Our nearly empty tourist bus careened along the road to Phnom Penh, through a flat, green countryside that stretched to the horizon. Despite the beauty of the pastoral landscape, our moods were somber. We were entering a country whose recent past is one of the most brutal of the last century, a country still suffering tangibly from the violence that happened 30 years ago. Every Cambodian has a story of a friend or relative, often more than one, who lost their lives at the hands of the murderous Khmer Rouge. Cambodia is also one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, despite lengthy efforts by locals and international organizations to find and remove the devices. As we stared out our windows, we wondered how many of the fields we saw hid crippling reminders of war and genocide.
Flat rice paddies...
...dusty city streets...
...and the mighty Mekong, all on the way from Saigon to Phnom Penh.A brilliant, expansive blue sky dominated by fluffy white cumulus clouds greeted us as we drove into sleepy Phnom Penh. Like Vietnam, Cambodia had been a colony of France up to, and for a short time after, World War II. The contemporary layout of the city center reflects its colonial heritage. The flag-lined main boulevard radiates out from a whirling roundabout, a large Angkor-like stupa in its center, reminding one of Paris' Champs d'Elysee and Arc de Triumphe. The splendor of the city center seamlessly merges with the typically Southeast Asian mish-mash of shanties, shops, and urban squalor. In Vietnam and China, these character-rich back alleys and side streets were always chaotic tornadoes of business and life. In Phnom Penh, they seemed deserted and still. We'd heard a lot about Cambodia's ghosts from fellow travelers and from books and articles we'd read throughout our lives. Now, we were making our acquaintances in person.
Phnom Penh's beautiful center- a mixture of French colonial and quintessential Southeast Asian. Note the lack of traffic on the roundabout. 
The flag-flanked stupa at the center of one of the roundabouts. After the French withdrew in 1954, Cambodia set out to establish itself as a functioning democracy in a turbulent region. The effort was fraught with difficulties from the outset, and soon the fledgling nation found itself embroiled in a deadly civil war. The conflict in neighboring Vietnam also spilled over into fragile Cambodia, as American warplanes periodically bombarded VC and NVA units seeking refuge across the border. A brief yet controversial secret invasion of Cambodia by U.S. ground forces also occurred in 1970. In 1975, the same year Saigon fell to the NVA, Phnom Penh came under the control of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Thus began one of the modern-era's most devastating projects in social engineering. The Khmer Rouge set about to create an idealogically pure, peasant-driven socialist society, and promptly began a campaign of nearly indiscriminate internment and execution. Businessmen, the intelligentsia, opposition politicians, and anyone suspected of being against the movement were tortured and bludgeoned to death at a number of so-called "killing fields" across the nation. Urbanites, if they were lucky, were sent to the rice-paddies to "learn" from the peasantry. Others were executed for the heinous sin of wearing glasses or having clean fingernails. Estimates on the exact number of Pol Pot's victims are hard to come by. Some put the number at upwards of three million. More conservative estimates put the number at less than 1 million. We spent our first morning in Phnom Penh visiting some of the sites commemorating those lost during the bloody reign of the Khmer Rouge and recognizing that even one would have been far too many.
Mass graves at Choeung Ek, one of many "Killing Fields" in Cambodia.We almost caused a mini-civil war of our own before we even left the hostel. We had made arrangements with a man the night before to take us to the S-21 museum via tuk-tuk, a motorized version of the cyclos we'd fallen in love with in Vietnam. In characteristic fashion, we overslept the time of our planned meeting, and sat down to breakfast half an hour later unsure as to how to proceed. Soon, another enterprising Khmer offered his services. Thinking we'd already missed our original cheaffeur-to-be, we agreed to go with him. Shortly thereafter, our original guide, looking worn and haggard, stumbled into the rat-infested (rats the size of small dogs!) dining hall looking for us. We had a bit of a crisis to defuse. While not a consistently reliable source of income, such spontaneous guiding ventures provide locals with a quick source of considerable cash. We felt horrible knowing that we'd have to deny one of our potential suitors, both of whom expected us to go with them. Luckily for us, a third party stepped in and authoritatively settled the situation. We'd be going with him- a big, jovial man affectionately known as "Mup" (fat). We settled into his sputtering tuk-tuk and took off down the ghostly streets of Phnom Penh towards S-21.
