Chris : I'm sitting here under the terrace fans of the foreign correspondents club in Phnom Penh. The leather armchairs are perfect for taking notes while enjoying the war photography on the wall and a grand view of the river. For the first time in weeks I've been able to clear my thoughts because a lot of questions have been filling our heads.
There were sharp contrasts for people on either side of the wall in Germany and today there are many contrasts in consumerist Cambodia.
Touring communist-influenced countries on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has given many interesting comparisons of how governments' take hold of peoples lives, past and present. From present day Chinese censorship and Indian corruption, we had already seen a lot. Now we are meeting the people of Indochina who dealt with genocide and countless bloody wars in the not-so-distant past. It was interesting to see what had become of the moral bankrupcy of communism that pope John Paul II did so much to expose, and the West tried so hard to bury during the cold war.
Propaganda posters are still painted on the walls of small towns and large cities.
Vietnam has seen so much conflict in the last century that one can not help but being surprised by an amazingly positive people who have certainly moved on. I wished I had asked the few people we talked to in cafes and street stalls.
After a few days in Saigon we headed an hour north yesterday to cross the nearby boarder into Cambodia. We soon realised that nothing could compare to the recent history that Cambodians had to put behind them. We went straight to the 'security centers' (torture prisons) of the Khmer Rouge here in Phnom Penh. We learned what life was like in the 1970s when this city was evacuated under the politics of 'Demicratic' Kampuchea.
It is almost impossible to underatand how these radicals eliminate the capitalist bourgioise influnces into an agrarian hell for three years, and how Pol Pot could pull this off overnight. During the mass evacuations of all 'evil' cities, Cambodians were marched to the fields. They brought only the possesions they could carry and the shirt on theor back to work in a classless system of agriculture and farming. The new class of laborers were given nothing and allowed nothing. They even had to shower in their clothes. All daily conforts were erased. Human institutions of religion, love, marriage were all deleted. Even family was forbidden. The legal system thrown out the window. How were these morals just thrown out the window?
Instead Cambodians were given two things: fear, and a sole purpose to work in the fields for the 'Angkar' (organisation) under the gun of the Khmer Rouge. People with an education, or any other potential for disobedience were eradicated. They say it was better to torture and kill 10 innocent people, if only one turned out to be a dissident. There were no more than a few thousand administrators who were living in this ghost city in order to organise the country and process prisoners.
It sent chills down our spines to creep through cells with no one else around. I won't explain the torture methods but just say that almost everyone who was brought to these security centres were soon sentenced to death.
We drove straight to the killing fields almost an hour outside Phnom Penh where men, women and children were brought for execution. This was an eerie visit for us. We arrived at sunset to find the area empty with no other tourists around just before closing time.
People told us we would be shocked by what we found. But as we followed the paths, we couldn't find any signs of the mass graves. It soon sunk in that the scraps of cloth sticking out of the dirt in the path was clothing that had gradually surfaced as visitors pass day after day - the same clothes they were not allowed to take off for neither sleep, nor shower. Steph soon looked a little closer and found a scattered set of teeth. We then saw a bone sticking out in the middle of the path. Not much was touched here since the days when around 300 people were murdered each day.
When the sun set we drove back to our hostel in the city, just a few hubdred metres from the royal palace. Fireworks were thumping across the sky above to mark independence day from the Vietnamese who left in the 1990s after toppling the DK, while families watch from their picnic blankets.
It is perplexing to think that most of the Khmer Rouge were never brought to justice. Today there is a large gap in the older generations while the torturers live alongside the tortured.
It is just unimaginable to me how each and every Cambodian can live with this only 30 years on.
When the sun set we drove back to our hostel in the city, just a few hubdred metres from the royal palace. Fireworks were thumping across the sky above to mark independence day from the Vietnamese who left in the 1990s after toppling the DK, while families watch from their picnic blankets.
"To see what is in front of you often takes a constant struggle." George Orwell
It is perplexing to think that most of the Khmer Rouge were never brought to justice. Today there is a large gap in the older generations while the torturers live alongside the tortured.
How to the crowds filling the park feel about their past, their country?? What do all the happy cyclists smiling back choose to remember?
Fantastic! Thanks for the postcard on a cold and dreary day in Paris. I'm green with envy!
ReplyDeleteI loved Vietnam too - the colonial Sofitel and bustling Old Quarter in Hanoi, a chance encounter with a Woody Allen lookalike who turned out to be one of the world's leading pepper traders, the mystical mountains of Halong Bay, and the train up to Sapa.
If you're in Siem Reap, check out the Angkor What? bar. A number of years ago, I responded to an ad for a bar tender with free room and board upstairs and have wondered ever since where that path might have led.
Enjoy, and keep it coming!