Holiday in Cambodia

Saturday 4 October 2008

Phnom Penh

"Well you'll work harder

With a gun in your back

For a bowl of rice a day

Slave for soldiers

Till you starve

Then your head is skewered on a stake"

Holiday in Cambodia, Dead Kennedys

So like Jack Bauer in a particularly surreal nightmare, we have 24 hours to "do" Phnom Penh and all its sites. We cover all of the main ones off: Phnom Wat (literally means "hill temple" which is where the town was founded. The temple that sits there is a particularly gaudy and disco-inspired Buddhist place of worship), the National Museum (a collection of Buddhist relics from all over but mostly Angkor Wat), S-21 (details follow), the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda (a mass of temples and royal buildings with extensively detailed decor). 

But S-21 is the stand-out museum. It's the Cambodian Auschwitz. After the Khmer Rouge took the capital, they emptied it out in a crazy ultra-Maoist communist ideal that all Cambodians would be rice farmers, each acre producing three tons a year. Despite the fact that this was logistically impossible. They also wanted the country to be self-sufficient, isolationist, devoid of class, devoid of money, religion, education, trade, family (marriage and blood relatives were outlawed) and indeed anything that would contribute to the successful running of a country on any level. People were forced to "marry" at random with the sole purpose of producing more children to ultimately work as farmers.

But in this new, sickening utopia run by the sociopathic, psychopathic Khmer Rouge those that didn't believe in the "ideal" were the enemy. This was the metropolitan elite, the intellectuals, the academics, the ethnic minorities and anyone that disagreed. As well as those who wore glasses. And god knows, anyone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

The majority of these were taken to S-21, a former school south-west of the centre of Phnom Penh where they were brutalised, tortured, and killed without mercy. Shackled with iron bars to iron bed frames they were interrogated, electrocuted, beaten and murdered in an attempt to produce a confession, often with the interrogator and the suspect both unaware of what was meant to be confessed.

The beds and bars are still there, along with photos taken when the Vietnamese, provoked by Khmer Rouge military action on their border, invaded the country and captured the capital and discovered the prison, with 14 dead inmates still in their cells. The pictures of dead Cambodians, their bodies twisted, damaged and destroyed, lying still in positions of pain on their metal bed frameworks, with blood collected in pools and splashed around, evidence of the sickening torture that they must have endured, tell you everything that you need to know about what happened there.

The one thing you're left wondering is "Why?" What were they possibly trying to gain? Along with their genocidal and society-destroying tendencies, the KR (like most communist regimes) were also gripped by intense paranoia. But it's hard to understand what they really thought their ultimate aim was. It was never going to work, and the reasons for the deaths of the millions of people that they killed were quite clearly senseless.

As a footnote it's worth mentioning that after the Vietnamese invasion and the end of KR rule, the UN failed to recognise the rulers that the invaders put in place as an interim government to help Cambodia rebuild itself for years, as the KR were an elected government. It has to be one of the stupidest mistake they could have made, and as a result it was solely up to the Vietnamese and their resources to rebuild the country.

After that we took some time to recover. By the evening we hit the bars, had a few gin and tonics and then dinner at a Khmer restaurant. We visited a few other bars, ending in a place playing U2, REM and Tina Turner covers which provided a suitably surreal end of the evening.