Killing Fields

On a recent visit to Cambodia, my wife and I visited S-21 Prison in Phnom Penh. As I looked at the pictures of those who died, the skulls in a glass case as a memorial to the innocent who perished, I wondered, like countless others who have visited the prison, on how such atrocities could ever take place.

Between 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge party slaughtered over two million people, thirty percent of Cambodia’s population at that time. Anyone who appeared to be against Pot’s vision of a pure Communist society was targeted for extermination. Intellectuals, professionals, teachers were his primary focus, but even if you wore glasses, or listened to or read books from the West, was enough reason to be erased from life.

It’s hard to phantom the evil that lies in the heart of man. I grieve over the faces of those who perished at the hands of such evil. Visiting Tuolsleng Genocide Museum reminded me again why I take the Good News to a world that, without Christ, is sad and tragic.