The area near Angkor Wat, the world’s largest religious structure and one of the most spectacular architectural wonders, was used as one of 300 “killing fields” by Cambodia’s genocidal dictator Pol Pot.
On January 7, monks chanted at Angkor Wat, other temples and “killing fields” throughout Cambodia to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of Pol Pot’s horrific regime – one of history’s worst.
Pol Pot's infamous Khmer Rouge regime killed an estimated 1.7 million people – more than one-fifth of Cambodia’s population -- in the late 1970’s. They were either murdered outright, or died from forced labor and starvation.
“Massacres occurred in the vicinity of Angkor Wat, many in its Siem Reap province,” Ben Kiernan, Founding Director of Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program told me. "The precise total number of 'killing fields' across Cambodia is unknown, but probably up to three hundred."
Kiernan wrote definitive books, “The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79” and "How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975", both published by Yale University Press.
Recently, I finally realized a life-long dream to visit Angkor Wat and stayed in the town of Siem Reap, about 10 miles away.
I asked my extraordinarily knowledgeable guide, Phalla Chan, how he had managed to survive those years. “I guess I’m strong,” he replied, adding that he had lost many family members. “Today is for today, not for thinking about yesterday.”
Fortunately, the only violence we saw was in the bas-reliefs of epic Hindu tales covering Angkor Wat, the spectacular temple spread across more than four square miles. Truly a world wonder, Angkor Wat is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Not until 2004 was Angkor removed from UNESCO's endangered World Heritage sites. UNESCO called Cambodia's efforts a "success story" in clearing landmines, reducing pilfering and other crimes.
Angkor Wat and the four nearby temples I toured were the most spectacular I've ever seen. Yes, even more than the temples I've toured like those of the Kama Sutra at
Khajuraho in northern India,
Mahabalipuram and Kancheepuram in southern India, the
Taj Mahal; pagodas along
Burma's "Road to Mandalay" -- I refuse to use the dictator's terms like Myanmar; Mayan ruins in
Mexico and
Guatemala;
Machu Piccu in the Peruvian Andes, etc., etc. Full disclosure: Okay, so I haven't -- yet -- seen the Pyramids and many other world wonders. But back to Angkor Wat...
W. Somerset Maugham put it like this, “No one, no one should die before they see Angkor,” during his second visit to Cambodia in 1959.
I certainly agreed with "Of Human Bondage" author, but the Angkor area had been extremely dangerous thanks to remaining Khmer Rouge guerrillas, other armed bandits and kidnappers, and landmines. Two of my neighbors were shot there. My guide Phalla Chan said temple-goers used to hire armed guards.
Angkor Wat had been the center of the enormous Khmer empire that thrived from the 9th to the 15th century. About 40 other temples are in the Angkor area near Siem Reap. One of the most astounding is Banteay Srei “Fortress of Women” with numerous sculptures of celestial dancers called apsaras.
French author André Malraux (“Man’s Fate”) and his wife Clara found the sculptures so beguiling that the couple was convicted of stealing several Banteay Srei statues in 1923. However, the jail sentences were never enforced in what was then French Indochina.
Malraux described it like this in his novel “The Royal Way”, “…the two dancing girls were some of the purest work he had ever seen. Well, the next thing was to load them onto the carts.” Despite his art pilfering, Malraux’s fate was to serve as France’s Minister of Cultural Affairs in the 1960s. Mon dieux, Malraux.
These days, at several temple sites, musicians injured by landmines play hauntingly eerie Cambodian tunes on traditional instruments.
Country & western Musak was playing in the lobby of my hotel in Siem Reap, the jumping off town for Angkor. I couldn’t escape country & western alleged music even in Siem Reap? Hotels there have “sprung up like mushrooms after the rains”, Phalla Chan commented.
There was no room at the inn I’d wanted, the elegant Amansara, formerly a guest villa of Cambodia's Prince, later King Norodom Sihanouk. The name is a combo of the Sanskrit word for peace, aman, and apsara, those heavenly dancers. You'll need as much peace and heavenly repose as possible to help you absorb the exquisite beauty and tragedy of this phenomenal country. The Khmer Rouge military had occupied the villa in the 1980s, but in recent years the Amansura has been meticulously reconstructed, expanded, and enhanced with even a spa.
Stay anywhere you need to in order to see Angkor Wat, as Maugham said. And experience the rest of this exquisite country decimated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
Yesteryear's tragedies are today's tourist attractions in Cambodia -- including "killing fields" and prisons. Philip Short, author of the excellent biography “Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare” (Henry Holt and Company) told me, "There can be no justification from profiting from evil in this way...It is callous and inhumane."
I agree with Short, and yet also with the philosopher George Santayana who warned, "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it."
At the most notorious of hundreds of killing fields, Choeung Ek, 8,000 skulls are stacked up in the former orchard just a few miles from Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh. Cambodia’s deadliest prison, then called S-21, is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The 290 skulls on display there used to be arranged in the shape of Cambodia. The walls of the former high school are papered with head shots of the 14,000 prisoners tortured there daily by the Khmer Rouge. These photos can be ordered, if you really want, as wallpaper for your computer.
The killing fields and museums affected me as deeply as Holocaust museums in Washington and in my hometown of Houston (I have not yet been able to face other Holocaust sites); Robben Island prison off Cape Town, South Africa where Nelson Mandela was held for 27 years in a three-square-yard cell; the Spanish Inquisition Museum in Lima, Peru; among many others.
Although one of history’s worst mass killers, Pol Pot never faced trial and died peacefully in his sleep at age 73. “Pol Pot” and "Brother Number One" were two of 10 aliases for Saloth Sar, a former schoolteacher. “The more often you change your name the better. It confuses the enemy,” he once said, according to “Pol Pot: Anatomy of A Nightmare”.
Five former Khmer Rouge leaders are languishing in a Cambodian-United Nations detention center -- whose food they’ve complained about. The trial of Kaing Khek Iev, who led Tuol Seng, will probably go on trial in March, but the four other detainees, in their 80s, are unlikely to face charges until 2010 and may well die peacefully before facing justice.
”After 30 years, no one has been tried, convicted or sentenced for the crimes of one of the bloodiest regimes of the 20th century," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “This is no accident. For more than a decade, China and the United States blocked efforts at accountability, and for the past decade (Cambodian Prime Minister) Hun Sen has done his best to thwart justice."
Hun Sen and other members of the ruling party held a rally marking the 30th anniversary, attended by about 40,000 people in the capital Phnom Penh, but did not mention the trial, according to the Agence France Presse (AFP) news agency.
The Cambodians I had the honor to meet, certainly Phalla Chan, seemed to embody the Cambodia proverb “Cultivate a heart of love that knows no anger”. May the world cultivate the World War II Holocaust theme, "Never Again."
For more info:
“Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare” by Philip Short (Henry Holt and Company). Short has been a foreign correspondent for "The Times" of London, "The Economist", and the BBC
Trails of Indochina tour operators, who organized my independent travel in Cambodia and Vietnam
U.S. State Department travel information about Cambodia
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