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 Gonna take a deep breath here.Since I first came here at the beginning of March, I knew I'd have to write about this but I've put it off and put it off. I felt I still needed to learn more about what happened here. Talk to some more people. Try not to be such an outsider in just rattling off statistics and superficial thumbnail explanations. Why did I come to Cambodia? Out of all the countries in the world, why here? For the last two weeks, I've been travelling with an old college friend who came to visit. After running around Vietnam and the extraordinary Mekong Delta, we came back to Cambodia. I feel comfortable enough to now play "host" and I must say it was a complex experience viewing Cambodia through a newcomer's eyes. Of course she was ga-ga about the kooky traffic, the delicious food, the ornate wats, the smiles of the children...but other places in the world have those things as well in their own particular way. Cambodia though is special. It has been through something that few of us could ever imagine. When looking around and you see some of the poverty here, you feel sorrow. As I've said before, most of us are lucky never to have to experience anything like that. We are far luckier to never experience true "I-can't-fucking-believe-this-is-really-h Anyone who comes to Cambodia must pay their respects to the ghosts.  Cambodia is a country haunted by ghosts. Some ghosts are awe-inspring...Yesterday, I wandered with my friend through the grand wonder of Angkor Wat. Your brain thinks, "What extraordinary genius culture created this marvel?" If Angkor Wat reflects a certain heaven-on-earth quality, then the Khmer Rouge was certainly the embodiment of hell. Unimaginable, grotesque, miserable, pitiless hell. Like trying to describe the history and rationale for the Vietnam War, a Blurty doesn't do it justice. Know that as I quickly go through the falling dominoes of events. In 1941, the French installed 19-year-old Prince Norodom Sihanouk on the Cambodian throne, on the assumption that he would prove suitably pliable. This turned out to be a major miscalculation as the years after 1945 were strife-torn, with the waning of French colonial power and their troubles holding onto their influence in Vietnam and Laos. Cambodian independence was eventually proclaimed in 1953. King Sihanouk (an epic movie character himself--king, patron of peasant education and even a film director!), would become sucked into the swirl of events that we know as the Vietnam War.    Even though Cambodia was neutral in the conflict, in 1969 the United States, under the direction of President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, began the illegal secret bombing of the country. Because they supected communist base camps in Cambodia, the U.S. dropped more bombs on Cambodia then on Japan during World War II, killing thousands of civilians. King Sihanouk was overthrown in a military coup in March 1970 and his successor General Lon Nol moved closer to the Americans. Sihanouk forged an alliance with the "Khmer Rouge" (which in French means "Red Khmer"--as in Communists) and the small guerrilla force swelled to an army of thousands in a matter of weeks. Savage fighting soon engulfed the entire country, with Phnom Penh falling to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975. What happens next is one of the most insane, bizarre and vicious regimes in world history. POL POT, Khmer Rouge Dictator  Pol Pot, a General educated in Paris, sought to turn Cambodia into a peasant-dominated agrarian cooperative country. It was to be a Utopia of the Common Man. Currency was abolished, postal services were halted, schools eliminated, the population became a work force of slave laborers and the country was almost entirely cut off from the outside world. Particularly targeted were anyone considered educated because they were termed "elitists". This could mean if you had a book, could speak well, knew facts or even just wore glasses. It would be a death sentence. Under the Khmer Rouge, even the calendar was abolished: The KR proclaimed it was "Year Zero". Almost everyone who lived in the city was put away or killed. In four years, the Khmer Rouge would wipe out an entire generation of scholars, teachers and scientists. To say over two million were killed, doesn't do the word "killed" justice. Most were brutalized in the most agonizing, dehumanizing away before they were mercifully put to death. When you go to the Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz or Buchenwald in Poland and Germany, you will see "Death Factories" on a grand scale. Systematic, methodical, efficient. It had to be to handle those numbers. As horrifying as that must have been, the Khmer Rouge definitely perfected genocide to an extraordinary degree. Death became fetishized. Relished. The more painful, the better. And it gets worse. Many of the executioners were children. The Khmer Rouge had children become "re-educated." They were used as guards and killers. They were used to torture prisoners. They were used to stab babies. They were used to dispose of the thousands and thousands of corpses. In Phnom Penh you will visit two sacred places. The first is the famous "Killing Fields". There, you will see a stupa (temple) filled with 8,000 skulls that seem to reach the sky. The ones at eye level stare back at you hollow and inert. You can see the punctures in the bone where they were hit and wounded. You walk around the pits of the mass graves with pieces of bone and cloth still sticking out, but you find yourself staring off at the peaceful bucolic fields where water buffalos diligently toil under the hot sun. There are still many bodies under those marshes and fields.  The harder place to tour is Tuol Sleng. It looks like a high school because it was. The Khmer Rouge turned it into a prison known as Security Prison 21 (S-21). Over 17,000 people passed through here, men, women and children to face horrifying interogations and ghastly, sadistic deaths. Only seven people survived the four years of its existence. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge were meticulous in keeping records of their barbarism. Each prisoner who passed through S-21 was photographed before being tortured and then, terribly enough, right before they were about to be killed. For many, these pictures are the ONLY photographs they ever had taken of them in their entire life.     