Killing Field tourism: Haunting memorial or gratuitous commercialism?

According to the text on the US$2 entrance ticket, some of the proceeds from the 300-400 visitors per day goes to a charity called the Sun Fund, which helps send students on scholarship to Japan. The charity is linked to the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP), whose insignia is seen all over the country, including here at the side-road leading into Cheoung Ek.

Complaints about the commercialization of Cheoung Ek first emerged in 2005. This bench on the walkway to the rear of the site carries an advertisement for one of Cambodia's well-known beer brands. Others say that commercialization is fine, so long as the money is used to help some of the victims and survivors of the Khmer Rouge. 

Visitors to Choeung Ek, Cambodia's most infamous Killing Field, learn about the Khmer Rouge's murderous past in graphic detail, but locals don't benefit

18 May, 2011

By Simon Roughneen

CNNgo

From 1975 to 1979 an estimated 1.4 million Cambodians were killed under the despotic rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

The executions took place on what have become known as Cambodia's Killing Fields. The best known of these is Choeung Ek, 17 kilometers from the center of Phnom Penh. Here, an estimated 17,000 men, women and children were butchered by the Khmer Rouge.

It is a suitably grim and eerie memorial to those who died, an Auschwitz-Birkenau for Asia.

But unlike the Holocaust memorial, Choeung Ek is not a UNESCO World Heritage site and today questions are being raised about the benefit of Killing Field tourism for local inhabitants.

Choeung Ek is run by Japanese company JC Royal, which pays the Cambodian Government an annual US$15,000 levy for the site. Meanwhile, the five million survivors of the Khmer Rouge era appear to derive little benefit from it.

Many live on less than US$1 per day, an injustice that adds to the upset caused by delays in punishing the perpetrators behind Cambodia's darkest era.

Click here for a virtual tour of Choeung Ek.