FOR STUDENTS, A SHOCKING BRUSH WITH GENOCIDE
By Willy Fluharty

The Virginian-Pilot(Norfolk, Va.)
September 26, 2005 Monday The Virginian-Pilot Edition

In May, Willy Fluharty, a teacher in Cape Henry Collegiate School’s
international studies department, took a group of seniors to Cambodia
and Vietnam. Here is his account of the trip to Cambodia:

As our group of 15 Cape Henry Collegiate seniors gingerly walked around
fragments of femurs and skulls that “floated” to the surface after a
recent monsoonal rainfall, Vanta, our guide at the Killing Fields in
Cambodia, told of his personal experience under the genocidal regime
of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge.

Vanta was only a few years old when the Khmer Rouge came and evacuated
his neighborhood in the eastern part of Siem Reap near the ancient
Khmer capital of Angkor Wat. His family was forced into an agrarian
commune as slave laborers — as was the entire population of 6 million
after the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975.

Thousands died of starvation in the beginning of the communist
Utopian vision of Pol Pot, which supposedly was short for “Political
Potential.” Vanta survived on two spoonfuls of rice mush per day and
porridge of indigenous plants that his mother cooked each evening. He
recounted how she was sure he wouldn’t survive because he did not like
the taste of weed soup. So his mother begged the camp cook to help
supplement his diet. The cook obliged, but was caught and executed.

During the 3 years, 8 months and 20 days of the Khmer Rouge reign
of terror, a time frame seared into the memory of every Cambodian,
an estimated 2 million were killed, or 30 percent of the population,
in an act of insane genocide. The trauma this genocide inflicted on
the people is evident in the titles we witnessed at the Central Market
book stand in Phnom Penh. Books like “First They Killed My Father,”
“Stay Alive My Son,” “Year Zero” and “When Broken Glass Floats”
fill the store with morbid tales of genocide and survival.

Few elderly Cambodians are seen because many did not survive the
killing. The median age is 19. At our first stop in Phnom Penh,
at the Buddhist Wat Phnom, our group walked between saffron-robed
monks and a mob of limbless beggars who had the unfortunate fate of
stepping on one of the millions of land mines left over from decades
of civil war. Then came the child beggars.

The students were taken aback by the masses of poor. It’s one
thing to read about economic development and GDP per capita, but
it’s another when students witness first-hand the reality of a $350
average annual income.

But the students were most shocked at the magnitude of the genocide.

After visiting the powerful Killing Fields memorial, a five-story glass
building with thousands of skulls, one of my Cape Henry students,
Brandon Flynn, asked, “We know so much about the Holocaust, why
don’t we know anything about this?” He had just stepped over bones
and clothing that were recently exposed.

Each day someone walks through the mass grave site of an estimated
17,000 people, and gathers the bones and clothes and piles them up
for later removal. For about an hour, I didn’t hear one of my students
say a word as they absorbed the gravity of the Cambodian genocide in
all of its barbarity.

Cambodia was only one of many, many tragedies that man has thrust
upon himself; Armenia, Tibet, Rwanda, Bosnia and the present crisis
in Darfur are a few more examples.

“Why didn’t we intervene in Cambodia to stop the killing?” asked
student Whitney Fulton.

We had just lost 58,000 young Americans in neighboring Vietnam so
we let the Khmer Rouge have their way with the people. We tried and
failed in Southeast Asia. It was someone else’s turn to be the global
cop. Turns out, it was Vietnam itself that was forced to intervene
in Cambodia to stop the killing in 1979.

For our Cape Henry students, the “discovery” of the Cambodian
genocide and the massive poverty created the perfect educational
environment. “How can you stop such genocide?” they asked. “What can
we do to stop global poverty?”

After silently walking through the Tuol Sleng torture prison that
was converted from a high school under Pol Pot, the students saw
blood-splattered walls and floors along with hundreds of pictures of
the tortured and executed.

“How many must die before we do something about it?” As a teacher, I
welcomed being asked the question. Will I have to take another group of
Cape Henry students to another field of bones before I hear it again?

E-mail the author at willyfluharty@capehenry.org

GRAPHIC: RICHARD VOGEL/ASSOCIATED PRESS; A former soldier lays incense
at Cambodia’s Killing Fields memorial, where thousands of skulls are
on view.