Different drummer

Last week I had the privilege of visiting Choeung Ek, one of Pol Pot’s killing fields outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia. There 17,000 innocent Cambodians were killed and buried at the altar of a communist agrarian utopia, where city living was a crime. To save on expensive bullets, they used any other conceivable means of killing young and old, women and men, children, babies and elderly. To cover their screams from nearby villages while they killed them at night they played loud communist revolutionary music from loudspeakers hanging from a tree. That was the last thing the victims heard. The guards killed 10-20 people per night, each. With machetes, axes, stones, sago palm leaf stems (they have serrated edges) or bashing the heads of little ones on trees. Dead or alive, they were buried and covered in DDT to finish the work.

The place is tiny, like a little green with a few trees, totally unassuming. It could hardly fit 17,000 people standing. And yet. There are hundreds of these killing fields and millions of victims all over Cambodia.