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Published: November 25th 2006
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Hello all. Seems a long time since I last blogged. Life has rather slowed down since we came to Cambodia. It was defiantly a good move to cut Vietnam short and come here. Cambodia is much nicer with much nicer people and a laid back atmosphere.
We came by bus and managed to get away without paying the bribe at the border. The bus was pretty good and the ticket person form the bus company stood up and gave us all a whole introduction to Cambodia and taught us to say thank you and hello. I thought that was very sweet as no one has bothered before. We arrived in the capital Phom Phen and managed to get 5 plus backpacks in a tuk tuk. This involved me hanging half out the whole way. We ended up in a great guest house with 3 dollar rooms. US dollar that is. The cash machines here actually give you USD; they’ve given up on the Cambodian riel.
Anyway the guest house bar looks out over a large lake. It’s a beautiful view and very tranquil for the middle of a big smelly city.
The first day here we hired a tuk
tuk with two other people and went to the Killing Fields and the genocide museum. Not nice but it has to be visited so we can learn. The Killing Fields were the Khmer Rouge (communist revolutionaries) massacred thousands and thousands of people. We visited the site of mass graves, many of which still haven’t been opened. There is a monument filled with the sculls of the victims who have been dug up. They were mostly academics who were killed here but thousands of others were too including children. The really grizzly thing is that there are still bits of clothing and bones sticking out of the ground. It feels really wrong to walk on some ones bones but its rather unavoidable in places. The whole place is shocking. The tree is marked where children were killed. They basically swung the children by the leg and smashed there brains out. All sorts of awful methods of killing were used here. The worst thing is that the people who died here had already been tortured at the interrogation center which is now the genocide museum.
From the outside the museum looks like any other secondary school. Inside it’s a very different
story. The Khmer Rouge, lead by Pol Pot tortured a stupid number of people here. Basically anyone they decided was against them or didn’t believe in communism, or just whoever they felt like killing. There are the graves of the last 14 victims that died here in the playground. Inside they are still the beds that victims were tied to and the ankle shackles that people had to wear. In each room there is also a photo of victims. These are disturbing as they are photos of corpses after they have been starved and tortured in unimaginable ways. I had to try quite hard not to throw up and even now as I write a tear comes to my eye. This is seriously heavy shit. To think that humans can do this to each other is bad enough but to know that people still do these things to each other all over the world is numbing.
Other rooms just have rows and rows of photos of the victims. These were taken by the rouge when prisoners where brought here. There are so many of them and the profiles are worse as each person has a gun to the back
of their head. Some white journalists were brought here and died at the killing fields too. Upstairs is a display with peoples stories of loved ones who went missing and then their photos where found at the center years later. That’s really tragic as many people seem to have clung to a hope that their loved ones were alive but then they went to the museum and found their photos and learned what happened to them.
The whole thing is a weird experience. The museum is very well done but is very explicit about torture techniques etc. While part of me understands that it is important for the world to know what happened another part of me wonders whether it tells too much. The museum makes the unimaginable imaginable and the inconceivable conceivable. Part of me wonders whether it is best to leave the unimaginable unimagined and whether learning about the genocide so explicitly will encourage people to move to high levels of brutality, if that’s possible. The fact that human beings can, and continue to, do these things to each other makes me stick to the stomach. Have thousands of years of civilization and war taught us nothing? Does the magnitude of human suffering around us not hint at the fact the killing hundreds of thousands of people in horrific ways AIN”T GONNA MAKE IT BETTER????? It appears not. People haven’t learnt and I don’t think they ever will. The human race is a terrible thing indeed when set loose to release its suppressed desires and animal instincts. My only hope is that the people that do visit these sights are similarly moved and that some humans at least can strive towards peace, love and tolerance.
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Helen w
non-member comment
Horror
I remember as quite a young child going to a war museum in Belgium which included loads of pictures of concntration camps, piles of dead bodies, and people who were almost dead, I have never forgotten those images, and it made me realise what humans are capable of doing to each other. It seems hard to understand and yet it seems to be in all of us. But then so is the other side of compassion, unselfishness and self sacrifice, perhaps we can't have one without the potential of the other, but I am sure we can choose which one we want to have upper most in our lives.