Cambodia Cambucha: Phnom Penh

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

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.