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Published: January 31st 2013
HE SAID... On our third morning in
Phnom Penh we woke around 6am, worked briefly on our travel notes and then headed out for a quick breakfast at 7.30am. I had muesli with fresh fruit and yoghurt with a pot of Khmer tea. Once again, I had to remove the papaya piece by piece from the muesli. I have to work on my issue with this fruit – it just smells and tastes like vomit. Ren had a pineapple smoothie and an omelette. It was a great start to the day, ruined a little by an old white guy sitting behind us searching for very young Asian women on a dating website. He didn’t seem to care that everyone could see what he was doing on his laptop. Cambodia, like so many Asian countries, attracts its fair share of predatory losers.
We headed back to the hotel at 8am to prepare for our visit to Tuol Sleng Museum and the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. These were difficult places to visit and difficult places to write about. The Khmer Rouge meticulously recorded the genocide it inflicted upon its own people, and the confronting images of torture and death were harrowing.
On the orders of Pol Pot, Tuol Sleng Primary School was converted into Security Office 21 in 1975, and approximately 20,000 innocent men, women and children were tortured and murdered here between 1975 and 1978. Individual pictures of thousands of prisoners lined the walls, and their faces expressed so many emotions – fear, hatred, confusion, sadness. Only a handful of prisoners survived this place, and I almost felt it should be closed to the public. There were
No Laughing signs throughout the museum, but guides still had to ask groups of tourists to stop laughing. I couldn’t begin to imagine what they found to be amusing. Yet despite the ignorant few, many visitors were in tears, unable to comprehend how a regime could turn so violently against its own people. The following statement (which I read at the end of the tour) made me realise why the museum remains open:
“Keeping the memory of the atrocities committed on Cambodia soil alive is the key to building a new, strong and just state.” We met one of the few survivors at the end of the tour, who was selling signed copies of his book of survival at the exit gate.
I took a photo of Ren with the old man, who apparently receives no support from the current Cambodian government.
We left the museum in silence, jumped into our minibus and headed to the dusty outskirts of Phnom Penh to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. The trip itself gave a very stark insight into the poverty that permeates Cambodia. We arrived at the Killing Fields in the heat of the late morning sun. Our guide took us around the complex and explained the atrocities committed there by the Khmer Rouge. It was extremely difficult to walk on dirt paths where human bones were clearly visible beneath our feet, continually being unearthed by natural erosion and daily tourist traffic. We can only hope that by keeping the memory of such atrocities alive, this will never happen again in Cambodia. Personally, I feel the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek should be cordoned off to the public – the remains of innocent victims who lost their lives there should be given much greater import than the curiosity of tourists.
We boarded our minibus and sat listening to our guide as we retraced our path back to Phnom Penh. He was
only a few years younger than me, yet his life had been so terribly different. He was openly resentful of Cambodia’s current government, but he was also wary of being too public with his political views. On arrival in Phnom Penh, we jumped off the minibus, thanked our guide for his honesty and headed to the upstairs section of Khmer Saravan (a Tonle Sap riverfront restaurant) for lunch. I quenched my thirst with a cold Angkor beer before sharing spring rolls, fried morning glory and
prahok ktiss (minced pork in a coconut sauce) with Ren. After lunch we picked up our laptops/iPad minis from the hotel and headed back to the riverfront. I settled in at the Foreign Correspondents Club while Ren opted for a massage.
We met up with friends at the Foreign Correspondents Club around 5pm (happy hour) and soaked up the early evening atmosphere with Angkor beers and a variety of cocktails. We dined at 7.30pm at Khmer Saravan (the same place we’d had lunch). I had
chicken amok while Ren had a banana flower salad. It was fantastic. We slowly made our way back to the hotel, picked up our laundry and had a reasonably
early night (10.30pm). It had been an intense introduction to Cambodia, and tomorrow we were leaving Phnom Penh and starting our northward journey to Battambang.
SHE SAID... We woke feeling much better and refreshed on our third morning in
Phnom Penh, but at 3:30am! I forced myself to go back to sleep until 6am. We wrote up travel notes until breakfast which we had at a cafe on the corner of our hotel's laneway. My omelette was delicious, but the toast was made from that slightly sweet Asian bread which was a little weird with an omelette. A chilled pineapple shake was a nice change from a morning coffee.
Our third day in Phnom Penh was a pretty morbid and harsh day. We had to face the darker side of Cambodian history – the rule of the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979, when around two million people (about a fifth of the country’s population) were killed. Some were murdered, and many more died of starvation and disease. The genocide of the Khmer Rouge has been described as the worst in the world since Nazi Germany.