Into the city with "Mup" and his tuk-tuk.Before the Khmer Rouge triumphantly marched into town, the buildings that would become S-21 had been a simple secondary school. In 1975, it turned into the nation's preeminent internment and interrogation center. The palm trees that flanked the gallows swung gently in a refreshing breeze as we paid our fees and strolled through the courtyard and into the museum complex. The museum is divided into two decrepit, three-story structures. The first building consists of a series of rooms once used for detention and torture. They've been left relatively intact. Dried blood marks the cracked beige walls, while mattress-less bed frames with leg and arm shackles sit empty in the room's center. Horrifyingly graphic photos of bloodied bodies shackled to those very beds were illuminated by the sunlight that filtered in through the barred windows. At one point, the museum decided to post photos of Khmer Rouge officials above informative captions alongside these more gruesome displays. The pictures have since been mostly destroyed by a collection of petty vandals and angry Khmers who have no interest in seeing the faces of those who've caused their country so much grief. The caption describing Pol Pot stands alone- the photo has been totally destroyed by vandals and has been removed from the collection.
One of the cells in S-21. The photo on the wall is of one of the room's former occupants, an unfortunate Cambodian (Khmer) who'd been detained, tortured, and most likely murdered by the Khmer Rouge (litterally "Red Khmer").
Vandals have destroyed nearly all of the photos depicting former Khmer Rouge officials and collaborators. The photo of Pol Pot has been completely removed. The graphic photos in the rooms of the first building were eye-opening. The collection housed in the second building was eye-wetting. Like the Nazis before them, the Khmer Rouge took great care in documenting their atrocities. Each person brought to S-21 went through a battery of tests and measurements and, most importantly, had a mugshot-like photo taken. These black and white prints have been collected and made into an exhibit that make Saigon's War Remnants Museum look like a pottery collection at the Hermitage. The faces staring back at us all conveyed different emotions. Some seemed defiant, others scared to death. Some seemed emotionless, almost as if they'd already resigned themselves to their inevitable fate. Some had clearly been beaten. A few were photographed lying prone, their mangled faces and broken bodies proving no impediment to the need for securing photo-documentation. Some of the women pictured clutched babies to their breasts. Young boys stood alone, making us wonder what they could have possibly done at such a young age to incur the indiscriminate wrath of the Khmer Rouge. Ben held back anger, Faye choked back tears. A tall, uniformed Khmer man, apparently an officer in the Cambodian Air Force, stoically examined the faces on one of the displays. Walking around the corner and nearly running into Ben, he paused and gave a short bow. His elementary school-aged daughter (proudly wearing her dad's camo boonie hat), who had been trailing at a short distance, stopped in her tracks, smiled broadly, put her hands together and mimicked her stately father. As she gleefully skipped off after her dad, it occurred to both of us that they could have easily been looking at the faces of lost relatives. The situation seemed like a microcosm of Southeast Asia. Here we were in a room that held documentation of one of the world's most gruesome human catastrophes, and at the same time, some of the most friendly and beautiful people we'd ever met. That inexplicable contrast stuck with us throughout our entire stay.
S-21 from the outside. Hidden by the palm trees are the gallows used to execute detainees.The dusty street outside the museum provided no refuge from the emotional onslaught. While we searched for Mup and his tuk-tuk, we were confronted by three middle-aged men, all missing at least one limb. They hopped after us on wooden crutches, ball-caps in outstretched hands turned towards the sky in hopes of receiving a handout. For us, it was hard to turn them down. A plethora of legitimate outfits operate in Cambodia seeking to provide education and employment to handicapped veterans and recent landmine victims. Generally speaking, we felt more comfortable donating to them. Nevertheless, we felt it wrong to tour S-21 and then ignore or shun these still-living victims of the catastrophe documented inside. Still stunned from what we'd seen, we numbly handed out a few dollars, found Mup, and quietly motored away towards the second half of our gut-wrenching tour: the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek.
