A Week in Cambodia

By Charlie

Walk down the street in Phnom Penh and you’ll see the regular collection of characters: Guys with motorcycles who will give you a ride anywhere in the city for a dollar. Several generations of women playing with a baby on a mat. A blind old man playing a traditional fiddle as he is led down alleyways on a string by a little boy who also collects money for the old man. Palace guards and policemen. Monks and merchants.

All these people must have their own stories of war and survival. They all must know people who were killed. Some of these people must have done the killing.

Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia through a bizarre and vicious form of communism. They sent everyone to the fields and closed the country to the outside world. By the time it was all over, a quarter of the population was gone.

The history of Cambodia is absurdly complicated and twisted. The brief but expansive history section in the Lonely Planet got me interested. I picked up a more detailed history in Phnom Penh that was recommended by the Cambodia Luce Scholars. “When the War Was Over” by Elizabeth Becker starts at the beginning with the days of the Angkor Kingdom and works from there.

Now that I’m back in Mongolia, I’m reading about the confused days that followed World War Two. French colonialism, Japanese imperialism, Thai expansionism, American paranoia, Chinese meddling and Vietnamese chaos all provided ingredients for the poison that would kill so many Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge.

Any average Cambodian who is today over the age of 30 had some relationship with the Khmer Rouge. Maybe they joined. That’s what the current Prime Minister of Cambodia did. Maybe they walked out of Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge took the city in April 1975 and spent four years at hard labor. Maybe they stayed in town to guard the notorious Tuol Sleng security prison that went up in the four unimpressive buildings of a former high school.

Spend an hour or two roaming around Tuol Sleng and you will be a different person when you leave.

Much like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge documented their atrocities. A visit to Tuol Sleng presents two kinds of images. In two of the buildings, you see thousands of pictures of people who passed through the place. In the other two buildings, you see the prison pretty much as it was when the Vietnamese rolled into Phnom Penh in 1979 to drive out the Khmer Rouge. There are poorly constructed cells, some made from wood and others thrown together with bricks and mortar. There is barbed wire all over the place and implements of torture in the yard and in a few of the former classrooms.

There’s one remote room that looks like a neglected attic. There are boxes and old pieces of furniture. It looks innocuous enough until you enter and see decaying pictures of people being tortured.

Of the approximately 12,000 people who passed through Tuol Sleng, only 12 are known to have survived.

Museums in Asia often leave a lot to be desired, but not Tuol Sleng. It is simple, well done and powerful beyond comprehension. There is one strange corner in a stairwell where backpackers and other morons have taken it upon themselves to use graffiti to express their serious and heartfelt opposition to torture and genocide.

“Please people do not let this shit happen again!”

You can read more about Tuol Sleng and the efforts to document Khmer Rouge atrocities on the website of the Documentation Center of Cambodia.

I was not in Cambodia long enough to talk with any Cambodians about what happened. Even if I stayed a year, I’m not sure how easy it would be to talk with people about what they experienced. It’s all too recent and too brutal. And maybe some people think that it could happen again.

The maniacal leader of the Khmer Rouge died in 1998 before he could be tried. Pol Pot – the cadre formerly known as Saloth Sar – was cremated on a pyre of burning tires even before an autopsy could be performed. Many of his clique have also died. The few surviving Khmer Rouge leaders may face a nebulous tribunal in coming years, but don’t count on it.

The brutality of Cambodian history didn’t start with the Khmer Rouge. Elizabeth Becker’s book makes it very clear that violence and vengeance have been with the Cambodians since the days of the Angkor Kingdom, which reached its peak between the 9th and 15th Centuries.

It is the greatness of this past that may be one of Cambodia’s most vexing challenges. After three days of walking around the temples of Angkor Wat, Rachel made the very astute observation that Cambodia and Mongolia share an important reality. Both of these civilizations know that their greatest days are in the past – the very distant past. The future will not be so proud, not by a long shot.

It is an interesting quirk of history that the decline of the Angkor Kingdom coincided approximately with the rise of the Mongol Empire. Angkor in the 14th Century faced a variety of problems, not least of which were the people whom we now know as the Thais. These marauding Thais headed south from Yunan in the 14th Century to get away from Kublai Khan, the grandson of Chinggis.