WARNING: this entry has nothing in it about beaches or fun. It's definitely a downer. If you're not interested in such things, try another entry.

We spent our one afternoon in Phnom Penh visiting the museums dedicated to honoring the victims of the Khmer Rouge. For those of you who haven't seen the movie "the Killing Fields," here is a short history of Cambodia in recent times (as I understand it - if you want something official go read a book). Cambodia received its independence from the French in the 1950s and had a short lived time of glory until the early 1970s under King Sihanouk. Unfortunately, the country was situated directly in the path of the conflict that we call the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese call it the American War) and a serious of unfortunate moves by the monarch led to a political and military vacuum that was filled by the Khmer Rouge, a communist regime led by Pol Pot, one of the world's worst dictators/mass murderers. The Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975 and instituted their own brand of communism by clearing out cities, killing all educated people and people of "culture" and generally setting the clock back on Cambodia hundreds of years. I'm unsure of Pol Pot's precise philosophy but it seems his goal was to erase Khmer culture and force the people into a subsistence agrarian society. During the short period of time he controlled the country, 3 million people died.

Making a major mistake in tactics, the Khmer Rouge began warring with the Vietnamese communists in the late 1970s, resulting in the Vietnamese army invading Cambodia and eventually taking over Phnom Penh in 1978. The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Army (controlled by the Vietnamese) continued a civil war from 1979 well into the early 1990s, when a final peace accord was signed and the Vietnamese forces withdrew. It's interesting to note that the US supported the Khmer Rouge during this time even though they were communist, apparently under the theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Choeung Ek Memorial, known as the Killing Fields, is a memorial several km outside of Phnom Pehn and was erected on the site of mass graves of Khmer Rouge victims. 8,000 bodies have been exhumed from this site but it is estimated that 17,000 people were executed here. Like Rwanda, the majority of the killings done by the Khmer Rouge were done by hand and most victims were beaten to death. The museum is a little macabre since it is mostly just a pile of skulls, but without the skulls I think it would be difficult to imagine the horror that took place in that dusty field pockmarked by open pits that look like bomb craters.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (S-21) is the other Khmer Rouge related museum in Phnom Penh. It is a former high school that was appropriated by the Khmer Rouge as a prison and torture center for political prisoners, the vast majority of whom were killed after their confessions. The horror here is far more palpable since they have left the tiny brick cells and torture chambers intact. The Khmer Rouge kept surprisingly good records and each prisoner was photographed and numbered before being put into the system. Thousands of these photographsare displayed in the museum and walking past all of them with their haunted eyes is deeply unsettling. Most heartbreakingly of all is that a couple thousand of these "political prisoners" were children, some as young as 3 years old.

Because it was so horrific, one tends to think of the Khmer Rouge reign of terror as the worst thing that happened to the Cambodia people, but our driver in Phnom Penh reminded us that this country has been at war for most of the last 35 years. Cambodia has a very young population and most of the people we have interacted with don't remember the war years but this driver was exactly our age and it really made his story hit home with us. He grew up in a rural community in Eastern Cambodia and was one of 12 children. In 1970 (the year all three of us were born), five of his siblings were killed when a US plane dropped a bomb on his house. He lost two brothers in the Army and one sister (along with her newborn) in a missile attack by either the Vietnamese Army or the Khmer Rouge. At the age of 14, when Pearse and I were entering high school, this guy who had never had the chance to go to school entered the Cambodian Army to fight the Khmer Rouge. Surprisingly, his family went relatively unscathed by the Khmer Rouge, with only one aunt and uncle dying in the purges.

It is easy to forget Cambodia's history unless you visit the memorials because Cambodia has everything going for it: great tourist sites, friendly people, abeautiful culture, and really smart kids (we bought 30 postcards off of them because they spoke Irish to Pearse) who want to learn. There are steep obstacles to overcome: the corruption, the education system (very expensive here), the poverty and currently a drought, but when you consider that this country has only had a government for few years and the horrors it has been through, I think it's come a long way pretty quickly.