About half an hour south of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, lies
a disturbingly peaceful grassy field. The killing field of Choeng Ek is one of
the many places where thousands of Cambodians died at the hands of other
Cambodians.

Excavated mass graves have yielded a gruesome harvest of human bones,
some still covered in ragged clothes.

In the middle of the field, a glass memorial encloses about 8,000 skulls,
some visibly shattered in the act of murder. Each skull, one shudders to
realize, belonged to a human being, a life extinguished in an orgy of violence
during the days of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s.

It is a perilous practice to compare tragedies. But few countries have
suffered as much as Cambodia. And yet, 25 years after Vietnamese forces
overthrew the Khmer Rouge and its bloodthirsty leader, Pol Pot, there is
little understanding of what exactly happened during Cambodia’s nightmare.

The full article from the San Francisco Chronicle: Cambodia’s killing fields hold the key to a horrible truth