Children outside the fence that surrounds Choeung Ek, one of many killing fields outside Phnom Penh.
Prisoners were brought here for execution in the late 70's under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime, and they were killed as inexpensively and efficiently as possible. Bullets were expensive and scarce, so the preferred methods included blows to the head with blunt instruments, burying people alive, and smashing small children and babies against trees. Many victims came from Tuol Sleng prison.
There is a huge monument in the center of the fields that is filled with skulls of the victims, most of them showing the damage where a shovel or club was used to finish off the victim. Some mass graves were dug up to document the atrocities, while others have been left in peace. Signs near the graves are bluntly direct, saying things like "450 victims found here" or "166 headless victims" or, in the case of unearthed graves, simply "mass grave."
"Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?"
- Henry Kissinger
Kissinger has been saying this kind of stuff for years, to explain his lack of remorse for the American bombing campaign that destabilized Cambodia and led to Pol Pot's overthrow of the Sihanouk government in 1975. But even if Pol Pot had never existed, the American military killed 500,000 civilians in a country we weren't even at war with. That's what Mr. Kissinger is asking us to not flagellate him about, since bombing Cambodia was primarily his idea.
This is one reason why the U.S. alone, among all free nations, opposes the existence of the International Criminal Court: because one of that court's first actions would be to investigate Henry Kissinger, close friend of the Bush family and many other powerful Americans. The other democracies of the world think it wise to agree on some international laws and live by them, but the United States wants to reserve the right to kill large numbers of people against the will of the rest of the world.