WanderingWhy…

The holocaust was a horrible crime. On a trip to Europe years ago, my brother and I visited the concentration camp of Dachau. To see the gas chambers, ovens and stand on the ashes of 30,000 people was a sobering experience. The complex has almost a solemn, memorial feel to it. And although it was shocking to see the history books come alive there, this all happened long before my time.

The Khmer Rouge ran the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh from ‘75 to ‘79, just a few stops back on the timeline. I was still a kid, but the genocide of nearly 2 million people happened in my lifetime. It seems the “never forget” signs in the German concentration camps have been, and continue to be, ignored.

Pol Pot and company turned this high school into a camp for political prisoners. The textbooks were replaced with a list of rules:

If I ever see a similar sign along this line of thought in my own country it’s time to move and renounce my citizenship. They could have summed up all ten “rules” with: Don’t think for yourself and do whatever I say.

Basically the accused were already found guilty, especially if they followed the rules. Confessions were extracted–if not your fingernails were. Eventually the guilty were executed with a bullet in the head if you were lucky, more likely you were not worth the precious bullet and your skull was bashed and throat cut.

Couldn’t Pol Pot’s dream of an agrarian society have started with a small scale experiment in the hills somewhere? Go start a hippie commune or something? Did a third of the population need to be executed? If the ideology was so great, it would have spread all on its own.

The concentration camp in Germany was sobering, but S-21 was downright horrifying. There is little money in Cambodia so the camp is still pretty much as it was then. Water stained walls and mold covered ceilings, wooden makeshift holding cells fitted into former classrooms, and a view of the grounds can be seen through the now rusting barbed wire.

Records were kept on all the prisoners-you’d think this would be enough evidence to prosecute the responsible parties later on. The photos of the prisoners were shocking… this is the face of a criminal of the revolution?

Most shocking of all, the Khmer Rouge were recognized by the UN as the leaders of Cambodia until 1991! There seems to be no push to prosecute those responsible for the recent genocide.

Hitler, Pol Pot, Milosevic… Rwanda, Darfur… why do we ignore the atrocity while it’s happening only to recognize it 10 years or more after the fact? How does such a brutal and limited way of thinking ever come to power? Will we ever learn?

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