How “dark tourism” in Cambodia is revealing what really happened during the Khmer Rouge era
Cambodia is the home of some paradise beaches and ancient ruins as Angkor Wat, but it also keeps a recent past of genocide and pain.
By: Sascha Hannig
For a long part of my life I thought of visiting Cambodia. First and foremost, to see the ancient Khmer Ruins in Siem Reap (Angkor Wat and its neighbours) and enjoy some Southeast Asia’s dream vacations at the beach for less than US$10 a day.
But reality often wakes us up, and something you realize when you finally land in that country, is that there is still an open wound in people’s eyes and souls. If you look closer, you’ll se that most of the ancient statues are beheaded, the beaches are crowded with poor kids, old Russian armament and a story so terrible, that international organisms have preferred to forget, rather than take actions on it. I guess most tourists decide, for their own sake, to ignore such painful signals of the recent past, but I simply couldn’t do it.
I saw those scars at the very instant I started to walk around the city of Phnom Penh. A limbless young man who was selling books showed me a copy of “Cambodia: Year Zero” from Francois Ponchaud. He had a sign behind him, it warned people that he was a victim of Pol Pot’s landmines, and he wasn’t able to do many other jobs.
So, I bought the book, knowing very little about the topic, but with the memory of my mother telling me that Pol Pot was a Cambodian revolutionary and guerrillero who studied in France and then returned to establish a communist regime and kill everyone who was not even. That included, as I would later know, foreigners, academics and anyone who spoke more than one language. He installed the Republic of Kampuchea and made everyone leave the cities. Then he planned to instal a rice workforce and a perfect marxist system.
You might already know what happened: almost 3 out of 9 million people were murdered.
Dark tourism can be described as the likelihood to visit memorials and other locations with a dreadful history. Though it has become rather popular in the last year (it even has a Netflix series), I don’t consider it a personal hobby, but I admire how brave survivors are to come back to these places and to tell people what happened, even if they didn’t get any justice.
When I read the book and I returned to Cambodia’s Capital from a wedding, I told my boyfriend I wanted to see the landmarks of that era myself.
We asked a tuktuk driver to take us to the killing field of Choeung Ek, as it was one of the many touristic attractions that he had in his brochure. The place is not far away from the city, and we saw at least 12 propaganda posters on the way, claiming voters to pursuit socialism, “the ideas of the people”. We finally arrived at the fields, took the audio guides, and started walking. The place was just a carved field opened to public in 1988, but what I saw was much more horrific than the stories.
Our “audio” guide was the only survivor in a family of 8, and lived in the city by the time of the revolution. “Be careful, this is a sacred place, please do not step on the graves. You might see some bones, please be respectful” the voice insisted.
He explained that the pits still gather clothes and bones from the victims and every time it rains, some of them raise to the ground level, are removed and kept in boxes (jaws are usually found). You see where they were murdered, you see how they were killed, how they smashed babies against a tree to brake their skull, how they tortured people as they didn’t have more ammo to slay them.
You might already know what happened: almost 3 out of 9 million people were murdered. The Khmer Rouge faked an US attack to drag people to fear and jump to they side. Then, they ordered everyone to wear the same uniform. They separated children to make them weapons, they raped women, persecuted anyone who’s mind could be a dissident, tortured them, killed them and threw them to hundreds of hidden pits. As Pol Pot and his regime was not really judged by any of these atrocities (they had their own sit at the UN until 1982, thought they were removed from power in 1975), little is known by the west about all these. So dark tourism has become a way to teach visitors what happened in these areas. Only in that killing field, they had found more than 8,500 bodies. There are still hundreds of killing fields unknown.
The end of the visit takes you to the buddhist memorial of the fallen victims of the killing field. It is a Pagoda of several floors tall, that gathers the almost 9 thousand skulls who will never be recognized. It is the final rest place of the tortured dissidents (and normal people) of the Tuol Sleng School, that now stands as a Genocide museum.
The Death Kennedy’s song “Holiday in Cambodia” invited revolutionary college students to visit “real communism”. When you visit these places, your opinion gets drastically changed. In short, Cambodians are not only trying to stand up from one of the darkest ages of the cold war, but they are also trying to tell the world about it. Survivors wait from tourists to ask them questions and write books on the topic. One famous one is “First, they killed my father”, which was recently adapted to screen by Angelina Jolie and tells the story of the children soldiers of the regime.
I could write further, but I prefer to wait for your feedback. I strongly recommend my readers to investigate and read other sources. This story deserves to be told.
