Bloodstains on the ground still mark the spots where prisoners were slain. Bullet holes riddle the walls, and mounds of tangled barbed wire section off the various areas of the complex. On the ground floor, hundreds of photos of the inmates stare blankly from the walls. Many are women and children.
Seventeen kilometers away from the city, at the end of a long rutted road, lay the killing fields. Bits of bone and cloth still come up from the ground. Open pits mark former mass graves, some with signs noting that all the bodies found within were young children, or women, or soldiers. A glass stupa in the center of the field is filled with 17 levels of bones found at the site. And this place is not unique.
From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer revolution ravaged Cambodia. Pol Pot, a merciless dictator who led the Khmer Rouge guerilla force, killed over 1.5 million civilians in those four years in mass genocide. The extreme communist regime over which he presided targeted the educated, anyone with any knowledge of the former government, anyone who wore glasses, anyone who could speak a foreign language and anyone who was unable to work in the fields. The killing fields and war-torn ruins that remain in Cambodia today are reminders of that dark time.
The events in Cambodia are among the most tragic in modern history. So why, prior to actually traveling to Cambodia this summer, had I never even heard of Pol Pot? I read the newspaper. I took honors classes in high school and studied history in college. I should have known.
As troubling as this is, there is another greater issue. The United States played a critical role in these events. During the Vietnam War, the American military carpet-bombed Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, in an attempt to root out Vietnamese troops who were potentially hiding there. During these raids they killed an estimated 150,000 civilians. The subsequent economic and military destabilization of Cambodia eased Pol Pot's rise to power, much as the reparations of World War I destabilized Germany and assisted Hitler.
And the deadly Cambodian revolution is not the only example of genocide; the third world has been ravaged by horrific wars, revolutions and ethnic cleansing in recent history.
Although many Western nations play key roles in both the causes and the outcomes of these wars, very few westerners know about them. High school students are spoon-fed a simplistic study of world history, which for me, included an entire academic quarter on the Holocaust. Outside of America and the world wars, high school students sometimes receive a glossed-over summary of the Russian Revolution or Napoleon's exploits. And if they are really lucky, they might see a movie on Gandhi or Ancient Egypt. But that is it.
I consider myself to be relatively well educated. But I would not have been able to locate Cambodia on a map before deciding to travel in Southeast Asia last summer, let alone discuss any aspect of its history, modern or otherwise.
Banging around on Cambodia's dusty, red roads, moving from killing field to genocide museum to extermination cave, I grew more and more furious. Not just that these things have happened. And not just that the U.S. was involved. I was mad that I didn't know anything about it.
The Jewish holocaust was horrible, but so was this. So are the wars raging constantly in Africa, the constant bombings in Indonesia and the Philippines and the wars in the Caucus region of southern Russia. Why are these less important? Why does European death matter more?
Because that is what we are saying; our inaction and foreign policy speak a thousand words. Our Eurocentric education inadvertently teaches us to be blasé about the third world. Sure, the information is out there, if you choose to seek it out. But who would have even known to look? I certainly wouldn't have.
It is time that we acknowledge the third world; time that we realize that it is not wholly apart from we industrialized nations in the West; time we understand that Western decisions have a profound impact on third world nations and time that schools started taking global studies seriously.
We westerners must lose our indifference to sufferings in the third world. Two million deaths are still 2 million deaths, regardless of where the victims lived.
As I traveled around Southeast Asia this summer, I was horrified at how little I knew. But Cambodia really hit home. There is no excuse in the world for Americans to not know what happened there.
Katie Kelberlau is a religious studies and history junior. Reach her at katie.kelberlau@asu.edu.
