Friday June 9: From Killing Fields to Corruption

We just returned from the most haunting day of tourism I have ever experienced, experiencing the carnage of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in cold, gritty detail and seeing today’s absolute poverty, disease, corruption, and desperation in its most visceral forms in the shantytowns surrounding the city. I’m currently baking in our little tin shack, missing air conditioning as sweat continues to cascade down my skin, and yet, still a bit shell-shocked from the today’s visions and ever more cognizant of the incredible privilege I enjoy to be a free citizen, let alone be able to see this.
We hired a tuk-tuk and driver for the day today, for the total sum of $10. When we got off our bus yesterday, there were throngs of drivers offering to take us to our guesthouse, fighting hard for the $1 fare. Our driver found out we were planning to tour the city, and was waiting for us outside when I woke up at 7:00, grinning and waving and not moving until we came down and hired him at 9:00 for the day. I handled the bargaining for our day’s “package,” but it was hard to try to drive too hard of a deal—it is so clear that the people we are bargaining with need the money so much more than we do, and how do you begrudge someone who has waited hours for you a dollar or two?
Before I talk about the day, I want to mention the arts development NGO I happened to run across that relates directly to the research I hope to complete while abroad. Operated by the Singapore Girls Brigade, a religious sort of Girl Scouts, this group has opened a store in Phnom Penh that sells sewn bags, clothing, and handicrafts. The patterns come from Singapore, Europe, and from customer requests, and then the Singapore volunteers train locals in a village about an hour outside of the city on how to make the crafts. The crafts then come back to the city where they are sold and exported to Singapore and globally through Internet orders. It’s a lot like Ten Thousand Villages, but there were two really neat aspects. First was how the group focused on more than just production, offering complete development assistance, creating a library, teaching English and other classes, and assisting with local needs. Second was how quickly tourists were snapping up the products. The store was small, but it was packed with all sorts of foreigners who preferred to buy what they knew was “village made” at considerably higher prices than similar products carried by street vendors. Clearly there is a market for handicrafts and room for distribution even in developing countries, but I don’t know that this sheds any light on whether fine art can sell or if the products could be designed by the Khmer (Cambodian) people and still sell as well as products designed by foreigners.
Our first stop on the city tour was Toul Sleng Prison, or the S-21 Security Compound, the primary detention center for all prisoners from Phnom Penh during the Khmer Rouge era. More than 17,000 people passed through this former school campus. Only seven survived; they were sculptors who could turn out busts of Pol Pot. The prisoners were chained together, packed into rooms, and tortured for hours and hours and hours until they would confess to their “crimes against the state.” Possible charges included having a college education, speaking English or French, preaching or even practicing a religion, doing skilled work, talking intellectually, or having past connections to any nationalist military forces. Thus, all Cambodians were targeted and anyone with any sort of skill was killed first. Indeed, a full forty percent of the country’s population was wiped out. Now the campus is still, set in the middle of a quiet neighborhood, where life seems to progress with few visible reminders of such a dark history.
The only real visible reminder is the remaining amputees. Outside the camp was a collection of them begging for money. Cambodia has the highest proportion of amputees in the world; one in 276 is an amputee. Most of these are victims of landmines; faceless, indiscriminate killers thickly strewn across the countryside through years and years of conflict. Most of these landmines were not intended to kill—they sought to maim, eliminating healthy fighters and creating permanent dependents that guarantee poverty for the whole affected family. I feel sick every time I see one of these men or women, pant legs dangling or stumps hanging where arms should be. As we left the prison, I had given money to one amputee and felt like my good deed for the day was done, so I walked with my head down, ignoring the persistent figure limping heavily on his cane next to me asking, “Please sir, some little money for rice.” But when I climbed into the tuk-tuk, I made the mistake of looking into his face. It was grotesquely disfigured. One eye was completely glossed-over, not seeing. Where the other eye should have been was a bloody, twisted mass of scar tissue. His lips were pink and puffy, his teeth exposed. I felt sick, disgusted, and full of a deep, deep sorrow. I quickly peeled out 500 Riel notes and dropped them into his hat, wishing I hadn’t looked up, pleading with my mind to erase the picture that had been firmly etched in.
We continued our journey through the Khmer Rouge legacy by driving out to Cheung Elk, or the “killing fields.” The “killing fields” were just that; fields where the Khmer Rouge took their prisoners to slaughter them in secret. The fields are set 15 kilometers from Toul Sleng, and each night the soldiers would gather up anywhere from ten to thirty men, load them in trucks, take them to the fields, and shoot them.
