Democratic Kampuchea

Currently I'm sitting in Bangkok after about 6 days in Cambodia. I was only in two cities, Phnom Penh and Siem Reap but it seems that this is the tour that most people do. I first arrived in Phnom Penh and realized I was in a much different city than Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi or Bangkok. First it was much dustier than the other cities and as I traveled around it I quickly realized that was because many streets there are not paved. So its a capital city with dirt roads everywhere. In the other bigger cities there are poor people but everyone seems to be within a similar social strata. In Phnom Penh the disparity between rich and poor seemed much more pronounced. There were expensive stores and nice villas but then there were also shacks and slums. You could tell that part of the city was just for the rich and the poor were left to toil in other areas.

My main reason for traveling to Phnom Penh was to see the Killing Fields and S-21 prison. These are the two most famous sights of the horrors that took place during the Khmer Rouge regime and the Cambodian Genocide. I first visited the Killing Fields which is the place where the prisoners that were housed in the S-21 prison were taken to be killed. This is a sight with mass graves and had a very eerie feel to it because you could tell that it was no ordinary place. There is also a traditional Cambodian stupa, which is a temple looking building, that has hundreds of skulls and bones that were unearthed from the mass graves. This was one of the hardest things to see on my day but worth it because it is important for everyone to see what happened there in order to prevent it from happening again. Perhaps one of the most jarring things that I learned that day was just how brutal the Khmer Rouge was. Because they didn't want to waste bullets on killing people they would use blunt objects like hammers in order to kill their perceived enemies. The prisoners would be blindfolded and kneeling so that way they had no idea when they would be bludgeoned and once they were killed they would fall into the grave that they had just dug. The Khemer Rouge also had a policy of killing entire families. That way when kids grew up they couldn't take revenge on the regime that killed their parents. There is one tree on the ground of the Killing Fields that was used to kill babies. They would take the babies by their feet and smash their heads against this one tree. Realizing what had gone one there was pretty horrifying. Once I had seen the small museum there I walked out to my waiting motorbike driver. He must have been younger than me, probably 23-24, and he explained to me that he had two brothers that were older than him that had been killed during the genocide. The Khmer Rouge wanted more Cambodians so his parents were put together in order to start making Khmer babies. He said that one of his brothers was killing by the soldiers because he cried too much.

Next I went to the S-21 torture prison. This was truly a weird place. A former school that had been transformed into one of the worst places on earth. There are still jungle gym bars on the grounds and one of them was next to a makeshift gallows that were used to execute prisoners. The complex was pretty large although nothing compared to the size of the concentration and death camps that I saw when I was in Poland. There are a series of four buildings each with three stories and every room in these buildings were used to house and torture prisoners. In some of the buildings you can still see the shackles and beds that prisoners were attached to and in others there were hundreds of pictures of the people that perished there. One of the most shocking parts was how many pictures of kids there were. All these kids were tortured and killed there at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. There was one building that was wrapped in barbed wire. This was in order to prevent prisoners from jumping off the balconies and committing suicide. This place was one of the saddest and most horrific places that I've ever seen. To think that the Khmer Rouge were hellbent on killing anyone with glasses and an education is crazy. They killed over two million of their own people just because they thought that they were too smart to agree to the harsh treatment of their countrymen and others for no reason. Famine was widespread during this time and that also contributed to the death of thousand. The regime's rule ended in January of 1979 when the Vietnamese was able to take control of Phnom Penh and show the world what had gone on there. Another disturbing aspect of the end of this regime was that the UN, and the Americans more importantly, continued to recognize Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge as the rightful leaders of Cambodia until 1990.

I saw some other things in the capital as well but nothing to really write about. I was off to Siam Reap to see the splendor that is the Angkor Wat complex. Unfortunately my internet is running out right now so I'll have to tell you about it next time I get to post.

I've been in Bangkok for the past couple days and tonight I head to the islands for about three week of sun and surf. So I'll talk to you from there!