Learning the legacy of the Khmer Rouge

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Phnom Penh is the capital city of Cambodia and is a bit poorer and more laid back than the last two capitals. Still lots of motos and tuk tuks everywhere. Lots of people skip Phnom Penh on their trips to Cambodia but we think this is a mistake. If you just go to Siem Reap it would be like going to America and only visiting Disneyworld and Orlando. You would think they whole country is overpriced and full of tourists. Phnom Penh is still a little pricey compared to other Asian cities, especially for restaurants and services aimed at tourists, but at least there is an option to "live like a local". Street food is plentiful and water and soda are more manageable prices if you buy outside of the shops.

We stayed in a guesthouse above an Irish pub in town. The guesthouse was nice enough with A/C and satellite TV so Julius could watch the Champions League soccer games at 3 am. The bar itself was quite sleepy. They advertise the largest collection of Irish Whiskeys and they do have a lot. However, they have no Irish beer on tap and a small can of Guinness was $6. I asked about Strongbow and the Cambodian waitress had not even heard of it. At least it saved us money we might have spent on a drink.

The main draw to the city is the museums and sites related to the Khmer Rouge regime that was in power in the 1970's. All of you who were alive in the 1970's will remember the name Pol Pot. He led a rebel movement that overthrew a weakened government and upon taking power he declared Cambodia a communist agrarian state and outlawed money, technology and killed all the rich and educated people. Children were put in charge and everyone was moved from the cities and put on farms. Over the next four years millions of men, women and children were killed or starved to death. The US apparently didn't find this as offensive as the Vietnamese brand of communism so the world looked away. It was actually the Vietnamese who ended up joining with Cambodians to oust the Khmer Rounge from power. Cambodia lost a third to a half of their population before it was liberated.

The first site we visited was the Killing Fields. This was a field outside the city where people were brought from the prisons and killed enmass. Unlike the Nazis who had devised "advanced" ways to kill, here it was mainly done by blunt force to the head, machete or sometimes gun. 

On the way to the Killing Fields

Loudspeakers were set up to drown out the cries with music. Thousands of skeletons were later recovered from mass graves. The holes are still there, as are the bones, in a large tomb on the site. The clothes are also there. It was a terribly sad site but certainly important to see.

Next we saw the place where the "enemies" of the Khmer Rouge and their families were brought to be imprisoned and tortured. It is called Toul Sleng prison and it was a secondary school before the war. The impact of the place is strong because nothing was changed once the place was recaptured by the Vietnamese/Cambodian forces. There were 14 bodies rotting there (ironically Khmer Rouge officers who were felt to have betrayed the party) but everyone else had been taken to the Killing Fields and murdered. The bodies were buried on the site (photos were hung showing how the bodies were found) but everything else was left as it was. Beds used for torture were there, blood stains splattered the walls and floors.
The photos of everyone admitted to the prison were found and the rooms had stands with these photographs. They were organized by sex and age. Men and Women, children and even babies. Foreigners like Indians and Thai were there, even one Australian. Old, old women and men. 

Victims of Khmer Rouge

It breaks your heart to look at these faces. All these people died. All were tortured. Some had been beaten badly before the photo was even taken. Our guide told us that the babies were killed first because they made too much noise. The killing was done in front of the family as a torture device. One man came to the prison, then managed to survive by working as a painter there. After liberation he painted everything that he had seen. These paintings also hung in the rooms.

After seeing a site like this you keep asking yourself how people can be so cruel and heartless to other people. These aren't foreign enemies, but fellow citizens of the same country. And it isn't as if we can say "Oh, these people are like that" because this kind of thing has been done by every race of people over the last 100 years, by Europeans, Africans, Asians, Arabs, Hispanics. All of them have tortured people and killed children in front of their mothers. Even Americans have done it when sent to other lands in times of war. To see such evil makes you want to work for peace and justice and mercy in the world. People have the capacity for good. We have to work to make sure that capacity is not robbed from us as children, as it was here.

     Sadly, Cambodians are still waiting for justice. The UN is here trying to set up war crime tribunals like the ones for Rwanda and Serbia. They are meeting resistance from the Cambodian government because there are still people in the government who were in Khmer Rouge. They would rather the trial never took place. Pol Pot was never captured or brought to Justice (he died a few years back at his jungle hideout) and many of the masterminds are dying of old age. People want something done but are resigned to the fact that nothing may happen.

We also spent some time at the Russian Market (it used to sell weapons, but now sells knock off DVDs, purses and silk). We spent a morning at the Royal palace, a strangely quiet place that looked like a lesser version of the one in Thailand. They had some interesting exhibits of clothes and knick knacks from the royal family. One room which held royal clothing and place settings was rarely visited and we found the room to be about 45 degrees F. The air conditioning was obviously turned up a bit high (it reminded me of Texas) but standing in front of it for a while made the cost of admission worthwhile.

Children were everywhere on the streets selling books, postcards or just begging. Luckily a large organization has started for street children in the city called Friends (www.streetfriends.org). They have lots of services for the kids and run a shop and a restaurant. The restaurant trains former street kids so they can go out and get jobs as servers and chefs in restaurant. If any of you are going to Phnom Penh, the restaurant is called "Friends" and is right downtown by the main museum. The food was fabulous, they made killer margaritas and daiquiris and the service was top notch. God bless the work that these places are doing. Though the injustices that happened back then were much more brutal and shocking, there are still plenty of injustices today. Hopefully we can work together to right these injustices.