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Remains of the Day – A Lament for the millions butchered by the Khmer Rouge – Photo feature by Mark Ulyseas
Cambodians have struggled to rise up from the horrors of the last century. The butchery of Pol Pot is believed to have claimed millions of innocent victims. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, diplomats, teachers, school children and even infants were not spared. Mass graves revealed thousands of headless human remains.
Decades later the sites of torture and murder have become tourist attractions. The Cambodians have preserved the places where mass slaughter took place: Tuol Svay Prey High School in Phnom Penh, which was converted to the Tuol Sleng Prison called S.21 (Security Office 21) by the Pol Pot regime. It was from here that prisoners, after brutal interrogation, were trucked to Choeung Ek extermination camp, 15 km from the capital, where they were disposed of by medieval methods: Axes, bayonets, knives, barbed wire and even the smashing of heads against trees were the preferred methods so as to save on the bullets.
The following photographs reveal the inhumanity of humanity. It is also a reminder that perhaps we have learned nothing from Pol Pot, the massacre in East Bengal or from the Holocaust…the inhumanity of humanity continues to grow in the form of ISIS rampaging across the Middle East leaving a trail of severed human bodies in the thousands…a vast open air abattoir.
Could it be that when the Day of Reckoning arrives there will be no one left to greet our Maker?
© Mark Ulyseas