Remembering The Unspeakable Horrors

As well-travelled the man is in Europe and US, he isn't familiar with Asia, or Asean. He's quite curious about our neighboring cities. So when I got called to a work trip to Phnom Penh, he booked a ticket to join me in the city for an extended weekend. He didn't stay longer because I insisted on packing him away home during the work days- I dislike distraction. :p

I took the man to the site of Choeung Ek where it was one of the killing fields during the regime of the Khmer Rogue when Cambodia was known as the Democratic Kampuchea. I had been here several times and by now, the emotions had settled into something quiet and unruffled. But the man hadn't. I wanted to see how affected he would be. He was. Our guide was very eloquent in his description of the horrors the victims faced. As we meandered among the uncovered graves that now seemed serene, the man's face was unreadable.

We saw the skulls and the rags of what used to be clothes. The guide pointed out bone fragments on the ground, visible between the grass covered mounds. I imagined the rivulets of blood that seeped into the ground not that long ago, and the screams of the thousands of innocents that permeated the villages then. This is but one of the 300 over horrifying sites of murders and it's a stark reminder of how a group of humans could change the face of a nation's history and send it spiralling down into the darkest depths of the human soul.

Then I watched the man's lip curl in repugnance at the thought of how the victims suffered on those beds at the Tuol Sleng S21 Prison. The torture instruments and the metal beds remained in the cells as a tangible, graphic focus of all that had taken place in this venue. Though scrubbed and bleached clean, the linoleum flooring from a recent past were darkened in many areas with patches that could not be washed away. Those, were presumably stained from all the blood.

The man was glad to have seen these places for himself. To be in Phnom Penh, standing at these sites, conveyed a myriad of feelings that the 1984 film couldn't evoke. The revulsion was nauseating. It would do us good to remember Cambodia's painful past and quietly support the country as she emerges out of the economic and social regression into something, hopefully, better.