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It has been relatively easy and pleasant to write most of our blogs covering our travels since 2010 but this one has proved the hardest yet due to its main subject matter. Most of the places and events I write and chat about are happy, but I am afraid that this one is quite sad and distressing, however it is a part of our travels so must become part of our journal so here goes.
We arrived in
Phnom Penh, Cambodia after a short flight from Laos - we already had our Visas issued in the UK so thought it would be a mere formality to get through immigration. We went to two different desks and whilst I was photographed and had my fingers prints taken, Paul did not. They asked him for a copy of his Visa which we had but this was with our main luggage. So they said he had to take out the one that had been issued and glued into his passport in London. As you can imagine this was not easy to do and we are now a little concerned that he will not get out of the country as
his passport is now defaced. There appears to be no consistency with the immigration procedure on entering Cambodia as others in our group found out as well. They appear to just choose random visitors to finger print, photograph and/or request copies of Visa’s - quite strange but I suppose that’s their way...........
Phnom Penh, the capital of the
Kingdom of Cambodia, is built around four river arms formed by a sharp curve in the Mekong River near the junctions of the Bassac and the Tonle Sap tributaries. The city today has wide boulevards with a blend of oriental and colonial architecture, but reminders of a very troubled past were also evident. After years of isolation, the war ravaged nation was reunited under the monarchy in 1993 and has since seen rapid rebuilding from decades of civil war. The Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) is the major ruling party in Cambodia whist the King of Cambodia is the head of State, with limited power to that of a symbolic figurehead. The King of Cambodia is an elected monarch, making Cambodia one of the few elected monarchies in the world. He is elected by a Throne Council and
our guide did explain this to us but it was a little confusing, the elected King also has to be single which seems a bit strange. The population is approximately 14 million, and the majority (90%!)(MISSING) of the population is Khmer. The remaining 10%!a(MISSING)re comprised of Cham (Khmer Muslims), minority Hill Tribes, Chinese and Vietnamese. The official religion is in the country is Theravada Buddhism, which is practiced by approximately 95%!o(MISSING)f the Cambodian population.
We did finally got through immigration and were greeted by our new guide for Phnom Penh called Lucky - not his real name but this was rather difficult to pronounce. In any event, he said his mother called him Lucky because to her he was - she had lost three sons before he was born in what is known as the Cambodian Genocide, the period of the Khmer Rouge. Lucky said that they had lost 11 members of their family in the,
three years, eight months, and twenty days, of the Khmer Rouge’s and Pol Pot’s deadly reign over Cambodia. Lucky was young, probably in his twenties but old in mind, he was still studying as well
as acting as a tour guide, he had also been a Buddhist monk for four years, where he learnt his excellent English.
Lucky asked our group what we knew about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge and although we had all heard of him we did not know much about the recent history. We did not know that his real name was Saloth Sar but he gave himself the name
Pol Pot which is an abbreviation for ‘Political Potential’! We also did not know that the Vietnam War extended into Cambodia, giving rise to the Khmer Rouge which took the capital city of Phnom Penh in 1975. Immediately after the fall of the city the Khmer Rouge began to implement their concept of ‘Year Zero’ and ordered the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh and all other recently captured major towns and cities. Those leaving were told that the evacuation was due to the threat of severe American bombing and it would last for no more than a few days, it was to be
three years, eight months, and twenty days before so few of them did finally return. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had
been evacuating captured urban areas for many years driving people into the countryside to work in the fields, but the evacuation of Phnom Penh was unique due to its massive scale.
An estimated 1.7 million Cambodians (25%!o(MISSING)f the population) and many thousands of foreigners were starved to death, tortured, or killed, during this reign of terror. It is estimated that out of 60,000 Buddhist monks only 1,000 survived and 95%!o(MISSING)f their temples were destroyed. In such a very short time frame, the Khmer Rouge wiped out the epicenter of Cambodian culture. The regime was finally toppled with the invasion of Cambodia by its former ally, Vietnam who occupied the country over the next decade.
It was lunch time so we were dropped off and walked through the frenetic, hot and dusty streets to a local restaurant, we were looking forward to a cool drink and a little aircon but ‘alas’ there was a
power cut but Lucky happily tried to fan us all with the cardboard menus - power was restored about 15 minutes later much to everyone’s relief. The owner said that sometimes
it can be off for hours which is not much fun when you are trying to run a restaurant but the city cannot cope with the huge power demands as its population increases. The meal was good in fact very tasty with very different flavours to what we had been experiencing in Laos.