Tuol Sleng, now a genocide museum, has these poor soul's photos on display from floor to ceiling. Many of the high school classrooms feature simply the frame of a metal bed. This is where people were brought, tied up, electrocuted, stabbed and brutalized for days on end. The blank walls with just the bedframe is shocking in its effect: You can literally HEAR the shrieks of the tortured. The Khmer Rouge bludgeoned to death to avoid wasting precious bullets.     Amazingly enough, the world did nothing. The Khmer Rouge even had a representative at the UN! Because they were skirmishing with the Vietnamese on their border, it was the Vietnamese who invaded Cambodia in 1978, forcing the Khmer Rouge to flee to the relative sanctuary of the jungles along the Thai border. From there, they conducted a guerrilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government throughout the late 1970s and '80s. In mid-1993, UN-administered elections led to a new constitution and the reinstatement of Norodom Sihanouk as king. The Khmer Rouge boycotted the elections, rejected peace talks and continued to buy large quantities of arms from the Cambodian military leadership. (Sadly and tellingly enough, they even ransacked some of the remaining statues at Angkor Wat, their country's highest achievement, to buy weapons.) In the months following the election, a government-sponsored amnesty secured the first defections from Khmer ranks, with more defections occurring from 1994 when the Khmer Rouge was finally outlawed by the Cambodian government. Pol Pot himself was never charged with a single war crime. His peaceful death in April 1998 was greeted with fury; he never had to face the Cambodian people for what he perpetrated. It is only right now, in 2008, some of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge are facing an International Genocide Tribunal. Finally. Thirty years too late.   There isn't ANYONE in Cambodia who hasn't lost someone. Everywhere you go, you will hear the stories...a father...a mother...brother, sister, child...taken away...never seen again. Gone. No goodbyes. Only the nightmarish images the mind conjures of what they went through in their final hours. Sometimes older people will tell you of thier harrowing accounts of escape...of eating bugs...drinking urine..feigning death among hundreds of rotting corpses in order to survive. And then there are the children. The children executioners are middle age now--dealing with what they did--what they were told to do--what they thought was right back then....how psychologically damaged are these people now? How do you look at the survivors of Pol Pot's dystopia?     The remnants of the Khmer Rouge's monstrosity still lives on like this: a desperately poor nation, a government that is still corrupt and dictatorial and an education system that is a joke--where NOT ONE SINGLE COLLEGE DEGREE is up to any international standard and would be recognized. It will be years and years before Cambodia will be able to stand independently on its own without massive international assistance.  To learn more about what happened, there are certainly plenty of books. A gripping historical account is WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER by Washington Post reporter Elizabeth Becker. Then there's a short autobiography Vann Nath called A CAMBODIAN PRISON PORTRAIT. He was an artist that the Khmer Rouge had paint pictures and ultimately was one of the seven to walk out of S-21. He later painted the graphic pictures of torture that are featured in the museum and posted here. There are also two excellent, but wildly different films on the subject. The first is THE KILLING FIELDS which is a true account of what one person experienced under Pol Pot in his frantic attempt to survive those years. The second is extremely interesting in an artistic response way...the brilliant performance artist Spalding Gray recalls his experiences in Cambodia and S.E. Asia while filming THE KILLING FIELDS. Gray sits behind a desk and talks. That's the whole film. It's called SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA and you will not only be delightfully/grimly entertained, but learn how simple storytelling can become raised to an art form.   This has been my longest blurty to date. There is so much to cover and its hard to convey my feelings about living in a land that has borne witness to the worst moments of the last century. Of course we all know that replicas of these events can be found in many other places in the world...Darfur, China, Gaza, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Russia and the U.S. in the Guantánamo detention camp and other secret rendition centers scattered throughout the world.  Keep ALL Human Rights in Your Mind ALWAYS!Amnesty International, the two time Nobel Peace Prize winning organization, cautioned that the biggest threat to the future of human rights is the absence of a shared vision and collective leadership to prevent abuses and "call out" those who are guilty of such crimes and practices. Get involved in college. Become globally aware. When you travel, learn the POLITICS of the places you visit. You will come to understand history and sociology in a much deeper, more meaningful manner. I LOVE the fact we have the Peace Coalition and the Human Rights Clubs as active participants on the Carson campus. My friend and I bid goodbye to the temples of Angkor and we tuk tuked to the airport together. After sharing a final Tiger Beer, I saw her onto her big jet back to America. I boarded my small Siem Reap Airlines propeller plane back to Phnom Penh. It was only me, two French guys and the stewardess. I looked out the window. The peaceful rice fields and houses rolled by. I imagine if I were flying over Cambodia a thousand years ago, it would look pretty similar to the wetlands I was seeing now. This country which has been my adopted home for the past few months has taught me much about survival and renewal. I turn from those rice fields that were not too long ago filled with blood and crushed bodies. I glance up at the stewardess. She is probably only 25-years-old, born after the Khmer Rouge time. Her parents obviously survived as well, and then had her. I'm sure this airline position is much better than any work her parents ever did. They must be so proud of her. How much have they told her about those days? What does she think about her future? And those of her kids? She smiles. It makes me ponder all the "Great Questions of Life." I will take her smile, and the smiles of all the children I've seen here, with me for the rest of my life.  Post a comment in response: |
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