Nowhere is this this illustrated better than in Cambodia. You visit the temples of Angkor to marvel at them, but also you visit the other must-see sights: the genocide memorials.
Cambodia put on one of the great all-time genocides in the late 1970s. Technically, there's some argument that it wan't a genocide, as it was aimed at political and economic classes, rather than ethnic or religious groups. But that doesn't help the 2 million or so who were butchered or who died following the forceable evacuation of the cities. Or those who endured chaos and poverty for many years afterwards.Failed intellectual and psychopath Pol Pot, and his Khmer Rouge colleagues, decided in 1975 that Cambodia needed to go back to Year Zero. Teachers, intellectuals, and artists had to be got rid of. Zero sounds like a good place to start from, but without teachers, intellectuals and artists, you don't actually go anywhere useful. And Cambodia went nowhere for quite a while, except to yet more internal strife and suffering. (And amazingly, the western world, Australia included, continued to support the Khmer Rouge as the rightful holders of the country's UN seat, for many years after their forceful removal in 1979 by Vietnam.)
So in Phnom Penh you visit (mostly in stunned and respectful silence) the former torture prison of Tuol Sleng (S-21), with its meticulous photographic records of the victims, its torture equipment, and its wire mesh barriers to stop inmates jumping prematurely to their death. You go out to the nearby Killing Fields site at Choeung Ek, to see the remains of the mass graves, the piles of skulls and other bones, the bone fragments and items of clothing still protruding through the ground in places. You see the reminders of the cost-cutting technologies used to kill many - the tree against which children and babies were swung and smashed to death, and the palm trees with tough jagged leaf edges, which were used to cut people's throats.
Nobody has yet been brought to justice for any of this. Pol Pot died in 1988. 'Case 002' is the case currently being held by a joint Cambodian / international tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, against four of his leading henchpersons. One has been let off the hook because of declining mental capacity, and there are fears the other three will get to die before anything much happens with the case.
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