Phnom Penh

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05/06/2006, 06/06/2006

Phnom Penh is a capital in the making. There is a lot of restoration and road work being done, the riverfront seems to be undergoing some major renovation.

Our Guest House, funnily named ‘Me Mates Place’, is owned by an Aussie with Cambodian Heritage. The room was the best we have stayed in in Asia. It was really trendy and air-conditioned, with a power shower like no other. The day we arrived we spent hours enjoying the room and ended the day by taking a stroll down to the river and enjoying a good feed at a local market.

The following day, Andy and I visited the ‘Killing Fields’. It was a very sad day and we were very affected by this large garden that served as a mass grave for over 8000 people. That is only the number of recovered graves. There remains a large area in which lie more than 30 un-recovered mass graves. There is evidence in every step of the muddy track of people’s clothing, peering through the ground. A large glass tower sits in the middle of these fields, where 8000 human skulls, the skulls of the people brutally murdered during the Khmer Rouge, are being kept, staring at the visitor, reminding one that justice has not been done yet. The skulls are gruesomely arranged according to the age of the victims when they were slaughtered.

" The Killing Fields were a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the totalitarian communist Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately following the end of the Vietnam War.
At least 200,000 people were executed by the Khmer Rouge(while estimates of the total number of deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including disease and starvation, range from 1.4 to 2.2 million out of a population of around 7 million). In 1979, Vietnam invaded and toppled the Khmer Rouge regime, which was officially called Democratic Kampuchea. "
(courtesy of Wikipedia)


“The true magnitude of the Nobel Committee's blunder in awarding the Prize to Kissinger didn't become apparent until the destabilization of Cambodia, set in motion by American intervention, produced the Khmer Rouge and the slaughter of over a million” Paul Hager


My own perception on justice had changed only hours before.

At our hostel, I checked my mail and got an answer that I had long been waiting for. The people responsible for the crash of the Helios Airways flight in 2005 that had killed many of my friends and former colleagues, had officially been charged with 280+ accounts of manslaughter and negligence. Their names had been publicly released and the trial will take place on September the 17th, 2009. I cried tears of happiness that morning and realized after discussions with my husband, how much I had longed for justice and how released I felt with the knowledge that justice would be done. The previous day I had been saying ‘the past is in the past, what good will a trial do these people?’ referring to the Cambodians, but now I realized for myself, how important it is.

We went back to our hotel, unable to do any more for the day. The following morning we decided to head back to Siem Reap and consequently to Bangkok.

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