What makes a despot?

The Killing Fields outside Phnom Penh are, in fact, a field with a monument and a fantastic audio guide. The guide essentially 'walks with you' through the field, plays you music inspired by the events which took place there and gently, but unsparingly, retells the details, through a mixture of survivor's accounts and narrative, stopping you at various points to explain what would have happened here.

The Killing Fields are quite simply horrifying. They are like a sadistic horror film with the added horror of being true. You really are walking on the bones of hundreds of innocent people. You know this because, though the majority have been recovered and are displayed, reverently in the Buddhist tradition, here and there, half buried in the ground, you can still see them.

Though the old cells which we visit later that day, in which the 'enemies' were held and tortured, is chilling and retains an atmosphere of hopelessness, against the grassy birdsong of the Killing Fields, it is still the latter which most moves me. I am not sure why, perhaps because it is the first time I hear the details from first hand accounts, perhaps because of the quality of the audio guide, perhaps because by the time we reach the prison I simply cannot take in any more. In the prison, faced with hundreds of mug shots stating out at me, the faces of those incarcerated here, faced with pictures depicting the torture, I whisper a mental prayer for the victims but still, it is the Killing Fields which really break my heart. 

Victims were brought to the fields blindfolded and with their hands bound. They were told they were going to a new home.

"Perhaps some were hopeful after so long without hope" says the audio guide, "perhaps some suspected and maybe they were even a little relieved to see an end to all the suffering."

Yes, I think. I am a little relieved too for them. But I am imagining something quick. A gun to the head and then blessed peace. But the trucks which transported them were overcrowded. And as the numbers increased there were too many to handle, and so victims waited in a dark shed, bound and deafened by loudly blasted revolutionary songs for the benefit of the neighboring farms so that the noise of the business being undertaken could not be heard above it. The murder weapons were nothing so fancy as a gun. They were rudimentary at best, hoes and pipes and farming equipment. Whether or not fully dead, the bodies were pushed into the graves and sprinkled with strong chemicals to cover the smell. So no. It wasn't quick.

Whilst this makes me feel quite sick, it is, predictably enough, the stories of the murders of children in front of their mothers which properly breaks me. I cry for them all, for their needless suffering and for the lack of intervention or hope. 

Moving towards the final stop of our walk around the field, I see very few dry faces. The final monument displays the thousands of lovingly recovered bones. You can light insence, leave flowers or say a prayer. But not all the bones of this field have been recovered, nor all the fragments of clothing. As we walk towards the monument I point out to M that there are still quite a lot of half buried rags in the ground here. And then, as we look down we realise that thereare two bones just inches from my sandal. Surrounded by a scattering of teeth. I say my prayer here.

I am sorry. Because it is truly awful and the details aren't pretty. I have spared you a lot. 

And the country now is free of Pol Pot and the despotic reign of the Khmer Rouge, and has been stable for some time.

But I am still struggling with that overwhelming question - why? What is it that makes a despot?

Is it a child, somehow born into sadism or nurtured into it, beating his sister with a stick of bamboo?

Is it a bomb, dropped strategically or accidentally, wiping out a village full of innocent people?

Is it an economic crisis, a people pounded by famine welcoming in an extreme, any kind of extreme. As long it's hopeful. As long as it's new?

Is it bitterness? Pol Pot failed at least one of his studies prior to his anti intellectual stance.

Or is it power? A set of purist ideals corrupted by autocracy and the paranoia that goes with it. Or a group of people, a committee - the children and young adults who carried out the instructions to execute with such fervour? How much did Pol Pot order, and how much was over enthusiastic  extrapolation by his soldiers on the ground? At least some certainly was ordered, but the daily cruelty, the torture, the killings - were the men at the top really aware of every practice in every camp?

In the prison we learn of the trials of the key commanders. But there is no word of the many Khmer Rouge cadres who carried out the violence. But they would only have been young. Many of them were killed in the end by their own party and when everything was over, the rest simply faded into obscurity. 

And what punishment is 'fair'? The prison museum gives details of the trial for war crimes and the 35 year jail sentence awarded to one of the ruling perpetrators seems so trivial. A large photograph of this man, who has never shown remorse or admitted guilt is part of the display.

Someone, in some futile anger has scrawled a big cross and the words "f**k you" across it. 

And I know how they feel. I surprise my self by thinking, savagely that a jail sentence won't do it. That they should have to experience the same. That prison, basically, is too gentle. That they should be shown the same senseless lack of mercy they showed to such an enormous proportion of the Cambodian population. 

But if we were to do that. If we were to gather together all the perpetrators, including the subordinates who carried out the killing,  and do to them what they did to others, what will we have achieved? Have we made them realise something about themselves? Have we made the victims happy?

Or have we made another despot?