Warning: This post contains descriptions of graphic and disturbing images that occurred during the Kmer Rouge regime of the late 1970s. I don't have photos of these things, but describing them can be just as bad.
Here is the link for the photos again, if you missed the previous post.:
https://plus.google.com/+HeatherAskew79/posts/b3uKrwZ2iRq
Here is the link for the photos again, if you missed the previous post.:
https://plus.google.com/+HeatherAskew79/posts/b3uKrwZ2iRq
Day 5, April 15
Long drive today. We take the 8:45
bus to Phnom Penh with is about an 8 hour drive. Pretty uneventful other than
there are tiny roasted birds for sale at the lunch stopping point. We arrive in
Phnom Penh and it’s like a ghost town. Everyone keeps telling us about how busy
and crazy it is, like Bangkok, but since it’s holiday week, there is nobody
around, everyone has gone home to visit their families in villages. It’s nice
because I get enough crazy city life in Thailand. Tonight, we walk from our
hotel down to see the palace grounds and museum and walk along the river. We
find a place with cheap pizza and enjoy the evening warmth, despite it being
super humid. We have a plan to see the traditional Cambodian dancers at the
museum but they are closed til June! Internet fail. The website we saw was just
updated in February but clearly they were not up to date on all their info.
Such a disappointment, but we have a plan to see some other traditional
Cambodian show on Friday.
Day 6, April 16
Today we enjoy another delicious
hot breakfast at our new hotel, go for a morning swim on the rooftop infinity
pool and head out to explore the National Museum followed by the Palace after
lunch. Both are very interesting and informative and have some really cool
things to see about the long history of Cambodia. What’s funny is that when you
go to the museum in Chiang Mai, there is a map showing how big the Kingdom of
Thailand once was, encompassing lots of Cambodia, but then in Cambodia, there
is almost the same map showing how Cambodia once owned most of Thailand,
including Bangkok. So, I am thinking “…….uh, SOMEbody’s lying, but I don’t know
who.”
For dinner, we go to the new
mall, which is about as exciting as you expect a mall to be, but if you ask a
Cambodia person, it’s like the crown jewel of Phnom Penh and they are VERY
proud of its existence. Anyway. We eat a lovely dinner of Cambodian food and
watch some people at the ice skating rink, check out the English bookstore and
head home. No movies worth watching this week. J
Day 7, April 17
OK, so this is the day I have
been both dreading and anticipating for most of my life. Today we will tour the
killing fields and the Tuol Sleng prison. If you have ever seen the movie “The
Killing Fields,” you will know most of the story of Cambodia’s tyrant Pol Pot. In
case you haven’t, like many other people, here is a brief history lesson.
On April 17, 1975 (yes, that’s
right, folks, 40 years ago today), Pol Pot and his army of teenagers
indoctrinated and terrorized from the poorest areas of rice farming stormed all
the cities, including Phnom Penh, and forced all the people to leave the city
with only what they could carry and become rice farmers. He had a dream that
the country would only be an agrarian society, with no classes and no
education, medical training, lawyers, etc. This way, he and his cronies could
have absolute control. The really ironic thing is that Pol Pot and all his top
people were teachers! Teachers wanting to destroy the educational system. It
boggles my mind.
How did they empty the cities so easily?
They came in as a parade, claiming they were helping the people escape a
bombing by the Americans who were trying to destroy as much as they could in
the wake of the Vietnam war. It’s bad enough getting blamed for the things our
country has actually done wrong, but using the US as an excuse to slaughter
your own people is pretty despicable.
They emptied the cities in 3
days, and anyone who was educated in any way was kept in a high school that was
converted into a prison and torture chamber and tortured mercilessly until they
confessed. To what? To whatever their sadistic torturers wanted them to say.
Working for the KGB, CIA, being a traitor. After they finally confessed, they
would be executed. But not by a simple bullet to the head or gas; no, most of
the time their had their skulls bashed in with bamboo poles, axes, or machetes,
or had their throats slit with palm leaves.
Between 1975-1979, 3 million
people, over 25% of the population, was murdered by Pol Pot. We are talking
men, women, children, babies. Pol Pot had a lot of sayings, such as “to keep
you is no gain, to lose you is no loss” referring to killing entire families,
and “better to kill an innocent by mistake than let an enemy live by mistake.”
He thought if you killed the whole family, nobody would be left to avenge the
parents’ deaths.
People who had never worked in
fields a day in their lives were forced to become rice planters and the
production demanded was completely impossible to live up to. People would
literally work to death, surviving as long as possible on one bowl of white
rice per day or two. The soldiers were mostly poor teenagers whom Pol Pot
convinced to join his regime by promising them equality and prosperity.
