Where to Even Begin?

It seems as though my posts about Cambodia are going to be pretty sombre, but I just want to say that we are really enjoying our time here in this beautiful country. Angkor was magnificent. Siem Reap is a wonderful city, and Phnom Penh has been great as well. It's just that it's hard to justify babbling on and on about the great food and massages and the warm weather when we see things such as this...

Today we visited the Choueng Ek Killing Fields, located just outside the capital city of Phnom Penh. Over the span of four years, two million innocent Cambodians were executed and buried in shallow graves here and in other locations throughout the countryside. They were taken from their families and homes; they were starved, tortured, and terrorized. They were imprisoned, held captive in the basest of conditions, and then driven en masse to these Killing Fields where, in the name of saving bullets, they were bludgeoned to death with farming tools. Their crimes, if you can even call them that, were of being former government workers (or having ties to government workers), professionals or intellectuals or anybody with an education (even wearing glasses meant one could read, meaning one had an education and was an enemy), or anyone who was not an ethnic Khmer (Cambodian). All the while, other Cambodians were forced into work camps where they starved to death while tending farms that grew food they would never get to eat. In the span of four years, two million Cambodians died at the hand of the Khmer Rouge. Families were separated and children were trained to be soldiers. Anyone caught stealing food to feed a starving family was beaten savagely, and the sick or weak received no medical care at all, as they were deemed unworthy of survival in this new society anyway, and were left to die.

The first thing I saw at Choeung Ek was the massive memorial stupa -- it holds a staggering nine thousand human skulls, stacked upon 17 levels. I was not expecting to be so overwhelmed by the horror which whispered by; I could only barely sense the pain and suffering that must have happened there, and it was still too much for me to handle. Silently, grimly, we approached the stupa with incense and flowers, and tried to absorb the meaning of those skulls. Many showed signs of damage from the vicious beatings bestowed upon them while their owners still lived. In the fields around the memorial were many depressions in the soil. These were mass graves, some of them containing hundreds of bodies, though they were only a few feet deep. Some prisoners were made to dig their own graves before being pushed into them. We walked the meandering paths which are still strewn with faded, tattered pieces of clothing and bits of human bone that are forever being revealed by the yearly rains. Of the estimated 20 000 people exterminated at Choeung Ek, only 9000 have been exhumed.

Shaken to the core, we walked around the perimeter of the memorial area and tried to relate the sunny day, the warm breeze, and the lush tropical vegetation with the horrors and nightmares that belong to Choeung Ek, before moving on to the Tuol Sleng Prison Museum. This museum, once upon a time, was a high school, but was converted by the Khmer Rouge into a prison for "political" prisoners -- those destined to meet their ends in the Killing Fields. Here, prisoners were catalogued first. They were photographed and forced to give their biographies, which were kept in detailed files. They were shackled and imprisoned, sometimes for months, and tortured into giving confessions and names of other Khmer Rouge enemies. In the end, they were carried off to Choeung Ek. From 1975-1979, approximately 17,000 people were incarcerated at Tuol Sleng. There are only twelve known survivors from this time period.

The pictures of the men, women, and children that were taken to Tuol Sleng are on display for us to see. Nearly all of the people wear the black uniforms provided by the Khmer Rouge, and most of them have their hands bound behind their backs. It's impossible to read the expressions on their faces, but they could only have been terrified of what was to come and saddened for what they had lost. We saw the different cells that were used -- some were tiny, smaller than a bedroom closet, and some were huge and were meant for dozens of people lined up side by side and shackled together with leg irons. A few larger rooms had metal cots (never any mattresses) and were reserved for "important" prisoners. The open corridors were lined with a rusted mesh of barbed wire put in place to prevent prisoners from jumping to their deaths. The whole place had an oppressive, evil atmosphere, from the dark cells to the stained concrete floors, and I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

We remained quiet for a long time before starting into a circular and unoriginal discussion of "How did this happen? How do we prevent this from happening again? Who could do such evil?" We are not smart enough to know the answers to these questions. We just know that it should not happen again, and yet it has already.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the legacy of terror of the Khmer Rouge did not end in 1979. Land mines laid continue to plague the Cambodian countryside. The entire Khmer race is missing two generations: the one decimated by the Khmer Rouge, and the one that was not born. There were hardly any babies conceived, born, or surviving between the years of 1975 and 1979. Cambodia has truly had to start from zero, as the current culture is, in a lot of ways, only 30-odd years old. They should be proud of how far they have come, and it can be said quite definitely that Cambodia is one place that will not allow such atrocities to happen again.