Out of the city and into the suburbs. We passed a host of bikers...
...shanty communities...
...curious mechanisms of transportation...
...and women tending their watery crops.Generally speaking, most of the prisoners at S-21 were not executed there. Instead, they were hauled off en masse to a secluded location in the countryside just past the stilt houses and dusty shacks that make up Phnom Penh's suburbs. Here, they were offloaded, murdered, and dumped into a series of shallow mass graves. Often, in an effort to save precious bullets, the executioners would simply bludgeon their helpless victims over the head. Now, a towering white stupa dominates the immediate surroundings. A small sign asks guests to remove their shoes before climbing the few carpeted steps to the glass-fronted building, and incense burns to either side. The stupa itself houses thousands of skulls, their smashed domes grisly testament to the brutal manner of execution. A few tattered artifacts- clothes found in the graves- drove home the point that each skull represented a person who, as our parents were starting their adult lives on the other side of the world, was having his or hers wrenched away. We wandered the perimeter of the killing fields in the shade of low trees, where emaciated cows munched grass only meters from bone fragments. Along the outer fence, a group of kids waited for tourists to tag along with. From opposite sides of the fence, we joked back and forth and chatted until the boys decided they'd gone far enough. They all grouped together, posing for a photo and then sticking their skinny arms through the fence for payment, still joking around and grinning as we fished out a few bills totaling only a dollar or so. At the end of our walk, we searched the tuk-tuk driver crowd at a hammock cafe on the edge of the grove for Mup and headed back into town.
The skull-filled stupa at Choeung Ek, a chilling reminder of what happened there.
We knew they'd be asking for money in exchange for the photo, but they were too charming to turn down. It's more than a little strange to hear and see children playing just outside the gates of one of the 20th Century's most gruesome sites. Perhaps it can even be described as refreshing. Perceptive Mup realized from his efforts to shepherd us into the Choeung Ek gift shop that we weren't so keen on buying things for ourselves that day. He started telling us about the orphanage he volunteered at, how this time of year rice prices went up and they could barely afford to keep the children from starving, and how sometimes he brought tourists there. Would we like to buy some rice at the market and bring it over? We jumped at the opportunity to do anything at all that we could feel good about, and soon were following Mup through a shanty-town market full of naked children chasing chickens and dodging adults. The rice man agreed to deliver a big bag of the enriched rice to the orphanage, and we went a few meters further down the road. Stopping the tuk-tuk again, Mup chatted fondly with the two knee-high urchins who ran over looking for money. They climbed into the seats we vacated as he explained laughingly, "I pay them to guard my tuk-tuk. I don't want them begging, so I give them work."
"Mup" employed a few of these trustworthy looking security guards to take care of his tuk-tuk while we went into the dirty market.
Knowing that our tuk-tuk was safe, we waded into the tangled web of fresh and rotting vegetables, garbage, trinkets, and clothing to find the man who'd sell us a 50kg bag of rice for the orphanage.We followed him through the mud and debris past plywood buildings and shy boys until we reached a rough courtyard. This, it appeared, was the orphanage. The lopsided buildings resembled a kid's fort more than an institution- more plywood, with corrugated iron roofs and crudely made ladders. There were drawings on the walls, and a hand-painted sign listing the names and origins of various donors. The kids hammed it up for our cameras while the young man in charge showed us around, up a teetering ladder to the boys' room and the girls'. He also showed us the two small school rooms, one with a row of desks and tiny blackboard in an otherwise empty setting, the other lacking desks but full of maps and drawings the students had made. More than anything, this orphanage was a place to get kids off the streets. The number of orphans here were yet another aspect of the hardships in Cambodia today. The generation that would be today's grandparents, aunts, uncles, or other supportive family, was decimated by the genocide. Families are further strained by the loss of able workers to land mines, and poverty is desperate, which may make it impossible for some parents to provide for their children. The number of young people and absence of middle-aged or older is striking to even a casual observer. In fact, the demographics are startling- the median age in Cambodia is only 20 years old, while the global average is 28.
