Killing Fields Museum: Siem Reap



In an earlier post here, I showed the Choeung Ek Genocide Center, the Cambodian Killing Fields near Phnom Penh. While that was the largest of the Killing Fields during the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge reign of terror, it was certainly not the only one in the nation.  There are approximately 100 Killing Field sites that have been identified throughout Cambodia where approximately 1.7 million people were murdered--an astonishing 21% of the nation's population at that time.

When I finished visiting the Angkor Wat temple complex, I made a request of my driver that we stop at the Siem Reap Museum, near the site of the main Killing Field at Cambodia's 2nd largest city.  He seemed surprised that after exploring the marvels of human creativity, spirituality and achievement at Angkor Wat I would would want to visit on the same day a place that recorded the depths of human depravity. 

I don't think anyone visits this museum anymore.  The woman in the ticket booth was reclining on a hammock when I arrived, nursing her newborn and seemed as shocked as my driver that I had come for a visit.  If the underbrush that is growing around the exhibits, threatening to swallow them, is any indication, soon the genocide will soon be forgotten.

Though not as starkly horrifying as the Choeung Ek site, with human bones still poking out of the ground there, the Siem Reap museum is actually far more informative and includes an art museum with paintings that picture the horrors of the time. And, as with Cheoung Ek, the temple at Siem Reap displays the skulls of unidentified victims, staring at us, begging to us never to forget the horrors they suffered and urging us to always stand up for those in our time facing genocide of their own. 



Sadly, the educational exhibits are being overwhelmed by the foliage, so few people visit. How quickly we forget.  And in forgetting, and becoming apathetic, we enable future horrors to occur. 



This is Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge and the architect of the program that led to 1.7 million deaths.  In this picture he looks like a loving grandfather, mild and gentle--and with his family he probably was.  It just proves that you can't identify evil from outer impressions, but only when you assess actions that come straight from one's heart.




In the Art Gallery.  This painting depicts the forced march made by so many Cambodians, rounded up from their homes to prison or to killing fields.




These vivid images are unsparing and unsentimental and portray the cruel reality of that time.

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