While in Phnom Penh we visited the "Killing Fields" memorial to the humanitarian devastation that took place during the Pol Pot regime. Probably the most moving of elements of the memorial is a several story glass-paneled tower containing the skulls of victims stacked on shelve from the floor to the ceiling of the building. These represent only a few of the some 1.6 million estimated to have been murdered by the regime. However, each skull once was a living, breathing human being who was butchered in the name of "the great leap backwards". Combined with the thousands of individual photos at the old S-21 prison in downtown Phnom Penh, one starts to have some sense of the scale and horror of this terrible period in the history of this beautiful country.

It occurred to me during this trip that there have been at least five genocides (Cambodia, the Sudanese civil war ("lost boys of Sudan"), the Balkans, Rwanda, and now Darfur (also Sudan)), all in my lifetime and, more shameful, since the world said after the Holocaust, "Never again!". I have now visited the site of three of those genocides. How can people perpetrate such evil -- and is it not almost as evil for people (and nations) who could stop it stand by and allow it to continue?


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