Despite the difficult circumstances of their young lives, these orphans all seemed happy and full of energy.
The girls loved having their pictures taken, and for good reason- they were all quite photogenic.
The children at the orphanage have access to a stage, a boxing instructor, and a small, map adorned classroom. Ben shows one of the older boys, and also our guide, where we're from. 
Faye makes a few new friends.That same evening we decided to take a look at downtown Phnom Penh, walking from our hostel to the Independence Monument and then following the major boulevard to Wat Phnom. The Wat marks the highest point in the city, which is barely a hill. We strolled up its spiraling paths near dusk. As we walked we were repeatedly flanked by a boy about 12 and his little sister, who would cry as he asked for money. We stopped to watch monkeys clamber over one of the stupas near the top and they appeared again, this time with another little boy and an old woman selling bananas. Through various gestures, they indicated that we should buy bananas to feed the monkeys. Thinking that at least this way we'd be supporting a work ethic instead of begging we went ahead and bought a bunch, which we handed to the three kids. The two younger ones alternated between pointing at monkeys, throwing bananas at monkeys, and pushing bananas into their mouths. At the top of the wat pilgrims prayed in a small temple whose bronze Buddha statues were lit by kitschy rainbow colored lights, while outside one particularly audacious primate stole from their offerings. Charmed and exhausted, we wandered down the wat and navigated back towards the river, which would lead us to a plethora of restaurants and eventually our hostel.
A towering stupa at Wat Phnom.
Buddhist sculpture on Wat Phnom.
One of several mischievious monkeys snacking on bananas, climbing stupas, and setting ambushes for stray dogs at Wat Phnom.The Mekong River is Southeast Asia's lifeline. In Cambodia, it is of particular geographic interest. During the summer rainy season, the Tonle Sap River, a tributary of the Mekong that converges with that mighty river near Phnom Penh, reverses its flow and floods the Tonle Sap Lake. Normally, the Tonle Sap is little over 2,000 sq km, with an average depth of little more than a meter. But, during the rainy season, it can swell to over eight times its normal size and be nearly nine times as deep. It's an interesting geographic phenomenon that we, unfortunately, missed out upon. We had to content ourselves with appreciating the river's more picturesque qualities, qualities obviously not lost upon the city's restaurateurs. Families strolled on the river's bank, silhouetted by a spectacular pink sunset as we settled into a deck table at one of the strategically placed eateries. A low hedge-row shielded us from the neighboring road, which became progressively busier as the night wore on.
The setting sun painted the sky a brilliant shade of pink and deep hued blue as we sat down for dinner. We hadn't even gotten our menus before we were startled by what was to be the first of a steady stream of unexpected visitors. A young man, probably no older than 25, popped through the line of bushes and nearly into our laps. He had no legs below the knees, and no arms beyond his elbows. All had been lost because of an unfortunate encounter with a landmine. We spoke briefly with him, gave him a small donation, and watched as he made the rounds through the rest of the restaurant. He then retreated back to the street, where a friend or relative waited to push him to the next restaurant in the row. Several minutes later, another similarly impaired man stopped by, again emerging through the bushes like a chick hatched from an egg. And then another. And another. All had at least 3 limbs missing, most all four. These men, all of them young, were exceptions to a general rule in Cambodia. Most of the amputees, if they could, worked. Unfortunately, there is very little a quadruple amputee can accomplish. They were the most unfortunate of the unfortunate. They could all speak English, seemed to be well-kempt and intelligent, and had remarkably positive attitudes. If they'd managed to keep at least some of their limbs, they probably would have been employable. They hadn't, and they weren't. So, they had to do the only thing they could- beg. We thought it incredibly fortunate that they all had friends or family members to take care of them. We're sure that plenty such victims do not.
