Also a little warning, there's some pretty dark stuff mentioned today, so don't read this if you don't want to read about atrocities, though I did try and leave out gory detail.
Also also, I have decided to defer posting this entry until after I leave Cambodia. As I intimate later, the subject is taboo here, and given that one of my friends was sent to prison in Iran (only for 2 days, but still) for inciting political unrest, and since I don't know how web traffic is monitored here, I will wait until I am sure nobody is going to arrest me (aka when I am no longer in this country).
7.50am wasn't a terrible time to set off from our hotel, given that a vicious rumour had been going round that we would have to set off at 5.30 (seems someone just made that up). We were on a coach, with various travellers from other hotels etc, but it was much nicer than it sounded (they kept calling it a 'local bus', and I had images of people hanging off the side, chickens in cages etc etc). It took a couple of hours to get to the border, which eased my mind, as my visa exemption was set to run out at midnight, and I had worried our bus might break down, forcing me to run 100km to the border like something out of a movie.
It took one and a half hours to exit Vietnam, and the whole exit system was basically chaos. Good job the guy from the bus was sorting everything out! It was another half hour to get the Cambodian visas, but once again the bus man had us covered, and we used the time to grab lunch in a weird place between the borders. Shortly after we passed into Cambodia, and Phillipe got a stern telling off from a guard for taking photos.
The south of Cambodia is flat as a pancake. There was plenty of rice growing, plenty of livestock, and a lot less buildings than in Vietnam. The language spoken is Khmer, and this is from the civilisation which built Angkor Wat. It took another 3 and a half hours to get to Phnom Penh (pronounced P-nom pen), and to our hotel. Once again the room is sumptuous, and probably damn cheap. This hotel even has a gym. If we wanted a quick walking tour of a couple of monuments, we had 45 minutes to get ready, more than enough time for me, though nobody else from my original group was interested.
So me, the new people, and Mony, went and saw a monument to the king, and one to the current prime minister. Mony told us in hushed tones that he would explain more about the political situation on the bus tomorrow; it isn't safe to talk about in public! We then walked past the royal palace, and on to a lovely restaurant, which was on the first floor, and open to the night air overlooking a confluence of 4 rivers. I got to know the new people a bit, and they all seem very nice.
The next morning began with a mediocre breakfast (no cereal, no jam except pineapple), and it didn't look like it was going to get better any time soon with a visit to the genocide museum and killing fields on the cards.
We had a local guide, San, to take us round both places. He lived through the Pol Pot (this name is apparently one he took himself, short for Political Potential) regime as a child aged 6-10, though he lost his father and 4 siblings. All in all over 3 million Cambodians died as a result of the regime, pretty much half the population at that time, and this means that currently only 4% of the population are aged over 60. Apparently the regime targeted intellectuals because Pol Pot feared that they would be the ones who would rise up, but the criteria for being an intellectual were wearing glasses, being pale, or having non callused hands, regardless of whether there was any proof.
Currently, many of the officers of the regime still hold positions of power in Cambodia (including the current prime minister). The reason given by the political party is that they didn't want to cause any more civil war, which seemed to be somewhat accepted by Mony and San, though I think they were more agreeing with the lack of civil war than accepting the officers of the genocidal regime should be able to have nice jobs. San also mentioned that guards/soldiers (who generally all undertook at least some torture/murder, albeit under orders and possibly in fear for their own lives) of the regime had also been given amnesty from their crimes, and anyone you talk to aged 50+ could have been one. The people tend to somewhat shun someone who is discovered to be an ex regime soldier, however there are rarely revenge killings, thanks to a combination of a lack of desire to go to prison for life (especially for those with families), and Buddhism being the religion of 95% of people, therefore they all believe in Karma.
The genocide museum used to be a school, before being repurposed into a 'reeducation centre' (read prison) by the Khmer Rouge (Pol Pot's party). From 1975 to 1979, over 17,000 people were incarcerated there, with detailed records kept. Only 12 survived, 5 adults and 7 children, with the rest being sent to the killing fields and executed (with the exception of 20 odd, who were murdered in their cells when the Khmer Rouge left Phnom Penh). The men survived because they were skilled, and were taken along when the regime fled (an artist and a mechanic are the only ones still alive), and the kids hid in the kitchen and so were overlooked. There were 200 odd (I forget the exact number) of these prisons under the regime.
We learnt about the conditions people were kept under, torture methods used to try and get people to identify family members (family members of 'academics' were also considered dangerous. It was fairly in your face and not nice to hear about, so I won't go into detail) as well as looking at photographs of prisoners, guards, and the general population who were forced to work in (regular) fields with little food and no pay. San (who worked in these fields, aged 6-10) mentioned that people used to grab pretty much anything edible when a guard wasn't watching (there were guards in the fields), and eat it raw. Insects, lizards, leaves, tree roots, snails, you name it. If a guard caught you eating extra stuff, it was off to prison, and eventually the killing fields.
The only 2 surviving adult prisoners (the children were taken abroad and given a change of name etc.) were also at the prison. They were an artist and a mechanic, both in their 80s. Their entire families were killed in the genocide, but they made new families after, and still need income to support them, so they greet visitors to the museum, tell their stories through interpreters, and sell books about their incarceration which 3 American/Australian journalists helped them write/translate into English, with 50% of proceeds going towards a charity which is building a memorial for everyone who was imprisoned at this site, and 50% going to them (the journalists take nothing). They also like people to know what happened, as it is not well known globally, and it is no longer taught in Cambodian schools (it is inferred due to the fact that the current prime minister was an officer of the Khmer Rouge, but this isn't something you can say in public). The artist unconsciously cries a lot of the time, and is quiet, but the mechanic is keen to talk (in Khmer).
After an exceedingly sobering experience (some of the girls/ladies had been crying), we got back on the bus to go to the killing fields. San told us some more background on the way, however I covered it all at once here earlier, to make it more consistent. The killing fields are literally just some fields, with a lot of excavated and/or cordoned off mass graves, and a big stupa filled with the bones they have managed to recover (as Buddhists believe that someone whose bones are scattered cannot reincarnate until they are regathered). This killing field was one of 365 throughout Cambodia, and over 20,000 people were killed here.
Bullets were too expensive to be used up killing prisoners, so the guards basically used whatever they could find, with sugar palm leaves being commonly used (the edges of the big leaves especially are like saws, a lot harder and sharper than I expected). Music was played through speakers to trick the local farmers into thinking it was a military camp, as the Khmer Rouge spent an inordinate amount of effort trying to conceal the truth of their activities from the general population (hence the 'reeducation centre' prisons), and especially did not want foreigners to find out what was happening.
It has rained the previous night, and as such a fair few bones and scraps of clothes were uncovered. These are collected periodically, the bones to be added to the stupa, and we were asked to try not to walk on the bones of possible. As we walked round we had various facts given to us (for instance enemy soldiers were all beheaded, so they could not reincarnate), and we visited the stupa at the end, before leaving. Overall I think the prison/museum was worse, as there isn't exactly a lot left here, but I was glad to be don't with the depressing stuff!
The white things are bone fragments
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