After lunch we were thrown straight into the country’s recent troubled past with a visit in the middle of the city to the
Tuol Sleng Museum, known as the Museum of Genocidal Crimes which serves as a testament to the crimes of the Khmer Rouge in the mid seventies. The former Tuol Svay Prey High School was turned into a detention and torture centre known as Security Prison 21 (S-21) by Pol Pot’s security forces (Khmer Rouge). It soon became the largest centre of detention and torture in the country and most of the people held there were taken to the
Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Today the building houses paintings and photographs of many of the victims. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge leaders were meticulous in keeping records of their barbarism. Each prisoner who passed through S-21 was photographed, sometimes
before and after torture. We were shown around the crude cells built in the classrooms of the former school and the torture devices used to extract confessions. We had been warned before our visit that the Museum may be confronting and upsetting and it was with many of us having to walk outside for some fresh air. Our guide, Lucky was so passionate about this period, which is not surprising due to his own family tragedy but he said there are so many tragic stories that will never be told. As the Khmer Rouge ‘revolution’ reached ever greater heights of insanity, it began devouring its own. Generations of torturers and executioners who worked in the prison were in turn killed by others who took their places.
When the Vietnamese army liberated Phnom Penh in early 1979 and the S-21 prison staff fled there were only a handful of survivors amongst them Chum Mey, Vann Nath, Bou Meng and Chim Math, the only woman. All were kept alive because they had skills their captors judged to be useful. Vann Nath had trained as an artist and was put to work painting pictures of Pol Pot, many
of his paintings depicting events he witnessed in Tuol Sleng were on display in the museum when we visited. Bou Meng, whose wife was killed in the prison, was also an artist.
Chum Mey was kept alive because of his skills in repairing machinery. Fourteen others had been tortured to death as Vietnamese forces were closing in on the city. Photographs of their gruesome deaths were on display in the rooms where their decomposing corpses were found at the time. They were buried in separate graves in the courtyard directly in front of the prison, a stark reminder of what went on here.
All in our group found the visit to Tuol Sleng to be a profoundly depressing experience. The setting, left as it was found in 1979 made it seem even more horrific. A school building devoid of children, the classrooms now silent and just containing rusty iron beds with instruments of torture and on the walls photographs taken by the Vietnamese of what they found in each of these rooms when they entered the city. The playground where children used to play now containing fourteen white stone graves of the last people to
die. Worst of all lining the walls from floor to ceiling of many of the classrooms were black and white photographs of those that were tortured and died.
The museum is known for having housed the "skull map", a huge map of Cambodia composed of 300 skulls and other bones found by the Vietnamese during their occupation of Cambodia, to serve as a reminder of what happened at the prison. The map was dismantled in 2002, but the skulls of some victims were still on display on shelves in the museum. The Museum and the Choeung Ek Memorial (The Killing Fields), is included as a point of interest for those visiting Cambodia. Despite the disturbing images it contains, the museum is visited by large parties of Cambodian school children. Some believe that ghosts of the victims continues to haunt the place.
When we finished the tour of the buildings we met
Chum Mey, one of the known survivors who was promoting a book he has written called,
Survivor, which was being sold for $10, we did not buy the book but donated to his cause, the book outlined his sad story:
He survived two years of torture and fear in this Khmer Rouge death camp, sustained by thoughts of his pregnant wife and unborn child - his life only spared because of his high level of competence in machine repairing. He was marched at gunpoint into the provinces by his fleeing Khmer Rouge jailers following the Vietnamese invasion, he had a chance encounter with his wife and the young son who was born a few weeks after he was sent to the infamous Tuol Sleng prison in early 1977. For two days they travelled together to an isolated hamlet with a group of other prisoners. On the second evening, as the family rested beside a pagoda, the guards ordered them to walk into a rice field before suddenly opening fire with their AK-47 assault rifles. He said, ‘First they shot my wife, who was marching in front with the other women," he said. “She screamed to me, 'Please run, they are killing me now'. I heard my son crying and then they fired again, killing him. When I sleep, I still see their faces, and every day I still think of them". Lucky told us that he comes to Tuol Sleng
everyday to share his pain and experiences with anyone who wants to listen and his face was etched with such a terrible sadness. A final quotation from him,
"I come every day to tell the world the truth about the Tuol Sleng prison... so that none of these crimes are ever repeated anywhere in the world." For more than three decades he has carried the physical and emotional scars inflicted on him by the Khmer Rouge.
It was hard to move on from there but Lucky our guide said that we must and that you could not expect to visit Phnom Penh without seeing what went on in his city such a short time ago - such recent history.
The next day we visited the
Royal Palace, built in 1866 on the riverside by the French and occupied ever since then by the royal family with a period of absence during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. The first thing we noticed was this very unusual looking tree which according to the wooden name plaque was
Pentacme Siamensis. Its large pink flowers protruded off the trunk of the tree rather than off the
ends of branches and although the flowers were pretty the tree also looked strange at the same time. The palace was spectacular with very oriental looking architecture set within peacefully and serene gardens it had a central thin tower with a four sided face on the spires, a little strange, it felt like you were being
watched from all sides! We could not go in but could view through the windows and doors as the room was being prepared for the Kymer New Year celebrations, inside a magnificent carpet was a replica of the tiles on the outside of the building. Several other similar building and pagodas were dotted around the grounds but again not all were accessible as many were occupied by the present King and his family. Two cars were parked at the bottom of the steps with royal number plates - but we did not see any ‘royalty’ emerge from the buildings. We were able to view the
Silver Pagoda which was also known as the temple of the Emerald Buddha, formerly a wooden building it had been updated in the early 1960s and its floor was covered in over 5000 silver tiles each one apparently weighing
1kg. Only a small section could be seen though as the rest was covered in carpet. It is also famous for its 90kg, solid gold Buddha made in 1907 and an emerald Buddha said to be made of baccarat crystal which we saw along with thousands of other stunning artifacts Thousands and thousands of pounds in this one small pagoda with not a lot of security around was bizzare but it was nice to linger and look particularly though because they had some very effective ‘electric fans’ which was a great escape from the heat of the day. .