Pol Pot declared 1975 as ‘Year
Zero’, and began the process of turning Cambodia into a Maoist agrarian society, and all Cambodians into peasant farmers. Money was abolished and cities were abandoned when everyone was forcibly relocated to labour camps in the country to work in the rice fields. The Khmer Rouge’s level of paranoia was high and thousands were tortured and executed. There was also mass ethnic cleansing going on, where most people with Vietnamese, Chinese and Cham ancestry were killed. Their suspicion of educated minds meant death to multiple generations of educated Cambodians. Ironically, the top ranking Khmer Rouge officials were all highly educated. Their modus operandi was to control people through mass applications of a multitude of dehumanising practices in order to stamp out all individuality, creativity and any human sense of love, compassion or dignity.
The group met at 8:30am and caught a minibus to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (S21). It's estimated that more than 17,000 people were held and tortured here by the Khmer Rouge. I felt really sick and my skin went all clammy as soon as we entered the first room. Two members of the group decided to sit out the rest of the tour after this
first room. I had wondered how the younger members of the group would cope with the museum, but it was the oldest two group members who found this hardest. In hindsight I think I found going through the museum harder because I knew it used to be a primary school, and the ordinary-ness of things like old play equipment that had been converted into gallows made the evilness of it so much more unbearable. This wasn’t at all helped by the fact that I had lyrics of an old Cat Stevens song running around my head in a loop…'remember the days in the old school yard, we used to laugh a lot'. 😞
Our guide Mr Rum was very good; he was extremely informative and very honest – we got an objective history of Cambodia from 1950 to 1980. There was no sanitised commentary as we often get at these places. He had no respect for the soft stance taken against old Khmer Rouge officials, who even went on to be ministers in the current government. He was the first Cambodian we'd met who was critical of the King (who had just died) and the Royal Family's role in
Cambodia over the last 70 years. He was a child of six when the war started, so he and his siblings were sent to children's homes where they had to work in the fields (and from where the regime periodically recruited child soldiers). Mr Rum was only old enough to be put on scarecrow duty, and even though that may sound easy enough – ten hours of standing in the sun shooing birds at age six, with only one small meal of rice porridge a day, is pretty horrendous. He lost his father and five of his eight siblings in a four year period.
The Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records, and the black and white mug shots of the victims now fill the hallways of one of the buildings. Men, women, women with babies, elderly accepting eyes and young petrified eyes. Some expressions were neutral, some were hopeful with tentative smiles, others seemed to know exactly what horror lay ahead. All the women had the same asexual Beatles-style haircut forced upon them.
The massive halls of this school had been divided into bigger rooms for the VIP prisoners, and crudely bricked up into tiny cells for the others.
They had been poignantly left with empty iron bed frames, and blood stains on the wall. Of the 17,000+ people who entered this god forsaken place, it is thought that only a handful of people survived. The rest of them either died there while being tortured or met their gruesome death in the killing fields of Choeung Ek, just outside of town where we were headed next. We met one of the survivors who now makes a living by selling his story to tourists. I found his age particularly uncomfortable, as he was the exact age as my mum. When we travel I often reflect on what might have been if I had been born in that country, and in this case, the reflection was a chilling one.
We then caught a mini bus to the Choeung Ek Memorial (the Killing Fields), which is about 20 minutes out of town. This was the execution ground for the torture victims of Tuol Sleng we had just visited. There were many mass graves here which were exhumed in 1980, but even after all this time, heavy rains and wind keep bringing bits of clothing, bones and teeth to the surface. The
maintenance staff collect this ever-surfacing evidence of brutality and put it in the white stupa that serves as a memorial. Mr Rum guided us over the fields and every now and again would point out a newly surfacing bone or piece of clothing at our feet!
The stupa contains exhumed human skulls arranged by age and gender. Surprisingly, tourists are allowed to walk into the stupa. Some of the skulls bore the evidence of being bludgeoned to death to save bullets. Victims were usually asked to dig their own graves, then commanded to kneel on the edge of the large pits and were bludgeoned from behind with the handle of a pick axe or any other heavy blunt object, before being pushed into the grave. The women were routinely raped by the guards before being killed, guards who have since been pardoned ‘because they were merely following orders’.
There is a ‘killing tree’, against which guards would swing children by their legs and crack their heads against the tree, often in front of mothers and other siblings. The tree now bears a large collection of colourful bracelets that have been pinned to the tree by visitors. The ‘magic
tree’ was used to house speakers that played nationalistic anthems to drown out the screams and horror. It looks like just another tree in the field, but is still undeniably tainted in its mercilessness role in the brutality. My brain struggled to deal with all this unfathomable cruelty, and went into hiding whenever I tried to evaluate the situation. I wouldn't have been able to get through the day if I had stopped to think of the lives of the people behind each skull in the stupa.
