Now I have finally arrived in Ho Chi Minh City and I thought I would reflect a bit on my time in Cambodia. Cambodia and Phnom Penh are not large places and I think I was able to see most of the place in the time that I spent there. As I wrote about before, Phnom Penh is quite a nice city. The people are warm and accommodating. The city is pretty and reasonably accessible for non-Cambodians. I did have some problems with the Cambodian food however. I pride myself in being able to stomach all kinds of different food but for some reason I didn’t really enjoy the food while I was there and my stomach reacted pretty violently. I won’t get into the details but my digestive system was definitely struggling throughout my time there and only now am I feeling a bit better.
One aspect of Cambodia that is hard to miss is the fairly recent, extremely violent history of the place. If you were only visiting for a few days or so and just partied it up around the riverside then you could miss it but I used my longer period of time to try to get a better understanding of the situation. There is a place in Phnom Penh called S-21 which was one of the largest secret prisons of the Khmer Rouge. I wasn’t sure if I was going to go and honestly I was prepared to skip over it entirely. As important a place it is for the history of the country, I don’t have a particular fascination for depressing places. If I went to Poland, I don’t think I would want to go to Auschwitz. Anyway, some of my friends were going to S-21 so I decided to tag along. I didn’t take any pictures because firstly it’s not a beautiful location in the first place and I thought it was kind of morbid to be snapping pictures where thousands of people were tortured and killed. The compound used to be a school and was turned into a prison shortly after the Khmer Rouge seized power. The present government decided not to change anything and to leave the place pretty much how it was left; with the exception of a few rooms which were full of pictures and stories about the time period. They removed the dead bodies obviously however except for a room full of skulls and other bones. The compound looks like any other communist compound, fit with the uniform concrete pillars and fairly identical rooms. The rooms are pretty much empty with the exception an occasional bed frame with the torture utensils left on it. Some of the rooms are also fit with gruesome pictures of what the Vietnamese military discovered when they found the prisons after it was abandoned by the Khmer Rouge.
It’s hard to describe the chilling feeling you get when you walk into a room where probably over a hundred people were gruesomely tortured and murdered. I looked at the small window and could just imagine what the victims’ last view of the outside world would have been. Some of the rooms have writing scratched into the wall which I couldn’t read but you don’t have to be able to read the script to feel the anguish. As I walked from room to room, the solemnness and tranquility of the place is unsettling. Occasionally I heard children laughing from a nearby neighborhood and the bustling of modern life outside the prison which contrasted starkly with the raw silence of the rooms. It’s almost as if the souls of the victims are held within the compound by the silence. On the bottom floor of some of the sections was a museum section. One room was just a wall of photographs of victims and you see that the entire population was represented: children, young people, the elderly. The criteria for being killed by the Khmer Rouge were quite arbitrary and cruel. If you could speak another language, wore glasses, or had soft hands than you were probably killed unless you could hide it. Pol Pot sought to create an agrarian utopia and so anyone with a higher level of education was seen as a threat. As his reign of terror continued, the criteria became far less specific and victims were forced under torture to list the people they knew and loved as traitors and so the genocide continued. It seems that the cruelty of the place only escalated as time went on. There were pictures of soldiers throwing babies in the air and shooting them. I was thinking to myself about how awful rapes and murders are, crimes of passion, but I can’t imagine a worse part of humanity than this kind of systemized slaughter.
There is a section of the museum devoted to the current war crime trials and they spent a decent amount of time documenting the evidence for the genocide, as if we needed more evidence. The infuriating thing is that the Cambodian genocide was pretty much ignored by Western governments during the 70s and 80s because of the geopolitics of the region. The United States and the United Kingdom supported the Khmer Rouge while it was blatantly obvious what was happening. The Vietnamese were the ones who ousted Pol Pot from power by force and the US government was too bent on humiliating the Vietnamese to be on the right side of history. I heard that Bill Clinton was the last president to be shipping weapons to the Khmer Rouge as they fought their guerilla war against the government established by the Vietnamese. The ridiculous thing is that the president now was also a former Khmer Rouge who was opportunistic enough to flee at the right time and then work his way back into the government. Hun Sen has gutted the authority of the monarchy and rules with an authoritative fist. The war crime tribunals he oversees really have been a farce. The man who ran S-21 and oversaw thousands upon thousands of people tortured and killed was only sentenced recently to a mere 19 years in prison. It makes you wonder what you need to do in Cambodia to get life in prison. The truth is that the judicial system is very corrupt and the government now isn’t too enthusiastic about having these trials. Hun Sen I believe has said that only a few more people will be tried. So there really is no justice.
A friend of mine that has lived in Cambodia for a long time told me that he thinks the entire country is still going through a post-traumatic stress disorder. He said he reads every day about people committing violent and heinous crimes. People that probably just can’t cope with the past they’ve lived. History will always have its value in shaping human destiny but just as children still laugh and play games outside of S-21, perhaps Cambodians could benefit from a spell of amnesia as the sands of time erode the grief of the past.
S-21 was a sobering place to visit and I don’t know if I recommend other people to visit it. It’s tough but maybe it’s good sometimes to see the worst of humanity so you can appreciate the comparative placidity of today’s world.
No comments:
Post a Comment