A Very Long Mostly Historical Entry About Cambodia

About a month and a half ago I spent two weeks in Cambodia with my friend Stef, a 23 year-old from England.  We spent the first week between Siem Reap (where Angkor Wat is located) and Phnom Penh, where the main killing fields are, as well as the former torture prison Tuol Sleng (S-21).  We spent the second week relaxing on the beach down south in Sihanoukville.

Before I can really talk about the things we saw and their significance, I have to give a bit of a historical background on the Khmer Rouge.  “Khmer” is an extremely common word in Cambodian, as it simply means “Cambodia.”  They still use this word to describe their food, language, and country in general.  It is the second word, “Rouge,” meaning “red” (obviously) that tells what the Khmer Rouge really was: a communist organization.  In and of itself, that wouldn’t necessarily be problematic.  I’m not 1950’s Hollywood, and I’m not going to expound on the evils of communism because really that wasn’t the issue.  The issue was how they tried to implement communism, namely by murdering almost all of the country’s previous government officials and their families, as well as the upper classes and intellectuals.  So that’s… not great.  The Khmer Rouge was led by Pol Pot.  Pol Pot claimed that he was inspired by the farmers of the country, by those who worked with their hands and dug in the earth.  He posited that they were the truest citizens, oppressed heavily by the government and intellectuals in large cities such as Phnom Penh.  He called for a re-ordering of the country, a supposed equalizing.  However, nearly all of the middle management-type power was given to the former farmers, most of whom had little or no experience in leading others, and even less education.  Society was indeed reordered, as the wealthy citizens in large cities were herded out in to the country.  At first many people stayed with family or friends in the country, but soon people were shipped to camps where they were ordered to build their own shacks.  The whole family lived within these sorts of homes, regardless of how many members the family had.  The able-bodied were sent to work camps, where they spent their days in slave labor, most often planting or harvesting crops.  The vast majority of the people doing these jobs had never done them before and didn’t know what they were doing.  They were fed very little, but these camps were sometimes preferable to the non-work camps for small children and the elderly, where there was often no food at all.

Within this new society, everything was supposed to be equal, and the only thing that mattered was “Angkor” which just translates to something like “the organization.”  There was no longer a true family unit.  In “When Broken Glass Floats,” a memoir by a woman named Chanrithy who grew up under the Khmer Rouge but now lives in Portland, she discusses this shift.  Children weren’t allowed to call their parents “mother” and “father” (Mak and Pa), but were ordered to instead refer to them as “comrade.”  All people were supposed to be referred to as “comrade,” regardless of age, position in society (either the old or the new), or former relationship.  Families were often torn apart, as children over the age of seven or eight were often sent to the work camps, leaving younger siblings and parents behind in other camps.  Often, one or both parents were killed.  For example, in “When Broken Glass Floats,” Chanrithy’s father was ordered to leave the family and return to the city to help out in offices.  He went willingly, and they never heard from him again.  A few weeks later, Khmer Rouge officers asked the women whose husbands had gone back to the city if they wanted to join their husbands and help out in the offices.  All the women in that group said yes except for Chanrithy’s mother, who opted to stay in the country with her children.  They later found out that everyone who had gone to the city had been taken to a field, forced to dig, and then killed and buried in the mass grave they themselves had just dug.  Her father had been dead for weeks and they’d had no idea.

In addition to the dissolution of the family, the Khmer Rouge went about systematically destroying all religion, mostly though the destruction of temples and statues of Buddah. In truly Queen-Of-Hearts-esque fashion, they most often destroyed statues of Buddah by be-heading him.  Religion was forbidden, and if there was one thing you didn’t want to do it was get caught disobeying Khmer Rouge orders.  Education was also forbidden, and any schools that were run through the camps educated children in the Khmer Rouge’s propaganda version of Cambodian history, and other basic things that they would need to work in the fields.  Anyone demonstrating that they were previously participants in academia was punished severely for being from the upper classes.  Often this demonstration of knowledge needed be nothing more than a single word spoken in a foreign language.  Chanrithy’s sister merely said “Bonjour,” to a neighbor, but another person living in the camp reported her to the camp leaders.  She wasn’t sure how they would punish her, but she was extremely frightened.  In order to convince them that she had gone insane and possibly discourage them from punishing her transgression, she shaved her head and cut her skin.  Miraculously, it worked.  Still, having to do such a thing to yourself out of fear of reprisals for saying “Hello,” is completely unimaginable to me.

