Welcome to Khmer Rouge Land!

03.05.04 | 8:42 PM ET

As we walked back toward the motorbikes, Nan turned to me and smiled.

“We go to the shooting range now?” he asked.

“No, thanks. I think we’ll just go to the Russian Market,” I replied.

“But you can fire an AK-47 or an M-16—only one dollar a bullet,” Nan insisted.

“Really, I think we’ll just go to the market,” I smiled.

“For $20 they’ll let you fire a rocket launcher,” Nan countered.

“I think my wife would prefer to buy some souvenirs of Cambodia.”

Nan shrugged, barked something in Khmer at his fellow moto driver, then remounted his Honda Dream scooter and waited for me to jump on the back.

I could tell from the puzzled looks and muttered Khmer he exchanged with his partner that our Cambodian guide thought I was definitely strange, maybe even a little suspect in the virility stakes, for not wanting to fire an AK-47.

But Sandra and I had just spent the morning seeing the devastating damage that guns can do to men, women and children, and I had little desire to fire one myself, even if it was just a dollar a bullet. From Nan’s point of view, all the backpackers went to the shooting range—just after the concentration camp and the mass graves—so why should I be any different?

Welcome to Khmer Rouge Land, the Killing Fields theme park that is backpacker travel in Cambodia today.

Like the majority of travelers who visit Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh, we had decided to explore the country’s turbulent recent history, the murderous period between 1975 and 1978 when between one and two million Cambodians died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime. The scale and barbarity of the Khmer Rouge’s actions is almost unparalleled.

They force marched one million people out of Phnom Penh, abolished currency and education overnight and started on a harebrained scheme to create an agrarian communist culture. At the same time,  intellectuals, teachers, gays, and ethnic minorities were rounded up,  tortured and executed. Even wearing glasses, believed to be a telltale sign of an intellectual, meant a trip to the torture chamber.

Being a child of the seventies, I remember school appeals to help Kampuchea (as it was then officially known) as thousands starved as a result of a famine brought about by the KR’s disastrous policies. Back then I had only a vague concept of a faraway Asian country where the kids were a lot less fortunate than myself and my classmates in Ireland.

It was only in the nineties, with the death of Pol Pot and ongoing arguments over whether to bring the KR leaders to justice, that I began to appreciate the tragic history of a nation that suffered over 30 years of continuous strife from which it is still reeling.

While traveling in Cambodia, I told many people back home that Cambodia made Thailand look like Disneyland. But if Thailand is Disneyland, then Cambodia is something from the dark side of Walt’s psyche. The contrast was particularly stark as we walked across the border between the two countries at Poipet. On the Thai side there were paved roads, a wide selection of Western commodities in the shops and smooth-talking, slickly dressed touts trying to part unsuspecting backpackers from their cash. A few hundred yards away the road became a pitted dirt track, the shops were roadside shacks and limbless beggars vied for change.

When we arrived in the capital by boat, the riverbank was crowded with about 50 motorbike drivers for hire, all loudly touting for business. We were heading for Simons’ Place, one of the many guesthouses located in the backpacker ghetto of narrow alleyways on the banks of the Boeng Kak lake. It had been recommended for its helpful staff and lakeside location.

As we disembarked into the melee I spotted a tall guy in his late twenties at the back of the group holding up a sign saying “Simon’s Place.” I made a beeline for him and before we knew it we were being whisked off on the back of two small Honda motorbikes.  Without even realizing it we’d been “adopted” by Nan. If we needed anything or wanted to go anywhere in Phnom Penh, he was our man and questions to any of the other moto drivers hanging around the guest house would be directed to him. With his excellent English and shy smile, he was always willing to suggest activities and was very concerned at any suggestion that we’d want to walk anywhere.

That night on the open terrace, as the sun became a shrinking blood red orb over the shimmering waters of Boeng Kak, I sat with other travelers from Wales, Canada, Germany and England having the usual getting-to-know-you conversations about our travels. Nan and the other Khmers that worked in the guesthouse were also sitting around when someone slipped the ultimate Cambodia movie, “The Killing Fields,” into the communal video disk player.  As the camera panned over a typical rural Cambodia scene, with its distinctive tall palm trees, Nan mouthed the words “Cambodia” in time with the narrator. Clearly he’d seen this movie many times.

I felt uncomfortable watching such a powerful and disturbing movie in this setting. There we were, privileged travelers from the West,  “roughing it” in South East Asia, watching an English-made film about a tragic time in this country’s history, with Khmer people who had put it on for our entertainment. Somehow I couldn’t see as hard hitting a movie about terrorism in Northern Ireland being shown in a Belfast hostel. As the movie progressed to the Cambodian hero’s unwitting discovery of the Killing Fields, when he found himself knee deep in corpses in a paddy field, I became more uncomfortable. But I realized that for the Cambodians showing this movie was part of their economic reality and not an indication that they were numbed to the events of the past. Backpackers want to feel immersed in the local culture rather than cocooned in their safe tourist hotels, even if that’s not reality. What could be more “authentic” than sitting in a Phnom Penh guest house watching a pirated copy of The Killing Fields for the second night in a row? We were no exception.