The road to the fields was absolutely atrocious. We were remarking about how bumpy the pavement was as we left the couple of well-paved main streets, but as if to demonstrate that this was the least of our concerns, we then turned down a steep embankment and began to proceed on a dust and trash ridden throughway through the slums that spread for miles. This seemed even worse than the conditions in the countryside yesterday because here the population density is at best comparable to New York and in many places far more crowded, but the same lack of electricity, hot water, and sometimes even enclosed lodging that we saw in the countryside exists here as well. The smell of raw sewage pervaded, the streets were absolutely covered in filth—bags of trash appeared to have been sitting outside for days, and most of the trash never made it to a bag.
Like Tuol Sleng, there is not much setting off the fields from the surrounding neighborhood. Over seventeen thousand Cambodians (and about a dozen western journalists) died on these fields, but today they are eerily quiet. A giant memorial stupa was built to house the skulls of the more than 8000 victims whose bodies were unearthed in 1980 during an international excavation. This is as creepy as it sounds—over 8000 skulls are arranged on 10 stories of platforms on top of a base of uncovered clothing. We gave a guide a few dollars to show us around, and he matter-of-factly pointed to a few skulls and explained that “this person was caned to death, this person was bashed with an axe, this person’s face was crushed, this person was buried alive…”
We thought this was chilling, but then we began to walk around the actual fields. The mass burial pits were marked with very simple signs that just said “mass grave.” The land is not really protected, so it has become public grazing grounds, and there were cows grazing while young boys and men nonchalantly lounged around the pits. There were a few specially marked sights—the pit where the decapitated soldiers were all thrown, discovered with 400 soldiers and no heads, the tree where babies were known to be bashed or ripped apart, the adjacent area where their mothers were then raped, the “magical tree” where a speaker played party music so the neighbors would think the field was just for wild gatherings, and a map with the remainder of unexcavated graves.
Early on the tour I tripped. I looked down and saw a human bone. Our guide remarked, “every rain storm reveals more of the bones. They just keep coming up.” Then, we saw the colorful shards of clothing poking through the soil, and he continued, “their clothes also resurface. Some are on trees. We found a few skulls there too.” I had read how the first escapees from Cambodia to Thailand were unable to convince anyone of their stories of what was going on. I now understand why. As one official had said, “It is not that I think you are lying. I just cannot believe you.” Such atrocities are incomprehensible.
There were no permanent sanctions or punishments for any of the perpetrators in any way. Our guide told us that the guards were almost all children. They were the easiest to brainwash. All of these events are so fresh that these men are only about forty now. He said that they almost never speak of the events—maybe a bit if they are drunk. The government officially pardoned all of the soldiers (with the exception of a few leading officers, but Pol Pot died insisting he knew nothing of what had happened), as Cambodia needed them to fight again against the Vietnamese. Who knows what scars these very young soldiers endure today—in many ways, they too are victims.
Yet these genocides happen again and again and again. Just a few months ago I was standing on the grounds of Auschwitz in Poland. I surveyed the grounds of the camp, stepped into the gas chambers, and left in shock and horror. Today it was magnified exponentially. I don’t think I’ll be able to hear about genocide again without picturing these sights, but short of bringing the rest of the world on a field trip, how do you get the word out about what is going on in forgotten corners of the globe like Sudan and make ordinary people ten thousand miles away begin to care?
The return trip from the fields were even rougher than the journey out there. At one point we swerved around a pothole bigger than my kitchen table, leaving us stuck in thick, gooey mud alongside the “road.” We all had to pile out of the tuk-tuk and push until the wheels could move again. The whole time though, I could not help thinking that the road was really intended as a one-way road. Of course the road would have been better in the other direction—only empty trucks came back the way we were headed.
Then again, though, the genocide was thirty years ago. That should be plenty of time to fix a road. The problem is the amazing amount of corruption that still exists and the absolutely non-functioning government. There are virtually no public services provided by the government. Education is a privilege with a high price tag. We talked to a few of the children shepherding cattle around the Killing Fields, who told us that they had to pay their teacher 1000 Riel each day—no money, no class. That’s about twenty-five cents per child per day in a country where the average income is way under a dollar a day.
Other than the charity hospitals run by foreigners, there is no such thing as free health care. Later in the day we went to Phnom Penh’s Central Market. I almost vomited when a middle-aged man approached me begging for money; one whole side of his face was missing. Some sort of giant growth had overtaken his entire face, engulfing his forehead, eye, nose, mouth, and chin, and whatever it was and swollen so much that it just sort of dangled in front of him and he had to hold up that half of his head with his hand while the other hand was holding his hat for money. In America, regardless of your income or assets, such a growth would get emergency attention long before it ever got to that point. Here, I suppose this man will go on literally holding his head in his hands for the rest of his life.
