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"Killing Fields" Lure Tourists in Cambodia (Zoltan Istvan, January 10, 2003, National Geographic Today)

The sight of 8,000 human skulls in a glass shrine stuns visitors into silence.

Outside, where cattle usually graze, human bones sometimes come unearthed after heavy rains.

In Cambodia, nine miles (14.5 kilometers) from Phnom Penh, the "killing fields" of Choeung Ek have become a tourist attraction, horrifying and fascinating. Choeung Ek is one of thousands of other such sites around the country where the Khmer Rouge practiced genocide during the late 1970s.

"There are two things you must see in Cambodia," says Scott Harrison, a traveler from Australia. "Obviously one is Angkor Wat. But the other is the killing fields outside Phnom Penh."

You wish you could read that and believe that people are making a pilgrimmage of shame at what we allowed to happen--recall these words of George McGovern: The growing hysteria of the administration's posture on Cambodia seems to me to reflect a determined refusal to consider what the fall of the existing government in Phnom Penh would actually mean.... We should be able to see that the kind of government which would succeed Lon Nol's forces would most likely be a government ... run by some of the best-educated, most able intellectuals in Cambodia.--rather than just satisfying a grisly curiosity. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 11, 2003 12:11 AM