Stories from Phnom Penh: Part 2

You got me: I said on my last post I was going to update tomorrow and it's obviously been a few days since "tomorrow." I have gotten more than one comment on this (sheesh, give me a break! Just kidding, thanks for keeping me honest), and so I apologize for not sticking to my word. My excuses are: one, Thursday was Halloween and so I was quite busy doing lesson planning and homework and such and also putting together a last minute costume so I could go to a Halloween party. Two, Friday was my full day of teaching and I had papers and emails to catch up during my very little downtime. Three, yesterday I needed to recuperate from aforementioned Halloween festivities (nothing too crazy, you all know me) and teaching and so I deemed a full day of Gilmore Girls and junk food was in order. But here I am now!

Okay, so on our last day in Phnom Penh we got started early with a trip to the killing field of Choeng Ek. It was located a good long tuk tuk ride outside of the city but we hired a driver for the day for a really reasonable price. He even stopped at a roadside stand to get us masks for our mouths and noses because there was a lot of construction and congestion kicking up dirt and other nasty stuff into the air. We looked a bit like we were about to scrub in to a surgery but it did the trick and mask-wearing is actually extremely common in Asia.

A little background information on the tone of the day: after the U.S. left Southeast Asia in 1975, that April a political party known as the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia. Headed by the now infamous Pol Pot, the regime was founded on the principles of Cambodian nationalism and communism. Basically, Pol Pot wanted to create a agrarian utopia in which all kinds of modernization and urbanization was stamped out in favor of simple, collectivist village life. Within hours of the Khmer Rouge takeover, the capital city of Phnom Penh was emptied along with all other major cities, forcing the city people out into the country to become farmers.

The work was grueling and the people were given very little food and time for rest. Many of them didn't even know how to farm, being from the cities. However, anyone even remotely suspected of dissent was arrested and taken to prison, oftentimes along with their family members. They were tortured and forced to confess to plotting against the state, and eventually executed in killing fields such as Choeng Ek. To maintain order, every effort was made to keep these execution sites a secret from the remaining population. It wasn't until the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by the Vietnamese in 1979 and the locals discovered the mass graves that the world began to learn about the Cambodian genocide. In the end, they estimate 2 to 3 million people were killed under Pol Pot: roughly one fourth of the population.

Choeng Ek is the most comprehensively designated and preserved killing field, with a large memorial built on the site and a small museum. The most notable part of the visit was the audio walking tour, which enabled visitors to take in the killing field at their own pace and to hear firsthand accounts, background history, and other relevant stories to understand what they were looking at. All of the original buildings, such as holding areas, offices, and storage sheds had been disassembled by the Khmer Rouge, leaving the mass graves as the only evidence to the horrors that happened there. Although extensive excavation has occurred at Choeng Ek, each rainy season still turns up the buried human remains. The audio tour warned me that I might see rags or even bone fragments along the paths I walked, and I didn't believe it until I saw it with my own eyes.

As you can imagine, I wasn't too into snapping photographs of the site, but I did take a picture of the massive stupa that had been erected as a memorial and testament to the thousands who died at Choeng Ek and millions all across Cambodia.

You could actually walk into the stupa and study the shelves and shelves of human skulls that had been excavated from the mass graves nearby. In Cambodia, post mortem care is of great spiritual importance, as they believe that in order for a person's spirit to be at rest they need to be properly cremated at a temple. However, the death toll was so high it would be almost impossible to match up the remains and identify each person and see if they have any family remaining. The best that the excavation teams are able to do is sort the remains by sex and age, and display them as a somber but necessary reminder of the genocide. The tour ended with the closing sentiment that genocide happens all over the world, every day, and it will take a global effort to bring it to an end.

Our next stop was the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum back in Phnom Penh. Originally a high school, the buildings had been converted into a prison by the Khmer Rouge to house the people they suspected of plotting against the regime in some way. Totally paranoid, they would lock up and torture hundreds of people at a time before their executions. Much of the museum remained untouched since the Khmer Rouge abandoned it, but some of the rooms had been turned into exhibit halls for photographs and other information. Most striking were the countless mug shots of each prisoner, ranging from elementary age children to the elderly. I will never forget the faces that gazed back at me across the years, as they eliminated any kind of anonymity I could have projected onto the experience, making it personal and emotional.

There were rooms where rows of makeshift brick or wooden cells had been erected, and other rooms where the metal bed frames upon which people were chained and tortured still sat in the middle of the floor. It took a while to walk through the multiple buildings (all looked more or less like the one above). Since the Khmer Rouge had been replaced by a Vietnamese-run government, the regime actually held the United Nations seats for Cambodia long after its official fall, as the Vietnamese government was deemed illegitimate in the international community. Pol Pot went into hiding and eventually died. However, there has since been an ongoing tribunal for the remaining Khmer Rouge members, overseen by the current Cambodian government and the U.N. It tries the former leaders for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.

It was not the happiest way to end my time in Cambodia, but one I felt was totally necessary to understanding the country and to gain some perspective on its current state of development and the inter-connectivity with rest of Southeast Asia. The more time I spend here, the more and more I understand that no country can live in a vacuum, and that each event has ramifications far beyond the immediate or short term. It's a mindset that I want to carry with me long after I leave Thailand, which is the whole point of me being here in the first place!

We ended the day on a more upbeat note with dinner at an Italian restaurant and cupcakes for dessert with a dip in the hotel pool afterwards. I caught an early taxi to fly from Phnom Penh back to Chiang Mai via Bangkok. I got a couple days of downtime before my next adventure: a meditation retreat on Doi Suthep!