I knew I was going to find the Killing Fields and Toul Sleng Museum hard – I had hardly coped with the War Museum in Saigon, and I had been warned that this was far more raw and brutal. When we walked into the memorial stupa at the Killing Fields, I had an overwhelming feeling that we shouldn't be there. It didn’t help that some too-cool-for-school guy with too much hair product was making his girlfriend do fashion magazine style poses in front of a pile of beaten-in skulls. Seriously people! Have some respect.
Andrew and I had debated if it was disrespectful to turn a place of murder and burial
into a tourist venture, and we decided that it is important that the world sees what happened; however, seeing the flippant attitude with which people strolled through the place, casually taking photos of the murdered and then trotting over to the ice cream stall – I’m now not sure of my argument anymore. Tourism can be a very bizarre thing.
I could have chosen not to go, but I think it is important to acknowledge what happened, and as hard as it was, I think it gave me a better insight into what a struggle the people of Cambodia have gone through, and continue to go through.
The day left me with a few big realisations. As much as I question over and over again how one human being can be ordered to do unspeakably cruel things to another, I know that there is enough evidence to show that given the right (or wrong) circumstances we would all be capable of untold crimes. The difference is we have the luxury of not having found ourselves in that position. I would like to think I wasn’t capable of this kind of horror, but chances are, we all are.
But Cambodia’s problems didn’t just start with the Khmer Rouge in 1975. In 1973 the US bombed a vast part of rural Cambodia, virtually paralysing the country. This is thought to have been a critical factor in bringing the Khmer Rouge to power. Until the wars of the past are acknowledged for what they are, how can we ever hope to change our thinking about wars of the present and the future?
We talk about atrocities in faraway places and look at war memorabilia in museums and are able to feel removed from those past times of horror. But here there’s just no getting away from the fact that this wasn’t that long ago. These two sites are a prime example of the fact that humans are incapable of learning from the past, and will time and time again make decisions to kill and torture in the name of country or religion or (very ironically) peace. But really it’s all a glorified cover for the true reason – manipulation for money and power. No matter how you dress it up, war is nothing more than planned and organised murder.
Through the war and revolution, what the people went
through here was absolute hard core suffering. And even now, for most Cambodians it’s still a hard road to have the basics of life. To put all this into perspective though, I read somewhere that in the 1960s Cambodia was one of the most stable countries in Asia. I suppose there are just no guarantees in life.
We drove back to Phnom Penh and had lunch at Khmer Saravan on Sisowath Quay. Andrew and I shared dishes of fried spring rolls, stir fried morning glory with garlic, and
prahok ktiss (minced pork with fish paste, coconut milk, roasted peanuts and chilli) served with fresh carrots, beans, cucumber, cabbage, baby eggplant and lime. It was delicious, and a very welcome meal after the horribleness of the morning.
Prahok is very funky smelling but very tasty fermented fish paste used to flavour many Cambodian dishes.
That afternoon we just wanted to chill out, so I went off to get a foot and neck massage while Andrew settled into the Foreign Correspondent’s Club (FCC) to do some blog writing with an Angkor beer at his side. My massage was superb! When I joined Andrew an hour later I was very relaxed
and ready for a drink. I had a smoothie called a Camboffee – amaretto, kahlua, banana and ice cream – so yum! Kim and Lee joined us later and Kim and I started working our way through the cocktail list...frozen mojitos, lychee martinis and a cucumbertini later and we were very merry. Nigel from the group had joined us, and we decided to go back to Khmer Saravan for dinner. We shared a
chicken amok (chicken seasoned with lemongrass paste, coconut and chilli, and steamed in banana leaf) and a banana flower salad, washed down with a beer for Andrew and a coconut shake for me. It was all as delicious as lunch had been. We wobbled back to the hotel, picked up our laundry and pre-ordered breakfast for an early bus trip the next day.
I’m sorry this isn’t the most uplifting of blogs. Reading back on what I’ve written, I realise how heavy it is – sorry. However, I would feel very bogus writing a post on Phnom Penh and not addressing the unpleasant and unpalatable topics too.
It has been a sombre start to the trip, and all of this really brought home for me
what an uphill battle the Cambodian people have faced since the war, and will continue to face for a while yet. It also makes me appreciate the constant smiles, friendliness and good nature of the locals so much more.
It wasn’t all sadness and introspection, though –we’ve had some fantastic meals, and catching up with Kim and Lee over many drinks has been tremendous fun. It is brilliant to be travelling with them again! As un-local as the FCC is, I have really really enjoyed having afternoon drinks in this beautiful colonial styled drinking hole. 😊
Well, we are leaving Phnom Penh for now, and I’m already looking forward to coming back for a few more days at the end of the trip.
See you in Battambang in a few days!
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The Travel Camel
Shane Dallas
Seriously, what is wrong with some people
I've been to "dark tourism" places in both Rwanda and Poland, but I never saw anyone be disrespectful in terms of laughing or other inappropriate behaviour. What was going on with the group you were with?