I don't think you can spend a day in Cambodia without encountering the wounds left behind by the three-year reign of the Khmer-Rouge, whether you notice it or not. It's even more pronounced now that I'm in Laos, and I can compare the easygoing openness of the Laotians with the reserve of the Cambodians. The Cambodians I met were all extraordinarily warm, friendly, giving people, but you don't have to dig too deeply to hear about their trauma.
Two examples. The first week I was there, a boat racing festival was held which brought a million Cambodians from the countryside into the capital of Phnom Penh. They have fireworks every night for four nights, and pedestrians pack Sihanouk Road, one of the main streets in the city. Conveniently enough, I happened to sit next to a Cambodian who taught English for a living, and got to hear much of his life story. He's in his mid-30s, so he lived through the Khmer-Rouge as a child, and he told me much of his life story in reverse, starting with his recent divorce and going backwards. He didn't show much emotion throughout -- not when he talked about his wife leaving him, or about the difficulties of dating at his age in Cambodia. But when he spoke about working in the fields under the Khmer-Rouge, his eyes filled with tears.
I went to the Cheoung-Elk fields, the infamous "killing fields," with a Cambodian guide. The fields are a mind-wrenchingly disassociative experience. They're beautiful. All the buildings were long ago torn down, and now the fields are lushly green and peaceful. It's quiet and serene, and as you walk along the path, you occasionally see slight depressions in the ground with a string tracing the perimeter. It's easy to miss what they are if you don't notice the small signs in the corner that read, "Please don't walk on the mass graves."
As we walked through the fields, my guide told me his story, in a soft voice and with a nervous smile. He was about five when the Khmer Rouge came to power. He was taken from his parents and had to work in the fields. The Khmer Rouge set impossible quotas for the rice production, and the penalties for missing them were severe, so what people would do would be to lie about how much rice they produced and give most of their harvest to the government to sell to the Chinese. If they had actually produced what they said, they would have enough left over for themselves, but of course they couldn't, so most people starved. My guide's brother, who was nine years old, worked day and night to try and produce enough rice. He died during that time, not because anybody shot him. He simply worked himself to death.
I also went to the Tuol Sleng prison, but didn't ask the guide to go with me, and I'm glad I didn't. The killing fields were hard enough. Tuol Sleng wasn't dissociative at all - it was the most vividly horrible place I've ever been to. It's a former high school turned into a prison cum torture center. There are three buildings placed perpendicular to each other to form the school courtyard. The buildings have been left exactly as they were found when the Khmer Rouge fell and the prison was liberated. Coils of barbed wire cover is everywhere. The torture chambers on the first floor, former classrooms with institutional tile floors, still have the wrought iron beds that prisoners were bound to, with the shackles still attached and blood stains on the floor. They have pictures of the bodies that they found there, still chained to the beds. The only thing that they changed was to take the bodies away. Of 17,000 prisoners that passed through Tuol Sleng, 12 survived.
I'm starting to understand the reaction many Cambodians have when I asked them about the movie "The Killing Fields" (which I watched on the plane over, and highly recommend). They generally say that it only begins to capture what actually went on.
My colleague Ben Magarik has a great blog where he captures his observations of Cambodia and politics. Here's an interesting post comparing the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda.
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