The Khmer Rouge also wanted to erase everything that had come through the country before them.  To do this, they attempted to destroy historical structures, such as Angkor Wat.  Around Angkor Wat there are often headless statues.  In fact, there are probably more headless statues than ones that still have their heads.  Many of these statues were of Buddah.  Some, however, were merely statues of soldiers.  The Khmer Rouge came through and destroyed everything, pulling stones from the roof, beheading statues, and knocking down whatever they could.  This was done in an attempt to erase everything other than Angkor, to start new with Angkor and the Khmer Rouge as the only thing that people might follow, worship, and know.  And yet, Angkor Wat is still an absolutely incredibly sight to see.  To anyone reading this who might someday have a chance to go to Cambodia, GO, and see Angkor Wat. 

Small tangent to talk about Angkor Wat: it is absolutely incredible.  The main structure is set in the middle of a large field surrounded by palm trees and beautiful ponds.  The walls are all carved and etched with reliefs of many different things, from famous battles to Buddha to dancing girls.  There are a lot of different sections of the complex, and you have to take a tuk-tuk to get from one to the other.  If you ever go, one thing to know is that you should NOT hire a tuk-tuk through your hotel.  Stef and I did this, and we learned from our driver that he has to pay to rent the tuk-tuk from the company and gets paid no wage at all by them, surviving only on tips (because we paid the company directly).  Rather, walk out onto the street and find one of any number of tuk-tuk drivers.  Haggle with them and, at the same time, check out their English.  The first time I went to Cambodia our tuk-tuk driver spoke great English and he took us to a lot of places that most other people don't go because they don't know about it.  Back to Angkor Wat, though, one section that was interesting had faces carved on the sides of each tower, smiling pleasantly down at visitors.  My favorite section, however, was a bit of a hike into the trees.  The jungle had completely retaken the structure, and much of it was falling down after having been attacked not by the Khmer Rouge, but by trees.  Several trees were even growing right out of the top of the roof.  It was an incredible sight that makes you wonder whether man will ever truly destroy nature, or if nature will retake whatever we leave behind.  Tangent over, back to the Khmer Rouge.

By erasing the past, the Khmer Rouge aimed to focus all of the country’s attention on the future, which was, in their eyes, agrarian.  They left fields that had always grown yucca and other foods to fallow, and started entirely new fields.  They forced people who didn’t know how to plant properly to do the labor and had the people who knew what to do act as slave drivers, giving instructions and forcing people to carry them out.  Still, even with the agrarian focus, there was never enough food, because many of the leaders didn’t really know how or where to grow food properly.  People were starving to death left and right.  On the audio tour at the killing fields, one woman told a story of her newborn son.  She survived in the long run, but she was starving to such a degree that her body could no longer produce milk, and her son couldn’t eat.  She went to the leaders of her camp, and they refused to give her any more food.  As a result, she held her son and watched helplessly as, over a few days, he slowly starved to death in her arms.

This was far from the worst of what the Khmer Rouge did.  We visited Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which is located in what was previously S-21, a Khmer Rouge torture prison.  Built before the Khmer Rouge outlawed education in what was formerly a high school (side note: a high school converted to a prison… is that irony?  It sort of feels like irony…), the prison’s purpose was less imprisonment and more torture.  Of the thousands of people who were brought in to S-21, it is guessed that only seven people survived, five of whom were young boys.  These only survived because they were some of the last prisoners left as the Khmer Rouge’s control began to fall apart and because they were extremely lucky.  Within the prison people were held in cells that weren’t long enough to lie down or wide enough to comfortably sit.  Some rooms were larger, but these were generally used for torturing *ahem interrogating prisoners.  If parents were arrested, their children were also taken into the prison.  Most were only held there for three to four months, during which time they were tortured until they confessed to whatever crimes they were accused of committing, and often until they also implicated family members and friends.  After this time they were told they were going to be released and taken to a nearby field in trucks.  At the field they were checked in while music played loudly.  After being checked in to make sure everyone was present, they discovered why the music was really playing (from speakers in a large tree referred to as the “Magic Tree”): to cover the screams and groans of those who were being murdered or who lay dying.  People were murdered there using machetes, hammers, and other farm tools, mostly because bullets were too expensive to waste.  They were then dumped into mass graves. 

