Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I rode a tuk-tuk through rice fields in brilliant sunshine to a grove of trees where birds were singing. In this peaceful place, formerly an orchard and a Chinese cemetery, twenty thousand people were murdered over the course of three years. An open-air museum, it was shaded by tall trees, its largest structure a tower with stepped shelves containing some nine thousand human skulls. Many of the mass graves were still strewn with remnants of the victims' clothes. Most of the prisoners had been beaten to death with shovels, hoes, and pickaxes—among the cruelest and most painful deaths imaginable. Splits and cracks were visible in many of the skulls, from the force of a blunt ax head or the blade of a hoe. The skulls, young and old, male and female, said a great deal about who they had been and how they'd died.

When Vietnamese soldiers liberated Phnom Penh—against the wishes of the United States—129 mass graves were found here at Choeung Ek, one of the graves containing 450 corpses.

The victims were mainly people from the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, who had been tortured into confessing that they'd been spies or counterrevolutionaries. Many of them had been Khmer Rouge soldiers who'd fallen under suspicion, or been casually ratted on, or who'd just been unlucky. They were clerks, teachers, landlords—education was equated with wealth ("such people oppressed the poor")—or they were hapless bystanders who'd been pounced on for no good reason. Most were urbanites, termed "New People," considered inferior to peasants because they hadn't fought and suffered. According to David Chandler in Brother Number One (another pirated book I bought on a Phnom Penh street corner), they were mocked with the saying "Keeping you is no gain, losing you is no loss." These enemies of the state were driven in trucks the ten miles from the prison, twenty or thirty to a truck—frightened, starved, blindfolded, sick from torture.

When the truck arrived, the victims were led directly to be executed at the ditches and pits,

a little sign at Choeung Ek said. Because the execution methods were so crude—it was not possible to club more than three hundred people to death and also bury them on any given day—a backlog of doomed people built up, and many of the prisoners had to wait in locked huts for their turn to die, listening to the screams from the edges of the pits.

A sign on one tree said, The killing tree against which executioners beat children— and it explained that these children, the offspring of the despised privileged class of doctors, lawyers, and teachers, were swung by their heels and their skulls smashed against the tree.

Pathways linked the mass graves with the trees and the shrines—small platforms on poles, like bird feeders—where the clothes and sometimes the bones of the victims were stacked. On this hot sunny day, just the sort of day on which the killings took place, these platforms were thick with buzzing flies.

This tree was used as a tool to hang a microphone which make a sound louder to avoid the moan of victims while they were being executed, another sign said on a tree at the edge of one of the mass graves.

I was stunned and depressed by the visit to Choeung Ek. I had also begun to read the Philip Short book, which was not only a biography of Pol Pot but also a chronicle of Cambodia's recent history. One of Short's themes was how, today, the genocide was being marketed to advertise the virtue of the present government, which wasn't virtuous at all. He also emphasized that it was important to look closer at Khmer culture to understand the deep roots of this violence. The apparent anarchy was "a mosaic of idealism and butchery, exaltation and horror, compassion and brutality that defies easy generalization."

Writing of "the eternal Khmer dichotomy between serenity and uncontrollable violence, with no middle ground between," Short said that the killing fields were less an example of Pol Pot's excesses than the sort of behavior that was endemic in Khmer society. "The peculiarly abominable form [the ideology] took, came from pre-existing Khmer cultural models," he wrote. "Every atrocity the Khmer Rouge ever committed ... can be found depicted on the stone friezes of Angkor [and] in paintings of Buddhist hells"

It was self-serving for the United States to call it genocide, Short wrote, for after all, we had helped bring Pol Pot to power. And the existence of these museums of Khmer Rouge slaughter was also a way of suggesting that Cambodia had reformed, which was untrue. The present government was "rotten" and "utterly corrupt," and many men in it had been in the Khmer Rouge and had not repudiated their past crimes.