I stumbled across the Khmer Rouge when I was reading one of my forensic anthropology textbooks. I studied Modern History for 7 years - how had this never hit my radar before?! Mao's China, The Cold War, even the development of the World Wide Web, but an organised national genocide in South East Asia? Nothing. The Vietnam War was in our textbooks but never taught, and I was the only one in my class to get far enough through the read about it. Rwandan genocide? Che Guevara? Mexican drug cartels? Nope, but hey, did you know that Gerald Ford was the 38th US president and has 4 children? Wow that changes my outlook on the world.
Education, however, is difficult. As in Rwanda, Cambodia hasn't had an opportunity to be angry, mourn, or heal these events. There has been no recovery time because subsistence farmers cannot afford to take a moral stand against the neighbour who killed half their family: when you depend on the food you farm, you can't stop farming because you don't want to share the field with certain people. So then an impossibly horrible situation occurs whereby victims are forced to stand alongside their abusers and just get on. Tutsi working alongside Hutu, Khmer living alongside Khmer Rouge. It creates a suppressed anger and resentment which bubbles under he surface, locked down by a glass floor of silence: silence because it's too painful to remember, too fresh to uncover, too dangerous to talk.
It is difficult to get a personal understanding of the Khmer Rouge because it is never, ever spoken about in Khmer society. Everybody in Cambodia was affected: families, friends, even the base people (countryside families who had never been involved in the cities) suffered from rationing and punishments even though they were considered the aspirational type of Khmer. The scars are obvious: the countryside is riddled with unmapped landmines, littered with killing fields, and blanketed in silence. The only way to learn when visiting, therefore, is to venture to the prisons and killing fields which have been memorialised for education. These are exceptional sites.
It was a bright, sunny Tuesday when I peeled myself off the rubber seats in the back of the Tuk Tuk and walked into a beautiful green courtyard. Trees lined every side, children's play bars stood at the sides of the bright green lawn, and white frangipani flowers twizzled delicately as the light breeze lifted them from their branches and carried them floating to the pavement. I sat on a wooden bench and plugged in my earphones, watching birds fly past the light yellow buildings around me and began my harrowing journey through the history of the Khmer Rouge.
