Hey there Reader,
I don’t usually put disclaimers here, but this time around it’s probably necessary. I grappled with the decision to include a post regarding the Cambodian Genocide of the 1970s and ultimately decided to put it in. While it deviates from the usual lighthearted tone of the blog, I felt it was both important in its own right as well as an integral part of understanding the modern-day culture throughout the country (and the next four weeks of my travels).
Much has been written about these events and this is by no means a comprehensive look. I’ve simply tried to take my experience of the day, keep it within the confines of a narrative, and share it with my readership as best I can. And some of you, who have been looking for a break from the third-person writing might enjoy the shift in this post to second-person (though I think you’d be hard-pressed to truly ‘enjoy’ its content).
Simply put: It gets a bit graphic, so if you want to skip this one, feel free.
* * *
“You hungry?” Matt asks. He’s talking to Susan, the only other person in the room.
“Yeah, I could eat. What were you thinking?” She’s a short young woman, but when she speaks, it’s with authority. This likely comes from the fact that she’s spent a few years doing biological research. Working in research, becoming an expert in a field usually builds that sense of confidence. She’s based in this side of the globe, in South Korea (though she’s not a citizen, her Korean descent helps her get around easier). An American West-coaster through and through, she’s spending a month in Cambodia and trying to see it all, though her vacation is nearing its end. She leaves for Battambang, a city in the northwest, tomorrow from the capital, Phnom Penh, where they both are now.
Matt’s eyes roll up and look at–but don’t see–the bunk beds of the Envoy Hostel dorm. “I… kinda wanna try some Cambodian food for dinner. You’ve been here awhile, right? What’s good?”
“Uchhh,” she sounds disgusted. “Cambodian food is terrible. Okay, okay,” she backpedals a bit, “not terrible, but it’s just like, crappier versions of Thai food, or Vietnamese food, or of Chinese food. It’s like, get a cuisine of your own.”
He fixes her with a look for a second. Matt had only landed in Cambodia yesterday, but even he understands how galling her remark is.
* * *
Matt had stepped out of the Phnom Penh airport seconds ago and now breathes in the fresh air of this new land. The airport’s a bit out of the main city, so it still carries the smells of nature, juxtaposed to the smoggy air of Ho Chi Minh City that he’s left behind. It’s a certainty that future generations will have more miraculous means of travel, but for now, it’s always invigorating getting into a metal tube with seats and wings in one country and an hour later walking out of the airplane in another.
One of the handful of greeters at Arrivals is holding a ‘Matt Schiller’ sign. A cute touch. The hostel had sent the young driver named Sopheap, a crimson ascot tied around his neck in a strange twist of fashion sense for a tuk-tuk driver. Matt pays him with US dollars, crisp from the airport’s ATM. It seems that while Cambodia possesses a currency of its own (the riel, at approximately 4,000 riel to 1 USD), literally everyone prefers to use American money. And every bill is crisp and new!
Origami paradise. A man could get used to this.
When the locals are asked why they feel this way about the US bills, the answer is that they have a general lack of faith in their government. Nothing overblown, but the system is so new and the population so youth-heavy, there exists a lack of reverence for pretty much everything associated with older institutions.
For those not aware, Cambodia suffered a genocide in the late 1970’s. While America was dealing with Vietnam vets returning home with PTSD (at the time called ‘shell shock’) and domestic epidemics of disco fever, Cambodia was gripped in one of the most horrific chapters of human history. The country was wracked by political and social upheaval, as much of the Indochina region was at this time, following Europe’s retreat from the area. And from the resulting power struggle the Khmer Rouge party rose to prominence.
Led by Pol Pot and his supporters, the party’s communist ideology was rooted in the fact that the country had been occupied and ruled by the French for decades and many Cambodians felt their heritage had been cast aside. The Khmer Rouge was able to play on these feelings and seize control of the government on the platform of bringing Cambodia back to its glorified heyday. A time when ancient monuments like Angkor Wat were constructed.
The regime started to put its plan into action when they took power in 1975, first by evacuating the major cities and moving everyone into rural communes. People who had never seen a farm in their life were forced into labor camps and the unruly and ‘unclean’ were separated out for ‘re-education’.
The list of ‘unclean’ was exhaustive, including ethnically Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indian–really any ethnicity other than the ‘pure’ Cambodian people (a hard line to make in a country of only 8 million). Further, anyone who had gone to college, had traveled outside the country, was able to speak another language, held views different from the party, was a member of a religious organization, or even publicly objected to any of the Khmer Rouge’s brutal tactics was targeted and brought in for the ‘re-education’. This route invariably entailed being detained and tortured for days and weeks, capped with a midnight trip to a remote location in the countryside.
There were many such locations throughout Cambodia, accurately named ‘killing fields’. Here, instead of wasting precious ammunition, the Khmer Rouge’s brainwashed, cruel, or simply intimidated soldiers forced emaciated prisoners to dig their own mass graves before murdering them with clubs, machetes, poison gas, or the like.