The sweet tuk tuk driver who took
us to the mall last night picks us up to drive us out to the first stop. We get
headphones so we can hear the history of each stop on the walking tour at this, the
largest killing field. As we walk in, we see about 200 Cambodians dressed in white cleaning up after some sort of ceremony. We figure it's for New Year's since Khmer New Year was yesterday. We realize later that today was a memorial ceremony to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the day their world was ripped apart. Rather than react with bitterness or anger, they choose to spend this day remembering those who were lost.
This tour is so well done, so heartbreaking and
haunting. Many people share their stories and memories about what happened and
what Pol Pot did to their country. Experts think over 20,000 people
were murdered in this particular field during Pol Pot’s regime. The place was a field surrounded by
a fence, and they would play propaganda speeches all night long on the radio, so
the neighbors thought it was a work camp. They had no idea that in the dead of
night, truckloads of innocent men, women and children were bused in here to be
slaughtered, their bodies thrown into mass graves by the hundreds. Pol Pot killed everyone who had any education,
even though who simply wore glasses. He said he respected the peasants above
all, but they were slaughtered too. Even foreigners were killed if they caught
wind of what was really happening in these death camps so that they could not
tell their home countries. Land mines were planted along the borders of
Thailand and Vietnam to keep anyone from escaping over land.
As I walk through this now
beautiful area, hearing the stories of what happened here and across the
country brings me to tears. The worst part is a tree we come to that is
garlanded with wrist bands of every color and style in remembrance of what
happened here. This is a tree they used to kill the babies. The soldiers would
take the babies by the feet and smash their heads into the trunk until they
died, then toss them unceremoniously into a mass grave. When Vietnamese
soldiers first discovered this place, they couldn’t figure out why there was so
much brain matter here, and so they dug around the tree and discovered the
bones of over 100 babies and some of their mothers.
The absolute loss of your
humanity and soul that it would take to do that to an innocent child is
staggering. Even if I were threatened with death, or my family was threatened,
I just don’t think I could ever follow through with an order requiring that of
me. I don’t know how the soldiers who did these things could ever sleep again.
The other very disturbing part of
this tour is the areas that have not been fully excavated. While they have
found thousands of skeletal remains, every path you walk down has bones along
the pathway, some with clothing still attached. I see femurs, hand bones, and
other parts poking their way out of the surface of the earth. With each passing
rainy season, more are revealed.
At the end of this tour is a
towering memorial building. Inside the building are 17 levels of bones, mostly
skulls but other major bones as well. The first 10 levels are skulls identified
by forensics as to the age and manner of death of the person. Upper levels contain
arm and leg bones and most of the rest are still interred in the grounds of the
fields.
It takes us about 3 hours to do
the entire tour, sitting for reflection at multiple spots and watching an
educational movie about the history of this place. After a lunch across the
street, we head on to the Tuol Sleng prison. Somehow this place is even harder
to see than the killing fields, knowing the history of it as a place of
learning that was turned into a place of terror.
In front is a sign that lists the
rules of the prison. Number three makes my blood run cold. “You are not to cry
or scream when you are being beaten or electrocuted.” How on earth could you
conceive of such a rule and how would you ever be able to follow it?
This place is full of ghosts.
Room after room that was once a classroom, now sits with only a rickety bed
with chains attached to it. Photos adorn the walls depicting people in the
final stages of torture, on their deathbeds waiting for a release from the
neverending pain and suffering. Building two has classrooms converted into jail
cells. Each cell is wide enough for me to stand with my back against one side
and my palms almost flat on the opposite wall. From back to front, it is eight
paces if I put my feet one in front of the other.
The first floor of building two
houses photo after photo of terrified, innocent people about to experience the
most horrifying thing of their lives. The soldiers took close up photos of
every person to pass through this prison and their dark eyes stare at me
through the lens of the past. Almost worse than this, though, are the photos of
the children, some merely confused, but some actually smiling for the camera.
Which is worse, knowing what is coming, or having no idea what you are in for?
When Vietnamese troops liberated
Phnom Penh in 1979, they found so many corpses here, blood everywhere, only 7
people still alive out of hundreds. There were also several children, who, for
some reason, had not been killed with their parents. In the final building on the
site, the eldest tells the story of what he remembers. There were maybe 6 or 7
of them, a few being babies. He remembers hearing the screams at night of
people being tortured but didn’t know if his mother was one of them or if he
would be next. On the day of liberation, he was watching out for the babies, one
of whom was crying and crying. Finally, he stopped crying and the boy thought
the baby had fallen asleep, but when he looked closer, he realized the baby had
died, finally succumbing to starvation and lack of care.
Before entering the final
building, I’m so overwhelmed with anger, anguish, and residual trauma from
reading about and seeing so many horrifying things that one human being is
capable of doing to another, that I don’t know if I can take any more.
Thankfully, I power through because in the final building are stories of
survivors today, information about a team of museum workers who traveled to
Japan to learn how to turn this place into one that will help preserve peace
for the future, and updates about the trials holding the top perpetrators
accountable.
