S-21 and Choueng Ek, the site of the mass graves. The prisoners from S-21 were taken to Choueng Ek where they were executed and then thrown into mass graves. Entering the ``genocide museum'' in the heart of Phnom Penh costs another two dollars (the U.S. greenback is accepted everywhere in Cambodia and is, in fact, the preferred currency). It could have been just like any other school in the capital, but under the Khmer Rouge it was enclosed by two folds of corrugated iron sheets, all covered with dense, electrified barbed wire, to prevent anyone from escaping.

Heavy iron chains and small six-by-two partitioned cells are a feature of this concentration camp. Huge wooden beds to ``drown'' prisoners and other weapons of mass torture are on display at the museum. Kang Kek Ieu, or Duch as he was known, was the boss of the S-21 concentration camp. He is currently in jail - along with Ta Mok, the last commander of the Khmer Rouge, while several others whom many Cambodians want to be tried, including Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan and Ke Pauk, are roaming the country freely. Duch was a mathematics scholar.

The horrors perpetrated by Pol Pot (who himself died on April 15, 1998) and the Khmer Rouge are there for all to see both at Choung Ek and at the Tuong Sleng high school-turned torture centre. Justice, however, is far, far away for those who died under the brutal hand of the Khmer Rouge, which once reduced the three million population of Phnom Penh to 20,000 after taking over the city in April 1975.

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