Holiday in the Killing Fields

Cheung Ek Memorial Stupa.

By Jyoti Pande Lavakare
New Delhi, India
July 02, 2011,

You have to navigate carefully if you want to avoid stepping on human teeth at the Killing Fields, Choeung Ek, in Cambodia. Thirty years later, they still lie scattered along the area of the mass graves, where a memorial now stands, bizarre reminders of how low human nature can sink. The skulls at the memorial, hundreds of them piled one on top of the other, look out sightlessly at the people walking solemnly past. I don’t see many children around, but some teens brought by brave parents look on, arrested expressions on their faces, jaws slack in mid-chew, iPods on pause.

It’s been over three decades since the Pol Pot regime unleashed terror, transforming the psyche of Cambodians, perhaps forever. According to Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Joel Brinkley’s new book Cambodia’s Curse, the country lost a quarter of its population under the Khmer Rouge. As for the survivors, even today, 47 per cent of Cambodians suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), says a study by Cambodian psychiatrist Muny Sothara. Another study of Cambodian refugees found that 60 per cent of PTSD victims there suffered from sleep paralysis, a half-conscious state of catatonia. Social scientists are finding that PTSD is being passed from one generation to the next, the ugliness of a people traumatised by their own race becoming embedded in their very DNA.

Yet, the temple of Angkor Wat is beautiful. Magnificent, ravaged by nature and time, it is everything I imagined it to be. Our knowledgeable guide, a former Buddhist monk, Kim Yoeun Thol, turns out to be Angelina Jolie’s translator from when Hollywood descended to film Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. He shows us the exact spot where a critical scene from the film was shot at Ta Prohm. But what I remember most clearly is his personal story of working two jobs to care for his sister’s children after both their parents died of AIDS, his mother, a Buddhist monk, and his own wife and children. He is lucky to have a job at all in a country where the sick may die waiting for treatment if they cannot pay doctors' bribes.

Siem Riep is surrounded by several such temples. Some trees shrouding these are probably from the same family as the ones growing at Choeung Ek, against the trunks of which babies' heads were battered. The scattered teeth exhume the horrific past quicker than the badly-written signposts.

Did I know all this before I visited Cambodia? Of course not. I’d only read about Pol Pot’s gruesome regime casually when in college, but the scale of the horror had completely eluded me then. The Tuol Sleng genocide museum, a former high school converted into high-security prison S-21, right in the heart of the bustling city of Phnom Penh helped me understand the psyche of a race I knew very little about.

Did I need to know about all this, especially while on holiday? Most emphatically, yes. But more importantly, did I really need to introduce my children to these horrors? I think so, because I felt it was important for them to become aware of more than just Cambodia's beauty and the enjoyment of international travel — they were old enough for me to take off a couple of protective layers.

Almost everyone loves travelling. But here’s the thing. Travel can so easily transform into more than mindless enjoyment, if we tweak it, just a bit. Oh, I’m not saying mindless enjoyment is a bad thing — a Club Med or Carnival cruise can be just the thing to destress and rejuvenate. But additionally, if travel can help us learn more about the people we share our planet with, it can lead to greater understanding and respect.

Jyoti Pande Lavakare is a Delhi-based writer.