The government doesn’t do anything for even the poorest of the poor—in fact, they make things worse by skimming off the majority of foreign aid money that is coming into the country. If you can’t make it on your own, you just won’t make it. I read that the only positive thing that can be said about the current Cambodian government is that it is not the Khmer Rouge. That doesn’t mean there aren’t government sponsored murders and robberies, oppression, censorship, false imprisonment, and a farcical judicial system. In fact, we talked to a number of tuk-tuk drivers who told us how much they hated the Prime Minister, how much he stole from the country, and how he did such bad things. If it weren’t for a collective memory of such recent historical pain, I think the country would be on the brink of rebellion.
Later in the evening I picked up a copy of Cambodia’s English language newspaper, The Cambodia Daily, to see the headlines. The front page alone offers enough indication of the country’s woes. The first article was entitled, “World Bank to Gov’t: Return $7.6 Million,” and detailed how the World Bank reluctantly determined that all funding to Cambodia would be frozen until better accountability could be installed to stop drastic disappearances of money. It is a problem because the small percent of money that has gone to the people has made a huge difference, and the article discussed all of the accomplishments of clean water and road infrastructure. However, the losses have just grown too large. The article then attempted to get a comment from the government—the result was pathetically hilarious. No less than eleven officials were “out of town,” “uninformed,” or “unavailable” in some way; one hung up his phone repeatedly. The one official who did comment said the World Bank was “stupid.” It’s easy to get angry at the World Bank for cutting funding, but in such an environment, how can they be blamed?
The second article was entitled “None Resist as Tonle Bassac Site is Cleared.” Tonle Bassac is an area around the Mekong River where hundreds of poor occupants lived in squatter-style camps. Recently, though, the government decided that poor people are bad for the country’s image and that they cannot live in city limits. As a result, they declared that they were going to clear the area. To the government’s credit, they provided the residents with a field to move to (albeit well outside of the city) and offered them each “a piece of tarpaulin, 10kg of rice, and a bottle of soy sauce.” As an enticement, after five years of residence the residents will get land titles. However, the field is so far out of town that those with jobs but without their own transportation are out of luck. There is no plumbing or electricity at all in the new area, so you can imagine how quickly health conditions will deteriorate. And there are no concrete plans to provide these services in the near future. The forced move was conducted by heavily armed riot police and young men with baseball bats who promptly destroyed every family’s housing. Reporters were blocked from the area and journalists were forced to erase all pictures. All aid workers and human rights observers were also kept far from the area by more heavily armed police. Human rights still have a ways to go, and as long as the poor are deemed a cosmetic problem, there are still fundamental changes necessary.
We read in all of our tour books how willing Cambodians would be to share all about their lives, even telling the most personal stories about how they have been affected by past regimes and in the present. We had read plenty of stories in books and the museum, so we decided to try for ourselves. We were not disappointed! What followed were some of the most amazing oral history interviews I could imagine. Our own driver for the day had been separated from his family during the Khmer Rouge. They all fled to the Thai border and then had to split up and move from house to house. His father was wanted by the regime but managed to escape and is now a refuge living in Minnesota.
Even more amazing was a driver who I started chatting with outside a bar where we were watching the World Cup with some great girls we met from Yale (actually on their way to Beijing for the Duke in China program—it’s a small world!). I invited the driver to come have a beer with us and asked him about what it was like during the regime, and he just began to talk. Both of his parents were taken to Toul Sleng and murdered. He was sent to live with his grandmother and the two of them also fled to the Thai border. The Khmer Rouge came and his siblings ended up being captured and killed as well, but he managed to escape, and was finally able to get back to the city when the Vietnamese Occupation began. He saved up to buy a tuk-tuk and now drives most of the day and night, working 16 or more hours a day. He said he takes tourists to the prison and killing fields all the time, but he cannot ever go in. He wasn’t afraid at all to tell us how much he hated the current Prime Minister and told all sorts of stories of the corruption. If only there was a way for these passionate, intelligent individuals to have a say in running the government—there would be a possibility for change!
The night ended with us all embracing our new friend (and us planning to meet the Yale girls again in Vietnam the next day), and so concluded our last night in Cambodia. I have written on and on about this country, but I have never been so captivated in my life. The history is more terrible than anything I could ever have dreamed of as the country as been passed around like yesterday’s scraps for centuries. There are such absolute extremes of rich and grinding, hopeless poor. Yet, the people are all so ebullient and have such a grateful, humble outlook on life. Further, never have I met a group so willing to share their darkest life stories to complete strangers, and conveniently many speak such good English. English really is considered the way out and the golden key for jobs and success, so everyone works so hard to learn it. There is huge potential for development here if only the corruption could end. The country is rich in resources and full of citizens who are so committed to their education and improvement. I think in ten years Cambodia will have found the answer and have got on the same train that Japan, China, and now Vietnam have found. I want to watch and be a part of this process and maybe even do something to help it along. These past five days in Cambodia have sparked so many questions and lit up so many possibilities, and I cannot wait to return.