I kept no documentation of my visit to the killing fields, except for what is seared in my memory. I took no pictures, brought back no souvenirs.
Prior to my visit to the fields, I had a cursory understanding of Pol Pot’s regime and Khmer Rouge.
What I saw and heard during the audio tour had me cringe and recede into a dark space. Years later, even today the narration feels fresh.
The tower of skulls, rags that continue to emerge from the soil and the horrific ways in which tress were utilized to play with the victims minds and bodies are harsh reminders of incidents too brutal to have ever belonged in this world.
Over the course of the tour, I keep thinking – surely such horror, mass grief, killing and brutality have no place in the world today or in the future.
I was so wrong. My visit to the killing fields, was at the fringe of the beginning of the Syrian civil war.
Each clipping and frame of the devastation and grief the Syrian war has brought, is a repeat of the horrors that unfolded several decades ago in the Khmer killing fields – a narration of human moments, bits of song and conversation, an exchange of an escape plot, the waiting around, the submission, the adaptation to changing times (by both mind and body), an exchange of trust, broken trust, sudden fear, sudden death, prolonged violence, relentless war, no end in sight.
Desperation.
Clichés exist because they are often the norm – but I wish “History repeats itself” to never be true for war or suffering.