Phnom Phen and Genocide

We've been in Phnom Phen for 2 days now. It's basically a third world city with one tiny gentrified district (which we're staying in).

This is a pretty damn interesting place. The city sits on the Tonle Sap river (feeding into the Mekong) and is mainly characterised by dust, street urchins, beggars and the ever oppresive tuk-tuk drivers.

Today we went to S-21 and the Cheung Ek (the Killing Fields).

For the uninitiated, S-21 was a school in a central district of Phnom Phen that Pol Pot turned into a prison camp. His party sent "insurgents" (basically those who fit the profile of the Communist Party's paranoid delusions) there to be tortured before they were sent to the Cheung Ek for extermination.

There are no words to describe S-21, but I think Damo summed it up best when he said he felt like a blanket was covering him while he was in the grounds. It was grim. There are explicit photographs of the victims, both before and after torture. What surprised me most was their expresssions - the prisoners were made to keep silent because S-21 is in the centre of a residential suburb, and Pol Pot didn't want anyone to know what was going on there. I think some people looked like they didn't know what was going to happen to them, some looked terrified, some looked sadly resigned to their fate. People who visited were very respectful. Everyone looked terribly sad - I cried for a while and I think a lot of other people found it very distressing.

Cheong Ek was equally depressing. It is very hard to describe - walking through the grounds you are walking on mounds of clothes of the dead which are slowly reappearing through the mud because it is the rainy season. This was a very sad place.

We wanted to see these places so that we could understand the Cambodians better, to appreciate Cambodia and in particular Phnom Phen for how well it has rebuilt itself, and to pay our respects I guess. It's not something I'll ever forget.

With this filter I feel that I appreciate Phnom Phen more that on face value. It was nearly entirely destroyed by the Khmer Rouge and it's pretty amazing how its bounced back.

We're going to make tracks to Ho Chi Min City in Vietnam tomorrow. I'd like to stay but Vietnam calls and our fly-out date draws near. Our next post from there, and until then Ciao!