"To preserve you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss." (Khmer Rouge slogan)

My relaxed life of a student-tourist came to a sobering halt today with visits to the infamous "Killing Fields" and Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison.

During the reign of the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979, nearly 2 million people--one quarter of the population--were killed in an organized and ruthless campaign of Maoist Communism that sought to create an agrarian utopia. The city of Phnom Phen (pop. 1.7 million) was forcibly evacuated to the countryside overnight. Dissenters were shot on the spot...the weak, the bedridden, and the elderly were simply left to die.

Once in the countryside, the Cambodian people were placed in agrarian "communes" and made to work day and night. Starvation and malnutrition were prevalent. Families were separated and personal belongings were confiscated in an effort to promote fear and reverence for "Angkar" (literally, "the Organization"); the nebulous government authority whose de facto leader was Pol Pot.

The slightest dissent was met with swift retribution. Over 10,000 Cambodians were tortured and killed at Tuol Sleng prison, a former Phnom Phen high school turned nerve center for the Khmer Rouge's intelligence service. High ranking military officers, intellectuals, Buddhist monks, and political dissidents were often made to confess fantastic stories of subversion before being killed. Others were subjected to horrific torture methods whose only bounds were the limits of their torturers' imaginations.

Still many others were taken to the Killing Fields and summarily executed. Lacking bullets, victims were often dispatched with a blow to the head by readily available farming instruments--hoes, machetes, pick-axes. They were buried in shallow, mass graves that visitors today can still walk amongst...bones and clothing protruding from the dirt pathways.

It is both eerily morbid and refreshingly transparent the way that the Cambodian people have chosen to share these horrors with the outside world. It's as if, with each footstep among the mass graves and with each touch of the prison walls that once detained tortured souls, the country's wounds are healed. They are allowing us to mourn with them.