Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Trip Start
Nov 16, 2007
1
11
20
Trip End
Jan 14, 2008
Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
Friday, December 7, 2007
Judging by comments we heard, there appear to be lots of problems with graft and crooked politicians, as well as power plays that the electorate seems to have very little control over. There are plenty of problems with infrastructure, poor healthcare, infant mortality, etc. However, people seem to be getting by and be generally grateful to be past the Khmer Rouge / Pol Pot years, the Vietnamese occupation, and several years of famine
Mekong border crossing
. Things are very gradually getting better, especially since the Paris peace accord with Viet Nam in 1991, followed by elections in 1993. In the country and especially in Phnom Penh you see the schizophrenic nature of the history and culture of the Khmer people. On the sublime end we saw the National Museum with its pieces from Angkor and from earlier cultures and toured the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda - ornate buildings, lush gardens, and manicured lawns. The Silver Pagoda floor is tiled with 5000 silver tiles - 5 tons of silver from melted coins. It includes a life-size solid gold Buddha, adorned with 2086 diamonds, and as the centerpiece the "emerald" Buddha (jade? Baccarat crystal?). My favorites were somewhat less flashy, made from Cambodian marble, a very pretty brown/beige stone.
However, our first introduction to Cambodia the afternoon we arrived, was to the horrors of the very recent past. First we went to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, 15km west of Phnom Penh. This is the site of 129 mass graves (43 have never been disinterred), where about 17,000 men, women, and children were executed by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1978. In the center is a white stupa/memorial containing about 8,000 skulls, many of which were bludgeoned to death in order to save bullets. Even more horrible were the bone fragments and bits of cloth sticking up out of the ground around the mass graves...and the sound of children playing at the school next door
Fine Arts Museum
. It still gives me shivers.After that we went to Tuol Sleng S-21 prison, now a genocide museum. It's a former high school turned into the largest and most notorious torture prison in Cambodia. It held 1200-1500 prisoners at any given time (including children) - shackled and tortured under unimaginable conditions. Only 7 people survived out of well over 10,000!
These were just two of the many killing fields, prisons, slave labor and re-education camps, "orphanages", etc. throughout the country. Others were pointed out to us as we drove through the countryside. Everyone has a horror story to tell. Our guide in Phnom Penh came through relatively unscathed, losing only a couple of uncles. His family had to move back to his mother's village (the entire large city of Phnom Penh as well as other larger cities were forcibly evicted by the Khmer Rouge fanatics) and then they were separated into camps (women, boys, men, etc.). He was five years old and they didn't have enough to eat - boiled tree bark, ate centipedes, etc. Our guide in Siem Reap had a much more difficult story to tell - his entire family (academics, doctors, and nurses) was killed! He was 13 and in a Khmer Rouge "orphanage", where he had to perform hard manual labor and was continually tested for his "loyalty" to their insane and inhuman ideology - for instance, asked if he would kill his parents if told to (he had no idea they were already dead), etc. Very few of those kids survived. He escaped after more than a year and ended up a virtual slave working for a family for more than two years. They dumped him off in a refugee camp along the Thai border. He returned to Siem Reap in 1991, and never received any help or compensation from the government or from anyone else.
The country is full of these stories. It really brings home, again, the horrors of war and genocide, and the realization that we "civilized" nations continue to turn our backs and even prop up these regimes from time to time.