Interestingly, the man who ran S-21 prison is, to this day, the only leader in the Khmer Rouge who has officially confessed to any crimes or shown any remorse, and he only did so when he was taken to the killing fields and shown something called “The Killing Tree.”  Which, incredibly, is FAR worse than it sounds.  During his trial he had kept his cool, much like the other Khmer Rouge leaders who were tried for their crimes.  When he was brought to the killing field near his prison he was shown bones, skulls, and bodies, but it wasn’t until he reached the killing tree that he broke down, not only admitting to ordering the murder of these people, but taking full responsibility, admitting that if any of the men he had ordered to murder had refused, he would have had them murdered as well.  He didn’t want his men held responsible for what he had done.  He showed immense remorse and is, amazingly, the only leader who has done so.

At the killing fields (the main one for tourists is the one nearest to S-21 prison, just outside of Phnom Penh) there was an AMAZING audio tour that gave incredible amounts of information and context for everything around.  There are approximately 20,000 different mass graves, though many of them are inaccessible because they are deep in the jungle or surrounded by mines.  This one was the size of a professional baseball field and contained over 20,000 bodies.  The tour said “each indentation in the field is a spot where there was once a mass grave.”  The entire field was nothing by small hillocks and indentations.  Some spots were roped off and had signs saying, “Please do not step on the mass grave” in multiple languages.  Some of the graves hadn’t even been dug up because they wanted to let the people rest in peace.  Some graves held as many as 400 bodies, though the hole looked only big enough to fit perhaps 4 in both length and width.  However, the graves were dug to a depth of up to 16 feet and clearly no respect was given to body positioning or spacing.  The entire space is surrounded by beautiful trees and plants, and does not look as though it could have been a part of the horrors that were perpetrated there.  And yet, truly terrible things have happened there.  Every year, more bones teeth, and clothing wash up with the fresh rains.  Around the field are glass boxes filled with the things that have washed up, and it happens so frequently that there are even more pieces stacked on top of the boxes.  In the center of the whole field is a large tower, which is a monument that serves to remember those who were killed all over the country during the genocide.  Really the tower is just a large rectangle, and the inside is filled with shelves in the center that rise up seventeen levels.  The first fifteen levels are covered in skulls.  The top two levels of shelves are covered with other kinds of bones that have been dug up (shins, arms, etc.). 

All of that is clearly unimaginably awful and yet, it gets worse.  The aforementioned Killing Tree is quite possibly the worst thing I have ever heard of.  At first no one understood what it was, though they found blood and human tissue all over it.  Then they realized that it played into one of the many Khmer Rouge propaganda mottos: To kill the grass you must even kill the roots.  They didn’t want anyone coming back for revenge or for any of the ethnic groups they were trying to wipe out (Khmer Muslims, Khmer Christians, ethnic Thais or Chinese, etc.) to survive.  At the prison, parents and older children were held and later killed at the fields.  But there were also babies.  The Killing Tree was where Khmer Rouge soldiers would hold the babies by their feet and ankles and swing them, smashing their heads into the tree until they died.  There was a designated spot for baby brain smashing.

Cambodia is a country that is still healing from what happened in those years, during which it is estimated that, of a population of around 8 million, 2 to 3 million people were either murdered or died from the lack of food and medical care.  The four main organizers directly below Pol Pot (who died and was buried, though it doesn’t seem like people really know where), are still on trial for war crimes.  They claim no knowledge of any violence and that they did not order any murders, only that they were trying to introduce communism to Cambodia.  It was a political and social change that they were bringing about, not a fatal one, or so they claim.  Many of the lesser officers have already been tried and imprisoned.  Interestingly, though the Vietnamese drove the Khmer Rouge out of Cambodia in 1979, it remained a voice at the UN as a “government in exile” until 1993, and was widely regarded and treated as the government of Cambodia, though they were obviously no voice of the people.  Even the United States, United Kingdom, and other world powers, thought of the Khmer Rouge as the leaders of Cambodia, in spite of the fact that they had not retained a presence in the country in over ten years.