We later visited the
National Museum, located next to the Royal Palace which had an immense collection of Khmer arts, bronzes, ceramics in a truly magnificent setting. We had a lovely guide who also had a sad story to tell, she was forced to leave the city when she was only 11 and sent into the countryside to work in the rice fields. She gave us an excellent introduction into the museum which was well laid out in a rectangle with an open courtyard and water garden in the centre, which had a lot of shade
from the trees and was great to sit and chill between viewing the exhibits. She said that the museum had been ransacked during the Khmer Rouge period and many of the ‘treasures’ stolen or broken and it had taken many years of restoration before it could open it doors again as a museum of importance.
We later drove a short way out of the city to the
Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, one of thousands of other such sites around the country where the Khmer Rouge practiced genocide during the late 1970s. The memorial park here has been built around the mass graves of many thousands of victims, most of whom were executed after they had been transported from the S-21 Prison in Phnom Penh. There were notices in several languages outlining the atrocities and also reminding people to remain silent as they walked around the field, but they are not really needed because there was just nothing one could say. You just needed to take a deep breath before you walked around, it’s not what you can call a tourist attraction but an introduction to a part of history that will shock and remain with you,
but at the same time if you visit Cambodia you should go and see for yourself.
Our guide Lucky walked with us around the memorial park explaining that in order to save ammunition, the executions were often carried out using poison, spades or sharpened bamboo sticks - the soldiers who carried out the executions were mostly young men or women from peasant families and most of these also ended their lives here as well. I could not write here everything he told us as I found so much of it too horrific and even writing this has been difficult. I must say that the utmost respect is given to the victims of the massacre through signs and tributes throughout the park. Large wooden fenced areas surrounding the graves were decked with little colourful bracelets that people had left as a memorial - so very moving. Although some of the graves were visible above ground, Lucky said there were many which have not yet been excavated. Bones and clothing still kept surfacing after heavy rain due to the large number of bodies still buried in shallow mass graves. Recent rains had meant this was happening on our visit
and so he asked us to watch where we were walking and he even came across some bone and teeth of the victims scattered on the surface which he reported to the guards at the entrance. A large
Commemorative Stupa filled with hundreds of skulls stacked all the way to the top of the monument stands as a memorial to all the victims of the Killing Fields.
Many Cambodians now make a living by guiding visitors through the killing fields and other genocide related sites. Many guides, like Lucky and the lady at the museum tell their own harrowing personal stories of how they or their family survived the Khmer Rouge and of course Chum Mey has written his own personal account of survival. Everywhere there are reminders and what is just as heartrending throughout Cambodia are the amputees of all age groups begging in areas where tourists congregate. The Khmer Rouge may be gone, but many of the land mines they laid are still killing and maiming and there are still more areas waiting to be cleared. Lastly, Lucky said, as to what happened to Pol Pot, ‘he fled and remained free until 1997 and died
a year later of nature causes’.
On the way back to Phnom Penh we stopped at a Russian Market for some local shopping but I think most of us just wanted to get back to the hotel, it really had been a day of sadness.
The next morning we left Phnom Penh and on the way to the airport we stopped to visit
Wat Phnom, which is a sacred Buddhist pagoda sat prominently on a small hill where it has been a central site in the city as religious sanctuary for prayers and offerings since 1373. The temple is very important during certain Khmer Public holidays, especially during Khmer New Year. A flurry of activity was going on at the foot of the building where they were erecting a giant bamboo snake as the
‘Year of the Snake’ was just days away (13/14/15 April).
For much of the last three decades, Cambodia has suffered through war, political upheaval and massive genocide but recently it has begun to revive, particularly with the large influx of visitors who come not only to see the renowned,
Angkor Wat but also now to
see other areas with the
Killing Fields being one of them - as in Europe tourist curiosity about Cambodia's genocide has become big business, let’s hope the people of the country benefit.
A short flight of 45 minutes from Phnom Penh will see us in
Siem Reap where we are looking forward to seeing the
Temples of Angkor- see you there.
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Charmian
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Your latest blog was so interesting & so haunting. Everyone knows something of the history of the regime, but it's when you hear of the facts that have actually touched a person/family as you did, it makes it more real somehow. xx