Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER ONE
Against the Ages
“That's where the killing fields begin.” Mao Vei extended an arm eastward, past a low
concrete fence and a wall of green bamboo, toward the groves and orchards of the dead.
The tall green mango and papaya trees stretched over three hectares. They were planted
here 30 years ago, and their roots still mingle with the remains of the thousands killed at
Wat O Trakuon, a Buddhist pagoda and former Khmer Rouge prison in whose grounds the
67-year-old Vei now stood, his eyes narrowed against the afternoon sun, all the memories
crowding back.
From 1974 until 1978, Wat O Trakuon served as a Khmer Rouge security center for the
district of Kang Meas, a dusty town set on the broad brown sweep of the Mekong west of
Kampong Cham. A tin-roofed school building within the temple grounds was converted
into an office and interrogation center. The pale yellow pagoda hall, sweeping up from a
base of sun-split concrete, was used as a prison. Inside the fragrant darkness, Vei crouched
down and indicated where the thick wooden beams were fitted with iron bars, how the pris-
oners were shackled in rows by their ankles. He padded across a floor of cool brown tiles
and opened a wooden door, pouring light onto a wall of Buddha images. “They couldn't
clean the bloodstains,” he explained, “so they put in a new floor.”
In the Khmer Rouge years, Vei worked as a cook in a communal kitchen. One day in
1977, he climbed a sugar palm close to the prison walls to collect palm juice for the seni-
or cadre. Peering down into the fields, he saw prisoners arranged in lines, their hands tied
behind their backs. One by one, Khmer Rouge soldiers bludgeoned them in the back of the
head with hoes and other farming implements and threw them into pits. The bodies were
covered with a thin layer of earth; later, Vei told me, he could see the corpses swelling in
the heat. In 1982 a few of the graves were exhumed and the bones enclosed in a white
reliquary, where they still sit today, cobwebbed behind panes of dirty glass. According to
a memorial inscription, 32,690 people were executed at Wat O Trakuon. Most were left
undisturbed, lying beneath the fruit trees, planted to discourage people from scouring the
graves for valuables.