Afterwards, Nan politely motioned me over and with a wide smile asked me if there was any plant or tree in Ireland that was as distinctively Irish as the Cambodian palm trees featured in the opening sequence. I fluffed the answer as I tried to understand if for him this was the most noteworthy incident in a movie that painted some of his fellow countrymen as genocidal killers. Noting my interest in the Khmer Rouge era, he suggested that the next day he could bring us on a tour of S-21 and the Killing Fields. We accepted, looking forward to seeing them with a local who might be able to give us some insight into what happened there.

The next day we were up early and set off as pillion passengers on two motor scooters. Our first stop was S-21, or Tuol Sleng, as it’s also known, which was the Khmer Rouge detention center where those who were suspected of opposing the regime were sent. We pulled off one of the main boulevards down dusty side streets and found ourselves looking over a barbed wire wall at a run down three-story school. The barbed wire and the eerie silence—even the beggars didn’t congregate outside Tuol Sleng— were the only indicators of what lay inside.

Tuol Sleng was a high school before the Khmer Rouge set up a detention center here in May 1976, and it has been open as a genocide museum since 1980.  During its life as a prison and torture center more than 10,000 adults and anywhere up to 2,000 children were processed through it, spending their final days being degraded and tortured before being taken to the Killing Fields outside town to be murdered and interred in mass graves.

The details of what happened there are horrific, a reminder of what happens when a regime dehumanizes its subjects. As we entered we passed the classrooms on the ground floor, which were used as interrogation rooms.  The doors are locked, but looking through the windows we could see the steel framed beds, car batteries, and iron clubs that were used to dole out punishment to “enemies of the Khmer state.”

On the upper levels, as we walked through the tiny brick cells where more important prisoners were held, the crooked walls seemed to close in on me. I was overcome with claustrophobia, fear and the desire to cry at the uselessness of it all. I’d never experienced claustrophobia before. I wanted to flee and gulp down fresh air under the blue sky.

Despite this I was drawn back in. I wanted to see everything that S-21 had to offer. I wanted to try to understand what had gone wrong here.

But at the same time I felt uneasy. Here I was, a relatively wealthy Westerner visiting a third world country still suffering from the consequences of the very events whose notorious landmarks I was visiting as a tourist.

By the time we got to the three rooms whose walls were lined with photos of the victims I was numb. Looking at the faces of thousands of Cambodian men,  women and children I searched for something that might tell me their story.  The Khmer Rouge had been meticulous in keeping records of their acts,  including these photos of each of their victims, which now act as a chilling reminder that real people suffered and died here.

We emerged after an hour to find Nan patiently waiting to take us to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. It was a beautiful winter’s day as we turned off the highway and onto an unpaved country road. Cambodia’s winter is the dry season but the surrounding fields still looked verdant.

The midday sun was hot on our backs as we climbed off the bikes and walked up to the small group of bored-looking Cambodians playing cards at the entrance.

The center piece of the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek is a Buddhist stupa filled with skulls, bones and possessions of victims exhumed from some of the 129 mass graves. This is where the Khmer Rouge executed those who had been held at Tuol Sleng. Most were shot but many were bludgeoned to death to save bullets. The site is littered with small depressions in the ground indicating the site of graves that are marked with little signs saying “Mass Grave” and detail how many bodies were found in each hole.

Although the bodies of over 9,000 people were found in the 129 graves, the site is much smaller than I expected. Physically, there’s not much to see at the Killing Fields. The area is covered with grass and kept neat and tidy.  Although the guide book had warned us, it was still a shock to see the clothing and shards peeping through the grass at the edge of the graves.

The backpacker vanguard currently flocks to Cambodia in favor of more sanitized destinations such as Thailand. Part of the attraction is that the violence associated with the Khmer Rouge has only recently played itself out—there’s even talk of making the KR’s last hideout on the Thai border into a tourist attraction.

Nan’s main concern with this legacy seemed to be that he could make $5 or $6 each morning by bringing willing travelers to see the sites. What they meant to him on a personal or political level it was impossible to say. In fact in conversation, Nan, like the majority of Cambodians, steered away from discussion of politics, instead preferring the South East Asian standards such as why Sandra and I didn’t have children. Nan already had one and another was on the way.

Again and again I found myself trying to wrap my mind around the fact that S-21 and the Killing Fields had become another day trip on the South East Asia traveler circuit. Maybe travelers don’t want to wait for events to become dusty and distant before they take their tours. Maybe life in the West has become so sanitized that we want to experience a taste of lawlessness and violence. If I’m honest, that was certainly part of Cambodia’s attraction for me.

That kind of tourism clearly has an impact on the locals. My unease with the situation was undoubtedly caused by an internal debate over the rights and wrongs of that influence. As a visiting westerner I had the luxury of having that debate with myself. Nan and the other locals making a living on Cambodia’s backpacker trail have made an uneasy peace with their country’s nightmare tourist attraction.

I knew one thing was for sure. I didn’t have the stomach for visiting a firing range after what we’d seen at the Killing Fields and the torture chamber. Living in one of the poorest countries in the world, which is only now emerging from 30 years of war, the locals are filling a market demand generated by travelers like myself. I can’t blame them. But on this occasion I didn’t feel like smiling and going along with my guide. Instead, we headed off in silence down the dusty roads to the Russian Market.

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