Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2 February 2007
Cambodia has arisen an array of emotions within me, I have left off writing this blog until I could present my impressions as a whole:
Awe – at Angkor Wat and the temples surrounding it. We spent the better part of three days exploring the ruins and even then it didn’t feel as if we’d scratched the surface (on one day we got up to see the sunrise from Bayon, stayed to see the sunset off Angkor and inbetween rode a total of 41kms).
Affection – for Cambodians, who are both polite and upbeat. Considering their recent past and the fact that a dollar goes way too far in this country, one can’t help but admire the spirit in which surviving is carried out in this country.
Nostalgia – the streets of Phnom Penh are tree lined and warm. This, and the shabby French colonial architecture, makes it reminiscent of Harare (2nd Street Extension for anyone who would know). Come to think of it, the expatriates and aid workers in all the best restaurants are also vaguely familiar.
Tremendously, tremendously sad – For those who may not be aware of Cambodian history, in 1976 Cambodia experienced a Communist Revolution under a group called the Khmer Rouge. In an attempt to convert the country to a peasant dominated agrarian cooperative, people were forced out of the cities, split up from their families and the country returned to what is referred to as “Year Zero”. Intellectuals, professionals, monks, foreigners and anyone not peasant enough were subjugated and often executed. The most horrific face of this revolution, however, was a prison and torture centre comparable to the Nazi detention camps. Tuol Sleng was previously a high school until the Khmer Rouge converted it into a security prison (S-21) in order to detain and interrogate suspected enemies of the paranoid Party Cadre. Of the 20,000 people held, questioned and tortured in this place only 7 survived. As a rule, once people had “confessed” and given enough evidence to convince the Party Cadre that they were right all along, they were taken to a place outside of Phnom Penh, executed and buried in mass graves.
We spent today at the Tuol Sleng which is now a museum. The rooms have been preserved as they were found by the liberating Vietnamese army, including shackles, blood stains and a photo of the bodies of the most recent victims as they were lying, murdered just before their captors fled. Also on display are the photographs of every one of the victims of S-21 (the Khmer Rouge documented the faces of each of the people they interrogated and, if they had died from torture, photographed them a second time.) We also traveled out to the “Killing Fields”, the site of the mass graves (one of many around Cambodia) and witnessed the piles of skulls, the tree used to bludgeon infants and the pieces of clothing still buried in the soil.
I cried, without even bothering to wipe my face.
Reading “Voices from S-21” by David Chandler (an academic text written by an Australian historian) the book explores the inner workings of an institution such as S-21 where death and torture is carried out on humans by other humans. A passage in particular struck close to home:
In a sense, some of the people who were tortured at Tuol Sleng may have been fortunate not to have survived, if we consider the continuous, traumatic aftereffects of torture that afflicts so many victims and that led many survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, for example, to kill themselves long after they were set fre... one such example is Jean Amray, a prominent Jewish intellectual in postwar Europe and a survivor of Auschwitz committed suicide in 1978. In his eloquent short book ‘At the Mind’s Limites’ Amery may have foreshadowed his own death when he wrote:
" Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured….anyone who has suffered torture will never again be at ease in the world; the abomination of the annihilation is never extinguished. Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again."
Awe – at Angkor Wat and the temples surrounding it. We spent the better part of three days exploring the ruins and even then it didn’t feel as if we’d scratched the surface (on one day we got up to see the sunrise from Bayon, stayed to see the sunset off Angkor and inbetween rode a total of 41kms).
Affection – for Cambodians, who are both polite and upbeat. Considering their recent past and the fact that a dollar goes way too far in this country, one can’t help but admire the spirit in which surviving is carried out in this country.
Nostalgia – the streets of Phnom Penh are tree lined and warm. This, and the shabby French colonial architecture, makes it reminiscent of Harare (2nd Street Extension for anyone who would know). Come to think of it, the expatriates and aid workers in all the best restaurants are also vaguely familiar.
