I just read that the first criminal charges are being pressed against the members of the Khmer Rouge. The first charges are being pressed now, 30 years after a genocide that wiped out 1.7 million people. Schoolteachers, bankers, lawyers, anyone with an education.

I was remembering visiting the killing fields and Tol Sleung and the piles of skulls and the prison cells. Looking down at the red clay beneath my feet and seeing bones because there was not enough dirt to cover the dead. Children playing in the water under the trees whose sharp leaves cut off heads when the bullets ran out.

The air was red and the mud was red and it washed up on the white walls of the middle school now filled with ghosts and empty photographs. They took careful records, at first, of everyone they killed, but soon the workload was too much. My guide was a beautiful young woman who had no parents.

Now, 30 years later, some of the few remaining leaders of the Khmer Rouge will be put on trial. But it bears remembering that it was the United States who kicked out the stable communist government and then left, allowing a marginalized bunch of western-educated fanatics to take control of a weakened state. Sound familiar?

OK! Sorry for being all soap-boxy and maudlin! That news article just made me remember all that stuff.

Labels: navel-gazing, travel