For the most part, however, it is a country unlike any other.  If you can forget that anyone over the age 35 has known a horrible kind of genocidal war, it’s pretty easy to see life there as it is.  I loved sitting by the window on the bus from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville (the beach in the south where we spent the final week of our vacation).  Out the window I could see normal country life taking place: a large sow suckling fifteen piglets, for example, or a man sleeping in a hammock under his house.  Houses in the country are often raised on stilts for two purposes: during the rainy seasons there is often flooding, and this protects the homes, and during the summer, when it is extremely hot, it provides shade.  Under another house a father and son were asleep, the boy (only about three) sleeping on his father’s stomach, both with one arm thrown carelessly over their head and the other holding their stomach.  In front of one home a father was giving his son a haircut, while the rest of the family stood in the yard and watched, possibly waiting for their turn.  Cows and goats, calves and kids, wandered around munching grasses and plants by the roadside at their leisure.   One boy stood nude in a basin in his front yard.  As I wondered what he was doing, his slightly older sister walked forward holding a bucket full of water.  She threw about half of the water on him and then went after him vigorously with a bar of soap, saving the other half of the water for rinsing off.  In front of a small food stall a man and a monk sat, sharing a meal and talking as they sat on small plastic stools.  In front of another stall, a family of about fifteen people ate together at one table, grabbing food from the dishes with their bare hands and squabbling over the best bits.  Little boys stole candies from a little shop and ran away, the ladies who owned the shops yelling and waving after them.  As soon as the boys were gone the women would smile and shake their heads, clucking their tongues.  Clearly they knew the boys and were accustomed to their thievery.  Over all, in spite of its harsh recent history, Cambodia is a beautiful country, filled with friendly, helpful, fun-loving people.  Plus everything is really cheap, which cannot be excluded as a good factor in a vacation location.

We spent the last week of vacation at the beach, which was a little too long for me.  One of the things about traveling with a companion with whom you have never travelled in the past is that it often changes and colors your vacation.  Stef is a great girl, and one of my best friends in Thailand, but she only wanted to spend time at the beach.  We hurried through Phnom Penh and Siem Reap in order to get to the beach, which was pretty boring to me.  Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE the beach, and the beach in Sihanoukville was pretty nice.  However, a week is too long to spend somewhere where you only lay around, and it was too much sun for me. 

One great thing about Sihanoukville, however, was one of the bartenders/ fire jugglers that I met there: Lee.  Lee was born in Phnom Penh and lived there most of his life.  While some Cambodians go to school from age five until age seventeen, many drop up.  Lee was one of those that dropped out when he was ten years old, in order to sell things on the street and support his mother, stepfather, and half-siblings.  His English was near perfect, which he admitted was because he had spent almost every day of the last eleven years speaking English.  He also admitted that when it came to other things, such as history, reading, writing, or math, he was “stupid.”  Which, I can tell you, he wasn’t.  He was an extremely smart guy, just uneducated.  His job when I met him was as a bartender at one of the beach bars, but at a certain time of the night he and his friend Monster (another Cambodian, though the majority of the bar workers were Westerners) would put on a fire show, where they spun chains equipped with flaming balls on the ends, or a bar that had both ends lit with flame.  A lot of what I know about how life is in Cambodia comes from talking to Lee and Monster, whose English was not as good because he stayed in school until he was fifteen.  In other words, his street education (which consists of a LOT of English) didn’t begin until later in life.  He was also younger, only nineteen years old.  Getting to know the two of them made me regret other vacations a little bit and the fact that I had never really tried to get to know the locals in other places (other than countries where I’ve lived).  You get to understand and know so much more about a place when you know and understand its people.

All in all, the trip to Cambodia was great (minus too much time at the beach and a stolen purse that was more inconvenient than costly to replace).  I would absolutely recommend traveling to Cambodia to anyone that can do so.  It’s a great place to visit because it’s both fun and educational, entertaining and illuminating.  Just keep in mind that you’ll need to carry cash because debit and credit cards aren’t accepted anywhere other than your local ATM.