Most of Cambodia's amputees do whatever they can to eke out a respectable living. Some play music, others produce locally flavored art and textiles, and others, like this man at Angkor, sell things to tourists. Unfortunately, the quadruple amputees we met in Phnom Penh could do none of this, and thus had to resort to begging. As the amputees passed in and out of the restaurant, we were joined by another friendly solicitor, this time in the form of a young boy. Thankfully, he was in possession of all of his limbs, but apparently not in possession of adequate or even existent parenting. He carried a stack of books with him, hoping to avoid the embarrassment of begging by offering tangible goods in exchange. He had a nasty scar on his face, and seemed to have gone several days without bathing. He spoke to us in a raspy voice that had already mastered the English language- an impressive accomplishment for a boy whom we doubt made it to school very often. We had no need for books, and didn't wish to insult the boy's efforts by offering a handout. At first, he seemed disappointed. As our conversation continued, however, he brightened up and proved himself to be quite the character, telling genuinely funny jokes and even engaging in some physical comedy. As he walked away, we were again reminded of how important our actions are- even the ones that seem insignificant. Other tourists brushed this kid off, acting annoyed and incredulous at his efforts at survival. We gave no money, but the simple act of polite conversation seemed to lift his spirits and left him with a smile on his face- and ours. Later, another young boy, this one dirtier and decidedly more bashful, approached our table selling flowers. We felt terrible- we'd just ordered dessert after a huge meal, and now found ourselves turning down this obviously hungry child. We hurriedly bundled up the apple pancake we were about to share and passed it on to the boy, who quickly scurried away with his prize. We were both surprised and touched by what happened next. He walked out to the street to another young boy, this one smaller and much dirtier, put his arm around him, ripped off half of the pancake, handed it to his friend, and walked down the street munching away. After all that we'd seen during the day, it was good to end things with a few good reminders of the power of small actions.
Still, we found ourselves rendered speechless by the day's events, and our brief tuk-tuk ride back to the hostel provided many more somber reminders of Cambodia's brutal past and difficult present. Amputees seemed to grow from the streets like forests of disfigured trees. And, the unfortunate reality is, it's only going to get worse. There is a considerable effort underway to eradicate the landmine scourge, but there remains much work to be done. Officials speculate that there may be as many as 6 million (perhaps even more) active landmines left in the tiny nation, almost all of them completely unmarked. For a good time to come, lives and limbs will be lost and families broken because someone commits the unpardonable sin of stepping in the wrong spot.
A collection of landmines and other ordinance unearthed from Cambodian soil. Despite considerable effort to clean these up, there still exists an enormous threat. Only three years after coming to power, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge committed a fatal sin of its own. A series of foolhardy cross-border raids on southern Vietnam provoked the recently victorious, battle-hardened communists in that country to march on Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge never stood a chance. As the Vietnamese advanced, Pol Pot and his cronies fled to the northwest, where they remained for the next decade waging a low level guerrilla war against the Vietnamese sponsored government. In the early 1990's, a UN brokered cease-fire provided for the withdrawal of the Vietnamese and the establishment of a UN peacekeeping mission in the battered country. Elections in 1993, under the direction of the UN, set the nation on the long road to political recovery. Pol Pot was, to the chagrin of most Khmers and the embarrassment of the UN and the International War Crimes Tribunal, never convicted of the crimes he and his regime perpetrated. He died of natural causes in 1998. Like the Khmer Rouge, we also found ourselves fleeing Phnom Penh to the northwest, not because we were being chased by angry Vietnamese (we think we left most of the Viets with a good impression), but because we wanted to see the other, happier side of Cambodia: the fabled temples at Angkor.
Recent AP article on Cambodia's Khmer Rouge
Phnom Penh Photo Gallery 1
Phnom Penh Photo Gallery 2
0 comments:
Post a Comment