Reading about people who were
forced to be part of the army, or did it because they knew their families would
be fed if they worked for Pol Pot or because they had no other job prospects makes
me realize that even the soldiers were people too. Reading about the ways that
Cambodians of today want to preserve the stories of their past to make a better
future where this will not happen again gives me hope.
Things that still boggle my mind:
-Pol Pot was allowed to remain as
representative of Cambodia with the UN until 1996. He never served a day in
jail, only was on house arrest for the last year of his life until he
peacefully passed away. In contrast, one of the teenagers who had the job of recording
names of the people who came to Tuol Sleng prison was in jail for 3 years for
crimes against humanity.
-A delegation from Sweden came in
1978 to visit at Pol Pot’s request and were given a huge propaganda tour,
returning to the western world and assuring them that all the refugees able to
escape this regime were merely making up stories. They thought everything was
fine, didn’t see any soldiers with guns in the city, all the kids seemed fine
and happy. In reality, the kids they saw were the children of those in power,
and they didn’t see guns because they killed people in a much more brutal way
since bullets were too expensive. Even photos that they took at a hospital show
a child dressed in too big scrubs acting like a doctor. Now, one of the members
of this party has written a book called “Dinner with Pol Pot” describing this
trip and sharing his shame at his own part in a massive coverup where a
holocaust was occurring. He says that they didn’t see because they didn’t want
to know.
-Pol Pot’s number 2 man was
convicted in 2011 after facing a war crimes tribunal at the United Nations and
will spend the rest of his life in jail. He is the only person so far who has
not only admitted the atrocities committed by him and after his orders, but is
remorseful and repentant about the lives he took. Every other person in the top
council has denied any knowledge of death camps, torture or inhumane practices.
They have been on trial since 2011 and hopefully will receive a sentence this
year.
-Why does most of the world not
know about this? We get at least 2 movies a year about the Holocaust in Germany
and that is warranted because there are as many stories as people who lived it,
but shouldn’t Cambodia get the same treatment? If the best way to not repeat
the past is to not forget it, shouldn’t Hollywood care about the Cambodian
people’s history of holocaust as well? Or for that matter Darfur, Sudan, etc.?
The prison tour takes us about
another 2 hours, so we get back to the hotel for a nice swim, since we are
dripping in sweat and sorrow and need some down time to process. I think going
through something like this and being confronted by such intense images and
stories definitely takes a psychological toll. Psychologists even call it “residual
trauma” when you are faced with something so horrendous that you can’t even
process it. I think this experience will take me some time for my subconscious
to deal with. I do not look forward to the next week of nightmares.
We hit up a nearby Mexican restaurant
for dinner and head out by tuk tuk to a place that does traditional Cambodian
shadow puppets. It’s pretty cool to see the story take shape on a white screen
with hand carved giant shadow puppets made from cow leather, but the story is
told in Cambodian to a 99% foreign audience, so it definitely misses something
in the translation. I am glad we went, but would have enjoyed it even more if I
had understood the story they were portraying.
After the show, we head back to
the hotel, I pack and double check
everything, nearly forgetting my Cadbury chocolate in the fridge(!) and head to
the tuk tuk to go to my night bus back to Siem Reap for my flight tomorrow.
This bus is awesome. There are
two levels of fully reclining beds with three beds per row, top and bottom.
Pretty ingenious. I take the last bus of the day, thinking we will end up in
Siem Reap at about 7am. Nope. It’s 5:30am. Thank goodness for Jenni, Joy’s
friend, who is staying with some other friends at a nice hotel and let me come
crash with them.
Day 8, April 18
So, I come sneaking in at 5:30
when it’s still nearly dark, and crash in Jenni’s room with her friend. We end
up sleeping til 9:30 then head down for one last swim in their luxurious pool
(way better than our hotel next door which was only 5 strokes long!). We eat
some pastries, read some books and pack our stuff to head home, Jenni’s friends
to their local houses, and me for the airport. But first, we stop off at Jenni’s
place to drop her stuff and then we go for lunch and, finally, cupcakes! Bloom
is a cupcake/cake shop that employs women rescued out of trafficking, so we
want to support them. I get a chocolate cupcake with peanut butter whip
frosting. Soooooo delectable. I really want to try 3 or 4 but fear they will
melt away within seconds of leaving the shop. Such a shame. Finally, back to
Jenni’s to pick up my bags, jump in the tuk tuk and off to the airport. Such a
great vacation. I am glad we saved the intense stuff for last and that I got
cupcakes to soften the intensity of the killing fields and prison.
If you have stuck with me through
this whole story, I hope you have learned something that will stick with you
and give you pause. And I hope it’s not about the sex lives of silkworms. If
you ever have the chance to visit Cambodia yourself, I would highly recommend
it as a beautiful place with wonderful people and great food, and a rich
history that survives despite a tyrannical despots’ attempts to destroy it.
