The Killing Fields

A couple of days ago I visited Choeung Ek, one of the 300 extermination camps operating during the Khmer Rouge era, more widely known as the killing fields. In this particular camp about 17000 people found a horrible death after having been tortured-sometimes for months-in a building close to the city center. Visitors are asked to be quiet as they walk around the mass graves where after the rain it's not unusual to see human skulls and bones resurfacing, or enter the memorial stupa that contains 8000 skulls of the victims. As I sat on a bench, I realised that I'm pretty much against preserving such locations. If it's for remembering the dead, then give them all a proper burial and seal the mass graves, if I had lost my loved ones there I wouldnt like to know that some of their skulls are on display. I would prefer to remember how they lived their lives before, not their final moments of agony, I'd prefer to visit the place and see nothing else but a memorial, knowing that their remains lay on the ground below it,not see clothes on plexiglass boxes or signs describing how heads of children were crushed on trees. If it's so that it will not happen again, well, this is the biggest joke ever. History unfortunately does repeat itself and the Pol Pots of this world don't have any respect for human life no matter how many memorials we build. As for the need to educate the rest of us humble humans, I can't quite understand how one visits a country without knowing some basic facts about it, and cambodia's recent history is very well documented, a quick search on the net will bring tons of material,but even for the lazy ones a museum should be enough. Worst of all, now that blood and guts are all over the news and the net, and sometimes even the most restrained photographers will prefer to show all than to imply, we've built such an apathy that an extermination camp might become nothing more than a tourist attraction.But then again it might be just me...