The genocide lasted a relatively brief three years before the Vietnamese army broke in and stopped the Khmer Rouge’s reign of violence. The final death toll is difficult to tally properly, however, since records are not complete and many of the mass graves remain unmarked. Further, many subcultures and ways of life were completely wiped out, with few-to-no witnesses to recall who and what was destroyed. The most credible estimates vary somewhere between one and three million lives lost. Anthropologists suspect that they haven’t even found all of the killing fields.
It is to one of these killing fields that Matt makes his way on the morning of his second day in Cambodia. Among the most heavily trafficked of the Cambodian Genocide ‘museums’, Choeung Ek Genocidal Center lies ten miles south of Phnom Penh. Sopheap’s tuk-tuk cruises along city streets that bleed into village-like communities. The roads here are all under construction as the city’s population expands and grows.
The wind rushing by, the sparsening of houses and homes, and the silence of the driver allows a tourist to prepare for what’s to come.
At the Center itself, you rent a pair of headphones and a digital walkman. It’s a guided tour of the site, in lieu of more intrusive placards, explaining what happened where. And it’s necessary to have something to explain the significance, because all that remains are well-kept walkways and fields of flowers, somber gazebos and benches, a small stream that encircles the whole of the complex, and in the center, a two-hundred-foot high stupa painted in white and decorated with gold figures along its slanted roofs.
And that’s the order that the walkman takes its visitors. You find the first marker, a small white sign empty save for an image of headphones with a ‘1’ beneath it, and click play on the first track. In near complete silence, but for the narration piping into your ears and weeping of other visitors, you proceed along the paths and audio tracks up to and around the field. There are rolling, sloping fields here. They used to be barns and storage sheds, but were built up and repurposed by the Khmer Rouge for systematic slaughter. Thousands killed on this site alone.
Where you now walk in a slow stupor, men, women, and children were forced to fill out their own paperwork before being herded into yet other rooms. A small plot of land, no different from the rest, is all that remains where once stood a building of concrete and wood wherein men bashed in the heads of other men. When the regime fell and locals stumbled upon the complex, the buildings were torn down in rage and sorrow and shame.
The tour points out the sugarcane trees growing off to the side at the beginning of the marshland all around. It invites you to go and feel the sharp ridges along the strong, thick stalks that loom over you. Stalks just like the one under your hand were ripped down to slice throats when arms got too tired for bludgeoning.
Documents describe the killing that would go on for hours, almost always at night. From sunset to sunrise, truckloads of chained, malnourished prisoners were brought in under the eyes of guards. The moaning, the screaming, the cries of those being butchered were drowned out by a speaker system strung up in the trees between buildings. It belted patriotic songs and lively tunes to cover the sounds of murder. To keep prisoners ignorant of their fates and complacent as much as for the morale of the soldiers.
You pause the recording for a minute and sit on a bench in a weathered stone gazebo to gather your thoughts. All of that brutality? Here? Butterflies flap over yellow flowers. Branches heavy with broad leaves sway in the breeze, offering ample shade from the rapidly approaching noon heat. Ants march around pebbles and twigs. A group of them swarms over a dead beetle, bringing small portions of its corpse back the way they came.
In the middle of the main field teenage employees rake stray leaves off the grass. They laugh and pal around as you resume the audio. It asks that if you find anything of note on the ground to turn it in to them. It doesn’t mean lost cell phones or wallets, however, but newly surfaced evidence of the mass graves beneath your feet. It’s not uncommon to find scraps of clothing, bones, or teeth peeking out from the dirt after a rain or even just over time as the undiscovered, unnamed, unexhumed bodies rot below you.
Already teams have found dozens of pits here, full of the Khmer Rouge’s victims. As you walk from the gazebo to the bridge by the stream (careful to watch where you step on the dried mud), the land to either side of you is vaguely cordoned off. Behind the fabric ropes grass grows in erratic dunes. These are the locations of the known graves, the bodies removed for study and proper burial, leaving ominous scoops in the once-farmland. Some are thirty feet wide and a quarter as deep.
You hurry past the web of craters and take a seat again, this time on the bridge. It’s hard finding a place to sit, since many of the other visitors are already sitting here too, equally grateful for the relief. It’s exhausting and disorienting to hear the graceful narrative talk of the too-recent barbarism as you walk through the glade. Further down the bridge a couple sits, holding hands and staring out into the marshlands just now visible through the line of trees. Closer to you, a young woman sits and cries. You don’t comfort her, you don’t even make eye contact with anyone else. This isn’t a place for that.
“Okay! Hello! Hey!” a local man calls from the other side of the fence. “Money? Dollars? Okay! Hey!” He’s dirty and stares around wildly, calling to you and everyone who passes by. “Money? Sir? Sir? Sir? Madame? Money?” No one pays attention to him longer than to ascertain what he’s doing. “Please? Please? Okay! Hello! Hey!” No one has any pity left for him.
To better ignore the intruder, you turn up the volume on the headset. It’s come to the part where survivors are giving their personal accounts. A woman’s voice quavers in Khmer, the local language, before the sound fades down and another woman’s voice comes over the first. This one translates for you. The voice tells the story of a woman beaten, raped, and left for dead after one guard got jealous of another for keeping her as an errand girl. She manages to escape the camp, then over the border, and has been living in America for the past thirty years or so. She refuses to set foot on this continent again.
