Cambodia — The Failure of Never Again
By: Indie Jen Fischer
Tags: Genocide Prevention, Genocide, United Nations, Travel, Cambodia

World Genocide Commemoration Day

Child’s Photo on Display at Tuol Sleng

What I remember most are the eyes, not the glass cases filled to the ceiling with bones: one case for all of the skulls, another for limbs, but the eyes of the victims. At Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh, they’ve maintained and preserved the rooms and devices of this place, the most notorious torture prison in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge systematically tortured and exterminated those they considered to be “political” opponents, 25% of the population (1.5–2 million) over three years in the 1970's.

The items on display are rusted now, but this does not diminish their weight. The brutality of what was done in this place shines through clearly. Also on display are black and white photographs that were taken of every man, woman and child (yes, children) brought to this site. Often, individuals wear numbers. They stare straight ahead at the camera. Or, as it felt to me, they stare at you, the visitor, the tourist, the community member, the loved one (perhaps). Those eyes. One woman, in particular, stood out, defiance clear in her eyes. She undoubtedly knew the terror and horror that awaited her at this site, had likely already faced more loss and brutality than any one person should ever be expected to bear, and yet still, her eyes speak volumes, make clear her resistance to the Khmer Rouge.

By the time I visited Cambodia, I had studied South Africa and Apartheid, had lived through the US bombing of Kosovo and held a Master’s Degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard, which included a Kennedy School course in which we discussed Rwanda, Bosnia, Serbia, etc. Thus, I knew, intellectually, that there had been several genocides after the Holocaust. But, to be frank, it wasn’t until I stood in Tuol Sleng and looked into the eyes of the individuals that perished there, walked the hallways, passed the glass cases of bones that I truly began to understand the epic failing of our species. A declaration, after the Holocaust, “Never Again!” became merely words as we were unable to stop the “agains.” Just one genocide would have been too many. Yet, since 1945, there have been several.

Seeing Tuol Sleng and the continued affect of the genocide on the people of Cambodia made it clear to me how disgraceful the acts of my own nation had been during that time, supporting the Khmer Rouge (with FULL knowledge of what they were doing) simply because they weren’t communists. The Cold War deemed more important than the mass extinction of an entire group of people. I’d read Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide and mentally understood how abhorrent the actions of the U.S. (and other nations) were, but I had not taken in the true scale of it. The depravity of our choices did not sink in until I stood at that site in Cambodia.

Psychologists say this is common and that part of why mass atrocities continue is that our brains can’t compute them. The hard drive crashes when the numbers get too big. When the brutality is too extreme. When reality seems unreal. Our brains overwrite and tell us, simply, that maybe it isn’t real. It can’t be. 6 million. Impossible. 800,000 in 30 days (Rwanda). Unbelievable.

But our struggle to understand it, to wrap our heads around it, does not make it untrue. Those things are possible. They did happen. They continue to happen. Genocide is not isolated to one area, one group of people, one nation. It is all encompassing and it is about ALL of us.

When I left Cambodia, a seed was planted and it grew. The roots became strong. I didn’t know what I would create. How I would engage with the topic of genocide, but I knew that I had an itch I couldn’t really scratch, a problem I didn’t know how to solve. I needed to delve deeply into the question of why we haven’t ended genocide. We’ve put a man on the moon. Rovers explore Mars. We know more about Jupiter than my son knows about Pokemon (and he knows A LOT), but still genocide persists. We don’t intervene early enough or effectively. We don’t see the ways in which our language, our education, our systems open the door to future atrocities. We don’t prioritize honesty around the topic.

I understand why we might want to avoid it. Genocide is a mirror reflecting the worst of ourselves.

Unless we face this ugliness, we can’t move forward and create a world of beauty.