ETA: Check out the album here, but I must warn that it may be disturbing for some.

Just a Taste

We've finally got some photos up from Laos and Siem Reap (and the temples of Angkor!)

Sunset on Vang Viang:



BG's Cooking in Luang Prabang:



One Hungry Elephant:



Sunset on the Mekong (Don Khon):



For the rest of Laos, click here.


Cambodia (click!):

Exercising my Futility

Halfway through our second day of Wat-seeing, we took a break from the ancient mystical temples of Angkor and stepped into the very real and very raw Cambodia Land Mine Museum. Our feet ached and we were terribly hot and sweaty, but we quickly came to realize that we have no real understanding of the word "suffering". The Land Mine Museum was founded by a man named Aki Ra -- orphaned by the Khmer Rouge at age three, he was quickly "recruited" by the KR to be a child soldier. He planted his first land mine at age five and spent his childhood in the jungle, firing weapons and planting mines where he was told and when he was told to. Now an adult, he has redeemed his innocent evil deeds a thousand times and more, as he has unearthed and inactivated over 50,000 mines with his bare hands. He founded the land mine museum and houses and supports in his own home children who have been injured and maimed by mines. He is truly a hero. I was happy and a little proud to see that the Land Mine Museum is run in partnership by a Cambodian and a Canadian NGO; their head office is in Bayfield, ON.

Cambodia is the third most heavily land-mined country in the world; it is estimated that another 50 million mines pepper the countryside, though thousands of civillians in Cambodia alone have already been injured by mines in the past thirty years alone. Everywhere, in the markets, the streets, and the countryside, we see victims of land mines, missing limbs, blinded, horribly scarred. Those who can not work are often forced to beg to support themselves and their families: one doctor described amputating the leg from a land mine victim, saying, "I saved his life but ruined his future."

In the first room of the Land Mine Museum, we learned that mines are specifically designed to maim their victims and not to kill, as "more resources are exhausted caring for an injured soldier than on the battlefield. According to military strategy a dead soldier is less expensive than a maimed one." Unfortunately, anti-personnel mines were used in Cambodia like some sort of toxic seasoning without any concern for their targets, deliberate or otherwise. They were dropped by planes by the thousands, over farms and rice paddies; they were dropped in bodies of water, by the sides of rural roads, and buried in the jungle. Children found them curious and wanted to play; they were ploughed over in fields and stepped on by farmers. We saw mines that contained ball bearings and shrapnel so that they would do more damage on detonation. The militaries of several countries as well as the Khmer Rouge all have responsibility for these mines, but nobody wants to take responsibility for the Cambodian men, women, and children that have been mutilated and disfigured by these "perfect soldiers." I kept my sunglasses on in the dark room to hide my enraged tears.

In the next room we learned about the "Ottawa Convention", which prohibits future production and storage of land mines by the forty countries that signed it. Gratifyingly, Canada was one of these forty -- the fact that we have no military to speak of plays no role in this, I am sure. Among the dissenters: China, Russia, and -- the United States of America, among many others. My mind explodes with this; I don't understand. Have they seen what land mines can do? How can this refusal be justified? (Here's the answer.)

This museum visit and interacting with land mine victims over the past few days has left me silently seething, impotently raging, weeping with sadness and agonizing over the futility of it all. I have asked myself a million times how I can help, how we can help, why we all don't help. I ask myself how I deign to feel sorry for myself at any point in my shallow, sheltered life. I ask myself why I don't have the effing GUTS to do anything about this.

In the end I slam my money into the donation box as hard as I can. It doesn't make me feel any better.