A Postcard from Cambodia
Thursday, January 18, 2007
RI Consultant Eugene Carlson wrote the following about his visit this week to the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Eugene and RI President Emeritus Lionel Rosenblatt are currently traveling in Cambodia to meet with Phnong communities in Mondolkiri Province and assess the progress of RI-supported projects. RI has a long history of working with the Phnong, you can read more about it on our website.
If tourism is key to your nation’s economic success, and one of the most popular tourist sites is difficult to get to, it makes sense to improve access. Even if the site is one of modern history’s most horrific venues.
The Killing Fields at Choeung Ek is 15 kilometers from central Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. I drove there with a friend a couple of days ago. A visit to Choeung Ek, and its companion site in Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge’s house of torture at Tuol Sleng, is a gruesome must-see for most visitors to Cambodia.
After leaving the southern edge of the city, we bounced slowly along a deeply rutted dirt road. Tour buses coming and going from the same site, crawled slowly around deep potholes. Next to our track, however, highway crews were well along toward finishing an up-to-date paved road. In a country where road building and repair is a low priority, tourists will soon whisk from Phnom Penh to the gates of the Killing Fields in speed and comfort.
An estimated 17,000 men, women and children, marked for execution by the Khmer Rouge, were trucked to Choeung Ek. Shot or bludgeoned when bullets became scarce, their bodies were dumped in shallow pits dug among the trees of a longan orchard.
The remains of some 9,000 victims have been exhumed. Their skulls are stacked in a tall stupa, visible behind glass windows. Bone fragments are stacked in neat piles along paths that curve among three-dozen circular grassy pits where bodies were recovered.
Visitors walk slowly along the paths, lost in thought. Small butterflies flit among the trees. One lands briefly on a small stack of bone fragments near my feet. Children wave from a nearby field. All is quiet.
Except in the parking lot where the ubiquitous souvenir shop beckons. What items do you stock on your shelves for tourists who have just come face to face with genocide? Silver chop sticks. Bracelets. Ceremonial daggers. Ivory napkin holders. Sunglasses. Cotton scarves. Knock-offs of the cigarette lighters used by American soldiers in Vietnam. And, of course, tee-shirts.
Depressed by the tchotkes, I asked Kal Yan, the shopkeeper, to show me his best-selling item. He pointed to two books: First They Killed My Father, a survivor’s tale of the Khmer Rouge years by Loung Ung, and The Pol Pot Regime, by Ben Kiernan, director of Yale University’s Cambodia Genocide Project. A glimmer of good taste from the tourist trade.
If tourism is key to your nation’s economic success, and one of the most popular tourist sites is difficult to get to, it makes sense to improve access. Even if the site is one of modern history’s most horrific venues.
The Killing Fields at Choeung Ek is 15 kilometers from central Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. I drove there with a friend a couple of days ago. A visit to Choeung Ek, and its companion site in Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge’s house of torture at Tuol Sleng, is a gruesome must-see for most visitors to Cambodia.
After leaving the southern edge of the city, we bounced slowly along a deeply rutted dirt road. Tour buses coming and going from the same site, crawled slowly around deep potholes. Next to our track, however, highway crews were well along toward finishing an up-to-date paved road. In a country where road building and repair is a low priority, tourists will soon whisk from Phnom Penh to the gates of the Killing Fields in speed and comfort.
An estimated 17,000 men, women and children, marked for execution by the Khmer Rouge, were trucked to Choeung Ek. Shot or bludgeoned when bullets became scarce, their bodies were dumped in shallow pits dug among the trees of a longan orchard.
The remains of some 9,000 victims have been exhumed. Their skulls are stacked in a tall stupa, visible behind glass windows. Bone fragments are stacked in neat piles along paths that curve among three-dozen circular grassy pits where bodies were recovered.
Visitors walk slowly along the paths, lost in thought. Small butterflies flit among the trees. One lands briefly on a small stack of bone fragments near my feet. Children wave from a nearby field. All is quiet.
Except in the parking lot where the ubiquitous souvenir shop beckons. What items do you stock on your shelves for tourists who have just come face to face with genocide? Silver chop sticks. Bracelets. Ceremonial daggers. Ivory napkin holders. Sunglasses. Cotton scarves. Knock-offs of the cigarette lighters used by American soldiers in Vietnam. And, of course, tee-shirts.
Depressed by the tchotkes, I asked Kal Yan, the shopkeeper, to show me his best-selling item. He pointed to two books: First They Killed My Father, a survivor’s tale of the Khmer Rouge years by Loung Ung, and The Pol Pot Regime, by Ben Kiernan, director of Yale University’s Cambodia Genocide Project. A glimmer of good taste from the tourist trade.
Labels: Cambodia
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