Teeth

In New Zealand we have a tradition that as the first childhood teeth  fall out, we give a small coin for each tooth to the child.  It’s like a right of passage – not sure how many other western cultures do something similar.

 

I was staring at teeth yesterday.  Some of them children’s, some adults.  Some in skulls, some found during the rainy season surfacing on the very paths I am walking on.  On the paths you sometimes also come across fragments of clothing half buried in the ground and the odd fragment of human bone. 

There is a tree with many Buddhist prayer bracelets adorning the trunk.  It looks colourful.  Just under 30 years ago when this location was discovered, it had remnants of human hair, bone and teeth embedded in it.  The discoverers could not understand why until the unearthed the mass grave alongside.  It was one of many mass graves at Choeung Ek but this one was special, it was full of the bodies of mothers and their babies and young children.  Bullets were expensive so the camp exterminators had bashed the children’s heads against the tree to kill them; guards would later confirm in testimony that the children were usually killed first then the mothers. 

In total there are more than 40 mass graves at this location.  Some have been cleared and the bones stacked in a memorial, others they have left (to rest in peace?).

It is hard to get the final statistic on the number of people who died under the Khmer Rouge.  Some venture around 4 or more million. There are many more killing field locations.  Some have been cleared, others left (sometimes due to landmines being in the area).

 

The Killing Fields are a sobering experience to visit.  I visited 2 locations that day, the first was the old school in Phnom Penn, converted into a torture camp and now the genocide museum.  Then I took the one hour trip from there to the Killing Fields.  This was usually the same order in which those who were victims of the Khmer Rouge underwent this ordeal. Some kept for weeks, months or years to extract “confessions” then blindfolded and shipped on trucks to Cheoung Ek.

A single death is a tragedy.  Death of this proportion often becomes just a statistic in people’s minds.  For me it was important to translate the horror of this statistic into individual people.  Starring at the large number of photos at Tuol Sleng (S-21), it is still hard to get it to sink in.  These people are holding numbers, in some cases these numbers identify specific ‘prisoners”, in  many cases, just a “batch” number for a whole group.  There are no names.  The faces stare back in black and white.  The scream is silent but the other photos and the torture chambers and rooms left unchanged make the echo unbearable. 

 

I stare at photos hoping that some people in these actually made it out alive though knowing they did not.  The actual number of survivors of this camp could be counted on two hands. 

 

The Killing Fields are strangely serene in their quietness and the respectful pace and grace of those who work there now tending to the plots and the over ten thousand bodies that are anonymous but represent mothers, children, lovers, fathers, brothers, sisters, babies…all with a future that was terribly interrupted and ended.

You would hope humanity would learn.  That places such as this would act as a stark reminder lest we forget.

Those without memory are lacking a moral compass and destined to walk around in circles.

And so the fields continue.  Bosnia, Rwanda…

Everyone deserves a future.  The right of passage.  Next time you smile at a child who proudly shows you the gap in their teeth as they grow, spare a thought for the gaps in a whole countries generation.