Tremendously, tremendously sad – For those who may not be aware of Cambodian history, in 1976 Cambodia experienced a Communist Revolution under a group called the Khmer Rouge. In an attempt to convert the country to a peasant dominated agrarian cooperative, people were forced out of the cities, split up from their families and the country returned to what is referred to as “Year Zero”. Intellectuals, professionals, monks, foreigners and anyone not peasant enough were subjugated and often executed. The most horrific face of this revolution, however, was a prison and torture centre comparable to the Nazi detention camps. Tuol Sleng was previously a high school until the Khmer Rouge converted it into a security prison (S-21) in order to detain and interrogate suspected enemies of the paranoid Party Cadre. Of the 20,000 people held, questioned and tortured in this place only 7 survived. As a rule, once people had “confessed” and given enough evidence to convince the Party Cadre that they were right all along, they were taken to a place outside of Phnom Penh, executed and buried in mass graves.
We spent today at the Tuol Sleng which is now a museum. The rooms have been preserved as they were found by the liberating Vietnamese army, including shackles, blood stains and a photo of the bodies of the most recent victims as they were lying, murdered just before their captors fled. Also on display are the photographs of every one of the victims of S-21 (the Khmer Rouge documented the faces of each of the people they interrogated and, if they had died from torture, photographed them a second time.) We also traveled out to the “Killing Fields”, the site of the mass graves (one of many around Cambodia) and witnessed the piles of skulls, the tree used to bludgeon infants and the pieces of clothing still buried in the soil.
I cried, without even bothering to wipe my face.
Reading “Voices from S-21” by David Chandler (an academic text written by an Australian historian) the book explores the inner workings of an institution such as S-21 where death and torture is carried out on humans by other humans. A passage in particular struck close to home:
In a sense, some of the people who were tortured at Tuol Sleng may have been fortunate not to have survived, if we consider the continuous, traumatic aftereffects of torture that afflicts so many victims and that led many survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, for example, to kill themselves long after they were set fre... one such example is Jean Amray, a prominent Jewish intellectual in postwar Europe and a survivor of Auschwitz committed suicide in 1978. In his eloquent short book ‘At the Mind’s Limites’ Amery may have foreshadowed his own death when he wrote:
" Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured….anyone who has suffered torture will never again be at ease in the world; the abomination of the annihilation is never extinguished. Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again."
posted by Kait at 8:35 pm
2 Comments:
This is not a comment but simply the only way I can think of to send you greetings from New Zealand, where I have had the considerable pleasure of getting to know your Aunt Jo. She vectored me to your blog. I am also an academic economist, and an American who immigrated to New Zealand at 43 years of age.
Your account of travels in Cambodia prompts the following musings. By virtue of my turning 55 this year, I am aware of the killing fields of Cambodia. My mother was a teenage girl in occupied France during WWII. I have mulled over making an eventual pilgrimage to Vietnam, where I would have fought as a soldier had I been a few years older. The 20th century will go down in history as the century that institutionalized mass murder as a political tool. And I suspect that the deep cause of the resort to mass murder was an inability to deal with the immense increase in the power of human action that resulted from the Industrial Revolution. Especially what I call the Second Industrial Revolution, one built on steel, chemicals, oil, electrical machinery, and the the dawn of electricity. It led politicians to think "we have weapons that will quickly overwhelm the enemy" or "we can finally exterminate so-and-so." I can never forget that Pol Pot received a strong French education. And Jo just told me that Mugabe received a Jesuit education.
Once you've read this, you may delete it from your blog. I have no blog of my own. If you want to dialogue with me via Email, just raise the matter with your aunt. She and I are in daily contact.
Absolute madness, Kait... it is unbelievable that humans can do such incredibly inane and horrible things to others.
Words fail me. But of course I'm sure you know what I mean and feel much the same. I remember feeling similarly numb and dumbstruck when I went to the Dachau concentration camp (now memorial) near Munich.
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