My girlfriend was here last year and showed me pictures. I couldn't for the life of me understand why anyone would want to go to such a place. Why look at that nasty, evil shit, viewing skulls and bones when there is so much more that this beautiful country affords a visitor.
Today was a different matter all together.
I am staying at a hotel which is walking distance from a children's school that was turned into a prison/torchure chamber (S21) in the mid 70s.
On April 17, 1976 the Kymer Rouge entered the capital city of Cambodia, Phnom Penh and began to change life for the local Cambodian people forever.
It would be 3 years & 8 months before anything good would happen again in Cambodia.
The Kymer Rouge was headed by a despot named Pol Pot. He was a ruthless recluse of a man who went to a Euro university and never quite graduated, believed to have failed out.
Over the next 3 years Pol Pot and his possie of murderous henchmen ruled over the Cambodian people causing a terrorist wave of death and torchure in their wake.
On the heals of the American-Vietnam war and unbeknownst to the entire world at the time, Pol Pot was able to convince some followers and bribe/enslave enough countryside people to create his army. This military force turned out to be a well organized regime of kidnappers, rapists and murderers. They terrorized the Cambodian population until 1979 when North Vietnam forces, feeling strong after kicking our asses, marched in and over threw Pol Pot's forces. When they sent him running southwest toward Thailand they left behind a land of broken people not to mention decades of pain and suffering. The Kymer Rouge in just 3 short years were responsible for the extermination of 25% of the population!
Mass graves like the ones discovered in the killing fields mare the countryside as well as the inner cities.
Pol Pot wasn't brought to justice until many years later, serving less than a year in prison for war crimes before his death. This murderius piece if shit lived a life of a King into his eighties.
Yes, yesterday was a hard day but I believe a day to acknowledge as an important part of my history. All said and done I'm glad I was able to experience this. After the anger I initially felt had set in a scarey thought of sad reality allowed me to understand that none of us are above these unthinkable deeds. We may think we are but we are human.
Thou shall not kill. Of course! Ya but stand me in front of a man that hurt my family. Someone who torchured or killed someone I love. That's when you can't predict the direction of an emotion in a physical sense. That's when anger, fear or just plain justice gets a meaning which is self defined.
As I stood in front of hundred of mass graves, thousands of skulls and bone fragments I found myself wishing that Pol Pot was standing before me. In that moment I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't make him pay with his life immediately.
It was some time before I could control my feelings and I was craving a drink.
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