Taking Bearings

WAT THMEY, Cambodia — On the road out of Siem Reap past the Jayavaraman hospital is a small memorial to those murdered in the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields. Wat Thmey (aka Wat Thmei) it’s not much more than a collection of bones and grainy weather-beaten few photos and drawings posted on display boards, a paltry testimony to the scope of the horror in Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea.

Men, women, and children were killed because they were educated, deemed too wealthy (even if they lived in poverty), or not of sufficient extremist ideological purity. They died of starvation, lack of medical care, and outright torture. Most were buried where they fell. Some in mass graves, others left to rot in open fields or stacked along the side of the road so that the dying and doomed marching in compelled exodus from their homes would be forced to walk past.

Figures of about 2,000,000 killed, up to a third of the population, are commonly found in academic texts. but no one really knows. As Cambodia become too murderous and dangerous a neighbor, the Vietnamese ousted and outlawed the Khmer Rouge in 1979. In the early 90’s the monarchy was restored and an elected government began to rule modern Cambodia.

The skulls on display at Wat Thmey came from locals and those driven from their homes in Phnom Penh. One curator said that under the rule of the Khmer Rouge he became the local teacher of mathematics, a position he held for the remainder of his life. His had only a sixth grade education and no special training in math, but all those more educated were driven off or killed.