A man’s voice, in English though heavily accented, tells his own story. A boy and his parents are brought from a city to a farm commune. His father is taken and never seen again before they even arrive. He and the others of his fields are worked to fill increasingly demanding yield quotas. Others are taken. New, gaunt faces come to replace the old ones. His mother and sister are relocated elsewhere. When the boy doesn’t have enough food or hope to go on, he’s taken to a detainment facility and is crammed into a room barely large enough for three men to lie down. He squats in chains, sharing the room with four grown men. And the rats, insects, and snakes that come in to avoid the rain. When the boy is selected for relocation (almost certain execution), one of his cellmates begs a guard to be the one who’s taken instead. “He’s too young,” the man pleads over and over, “He’s just a boy.” The man gets his wish and is never seen again. This gives the boy hope again, maybe he can find his mother and his sister? He escapes to Thailand, then America. He’s returned to Cambodia dozens of times, but has never found his family.
The stories keep coming. You cry with the victims who can share their accounts and for the countless whose much shorter stories will never be told.
The audio tour asks you to keep moving and you get up, realizing you’ve been near-motionless on the stone bench for a half hour. You loop back the way you came, passing more visitors who’re just coming from the graves and fields section, unaware of the first-hand horrors they’re in store for. You shake your head and scrub your cheeks with the back of your hand.
You’re on the fields again, but by now you’ve almost made it all the way around. Birds peck through the wild grass, pause, and fix you with a round stare. Most wing off into the woods, but some hop over to rest near one of the rectangular huts built over dirt plots not much bigger than a ping pong table. Colorful Cambodian bills decay in the dirt, offerings from those who’ve come before.
The track indicated by the numbered sign on one such hut directs your attention to a broad-trunked tree growing nearby covered in hundreds of ribbons that are pinned into the bark. This is one of the many Chankiri Trees across the county. It means ‘Killing Tree’. They were used as an anvil against which babies that were brought here had their heads smashed. The corpses of mothers and their children were tossed into nearby graves, above which the dirt plots now stand. The infants weren’t killed as a means of ethnic purification, but as a matter of practicality: the Khmer Rouge regime didn’t want any orphans of murdered citizens to rise up in the years following their ‘glorious’ rise to power.
You want to throw up and to leave, but the tour isn’t finished. You steel yourself on the final group of benches in the shadow of the stupa that you passed when you first started. A stupa is a Buddhist structure containing sacred relics or remnants, often decorated ornately, but not as garishly as many other temples in the region.
There is no audio for the interior of the stupa, which is only about fifteen feet to each side of the square when you’re inside, but the last two tracks explain its purpose. The stupa contains the skulls, bones, clothing, and much of the remains of what was found at this site. It’s all been cataloged, studied, and tagged to let you know how the person died. Red for blunt trauma, blue for bullets, yellow for machetes, separated by gender and age group.
You take a breath, slip off your shoes, and step inside. There isn’t room for more than a few people at a time, so you share this experience with those around you. A man’s voice in an American accent whisper words of awe and tragedy to his friend. A Latina woman is wracked by sobs before lurching out to the steps outside.
Skulls stacked on skulls grin at you from behind glass panes. Many have no associated jawbones, so they just stare, bucktoothed. Those with small red stickers have holes where bone crumbles around them. The smaller ones, those of children and infants have jagged, perpendicular fissures running the length of them where the fontanels, the plates of bone that make up the cranium, hadn’t had the years to finish fusing together.
You leave and go to drop off the headphones and walkman at the front desk, scrubbing your hands on your sides as if to wash yourself of this place. The sun in the parking lot is hot and it warms fingers you didn’t realize had gone cold.
“You want to shoot guns?” Sopheap asks.
Matt turns and eyes the smiling young man for a second. “No, I’m fine.” He’d been told by other travelers about the shooting range ‘tourist attraction’ that’s been set up next to the killing field.
“You sure? AK-47? Machine gun? Grenades?” He waggles his eyebrows.
“No,” Matt’s firm. “I’m not…in the mood to shoot guns. Just take me back to the hostel, please.”
Sopheap looks like he’s about to say more, but thinks better of it. “Okay, yes.”
As they rumble down the dusty road that leads back to the main street, Matt watches food stalls and the families who run them preparing, manning their posts, or alternatively, watching soap operas on TV. As a grey-haired old woman disappears from view around a corner, Matt realizes it’s the first local he’s seen that looks older than forty-five or so.
* * *
Susan begins to wilt under Matt’s stare. “You realize,” he says, “that like everyone who knew how to cook traditional food or really knew about the cultural heritage here is probably dead, right?”
“Oh of course, yeah. I’m just saying.”
“K, whatever. I went to this noodle place last night and they do some pretty spectacular Chinese pulled noodles for two dollars for a big bowl.”
And he’s pretty sure they sell beer, too. He’s going to want to drink tonight.
So this was a pretty downer post, so have a picture of a puppy in a box that I sat next to on my bus ride out of Phnom Penh