There is no smiling allowed in Phnom Penh...at least some places.
I enjoyed Siem Reap, Cambodia so much a few weeks ago that I decided to adjust my itinerary and swing through the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh for a few days.
I flew from Chang Mai with a short layover in Bangkok. Only one more short lay-over in Bangkok and I am done with that city…at least for this trip.
Phnom Penh, like most of Cambodia, is still recovering from Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime. Immediately after the Khmer Rouge took power, they instituted a city wide evacuation sending the entire civilian population to state run farms in the countryside. They wanted to abolish commerce, money, industry, family life, transportation, or anything else that was deemed a foreign influence that could disrupt their farming utopia. Phnom Penh went from a city of 2 million to a city of less than 40,000 literally overnight. Anybody left living in the city were officials of the government. It took the city until 2006 to recover its pre- Pol Pot population. Phnom Penh is one of the most developing cities I have seen yet. Every SE Asian city has a lot of construction but Phnom Penh would make Donald Trump proud. There is bamboo scaffolding everywhere.
When I arrived in Phnom Penh, my hotel was supposed to have a driver waiting for me at the airport. There was a driver from my hotel waiting there but he was not waiting for me. He was waiting for three other girls on my flight were also staying at the hotel so they let me tag along with them to the hotel. Actually, they let me tag along for the next few days. It was good to have some travel companions in Phnom Penh. There are some locations there that provoke a lot of thought and it was good to have some people with which to discuss the Khmer Rouge atrocities. I’ve never been to any of the Nazi deathcamps but I imagine that those also have to evoke similar reactions by any sane human being. Also, it was just good to have some people with which to have a few meals, beers, and solid English conversation.
By the time we got to the hotel from the airport, it was already getting late and nobody felt much like seeing Phnom Penh after dark much due to its reputation as being one of the more dangerous SE Asian cities (which I disagree with after having been there). The hotel had a TV and DVD collection and one of their titles was the Killing Fields which is a mid-80’s movie chronicling the Khmer Rouge regime from the eyes of one American and one Cambodian journalist based off of very real characters and very real facts. It was a good thing to watch to set the context of what we would be seeing the next morning.
Our first stop the next morning was Choeung Ek or what is commonly referred to as the “Killing Fields.” Is really, though, only one of dozens of sites around Cambodia in which the Pol Pot regime used to execute innocent Cambodians. I am not going to write again about how most of these people were selected for death but if you are interested, you can go back to my Siem Reap blog or read about any of this on wikipedia. This location is the main one visited because of its proximity to Phnom Penh and the sheer number of people that were executed here. In two years, a staff of 10 at this site killed over 20,000 people most of which are still interred where they were murdered. The bones that have been exhumed have been placed in a monument in the center of the park. It is grisly to see all of the skulls with the very visable head wounds. Prisoners had to dig their own graves, kneel next to them and were then executed with a blow to the head. Bullets were too expensive.
As you walk around the park, you can see all of the excavated graves that look like bomb craters one after another. Between the graves are pathways on which I really didn’t want to walk. There are so many bodies still buried here that there is evidence of them literally everywhere you walk. During every rainy season, like it is now, the rain erodes bits of dirt and exposes the bones and clothes of murdered people still in shallow graves in the ground underneath your feet. Everywhere you walk, you can see the white of bone peeking out from the paths. I even saw a tooth just lying in front of me on the path at one point. It is a terrible, terrible place. As bones and clothing become exposed by rain, they are usually placed in piles near the trees. I have a picture below of my guide explaining this while standing next to a pile of bones.
The next place we went to was the S-21 prison. S-21, before the Khmer Rouge took power, was Tuol Svay Prey High School, a public school in the heart of Phnom Penh. A society, though, in which you don’t want anyone educated, schools have little value. So the building was converted from a place of learning to a place of torture. Again, it is gruesome. One of the exhibits is a collection of thousands of mug shots of former inmates. Most of them are too young to vote in the US and some are only toddlers or younger. As I was looking at the photos, I realized that most of these people are now buried in the grounds of or displayed in the monument of the Killing Fields that I had just left. I probably walked right over several of their remains. Trucks left S-21 every few days, with whoever survived their torture, bound for Choeung Ek just outside of town. The instruments of torture are displayed everywhere and you can walk through the closet sized cells where prisoners were stuffed.
We saw several other sights on that day but I will remember none as much as the prison and killing fields. It is a shame, too, because, Phnom Penh is a great city with a great future and I’m sure that all anybody remembers upon leaving is darker side of its history. Living in the US, I think that we are sheltered a lot from some of the terrible things that go on in the world. Seeing a place like Cambodia really makes you realize how terrible human beings can be to each other. To me, Phnom Penh is either proof that Satan exists or God doesn’t.
No comments:
Post a Comment