Those Infamous Killing Fields

Im in Phnom Penh...

And every tourist visiting the city takes a tour of the `Killing Fields`...

From 1975 till 1978, Cambodia was ruled by one of the worlds more recent and more ruthless political regimes... Draconian would be a definite understatement!
The political group were called the Khmer Rouge, and they followed an ìdealised `Maoist` doctrine of a `simple agrarian, communal society`... no money, no technology, no personal possessions.
But, regardless of what they `believed in`, the end result of their rise to power through military force and subsequent forced exercise in "social engineering" was one of the most ruthless dictatorships in history! Within days of taking control of the county`s capital city, the entire population were re-located en-mass to the countryside to `live the life that was `RIGHT`.

... and they did it by force... brutal ruthless, relentless force!

Of course, their idealised vision was impossible to create, but that didnt matter (You simply cant triple a country's rice production in a single season using manual labour no matter how much brute force you throw at it)...
And of course, like all such regimes before them (and no doubt those that have and will come after them too), as time progressed, the ruling elite became more and more paranoid and there were purges and the brutality increased...
And in just about three short years, the Khmer Rouge had either directly and brutally murdered , or starved to death through work malnourishment and disease, about 1.5 million people, amounting to one fifth of the country's population!!
Most people lump it in with the "genocide" label, but in truth, most of the killing was not aimed at a racial group within the overall population, but rather, it was an ideology targeting "modernity"... All technology or modern knowledge was deemed to be a problem and to be removed... Any professionals of any sort were killed, Doctors, Lawyers, Professors, Administrators, Engineers, etc. Educated people were targeted... even wearing glasses or just having soft hands was plenty of reason to end up dead!
And they didnt just stop with the "offenders" either, they killed the offenders entire family too... babys and grandparents and, well, basically everyone!... "If you want to kill a weed then you need to kill its roots  and its seeds too!"

... Absolutely horrific, and I can not find words to describe any of it!

In the end, their own paranoia and self destruction made them vulnerable enough for the "recently Communist" Vietnam to invade and bring their reign to an end!
But, it doesnt stop there, because the scale of the atrocities was fairly quickly discovered, but the Western democratic powers were still very much afraid of the Communist states (which were still in the ascendant phase at the time), so the West decided that they would prefer to continue to recognise the dethroned Khmer Rouge (who were hiding out in the jungle regions of the country) rather than the communist Vietnamese liberators and so rather than persue culpability of the top cadre of the group for their "Crimes Against Humanity", they chose to legitimise them, give them monetary and military support, and a seat at the UN as well!!!!!!!
And to this day, only a few of the top Cadre (And most of them are located and identified) have been executed or prosecuted. Pol Pot himself (the leader of the KR), died just a few years ago, but he was never imprisoned or brought to justice for what he did. Most of the others in the group are it seems likely to die peacefully at home after living long and comfortable lives!!!!
Truly, there is no justice!!!!

But, those three short years were enough to absolutely destroy the country and scar the people and in fact, the world... forever!


And so, while Im here I (like most tourists) decided to visit a couple of the significant sites and to "think about" what happened and why, and try to commit it and my thoughts and to memory so to speak.

First place to visit was the largest of the "Security Prisons" called S21 in the city here... It was a school before it became a prison, and its a fairly simple set of four three floor buildings, each of about 60m long. Its simple concrete block construction with flat roofs , painted walls and tiled floors. When it became a prison, they added closed surrounding walls and wire, and divided about half of the class-rooms into tiny 75cm x 2.5m cells with either wood or brick walls. The other half of the rooms were interrogation and administration rooms.

According to their own meticulous records, the KR "processed" about 17,000 people in this place and no one who was ever brought there was ever "released"... They all either died during interrogation or were taken away and executed...
When the Vietnamese liberated the city, they found only 14 prisoners there, all dead and I believe all still shackled to the iron bed frames where they had been tortured to death.
But, as a current day visitor, its all pretty sanitised of course... The structure is all still intact and there are still some few of specific larger pieces of "equipment", but the two most striking things for me were as follows...

First, there are a few large prints of grainy black and white pictures of those last 14 victims on the walls of the rooms where they were found (about the only gruesome imagery in the place at all). And the rusty steel bed frames and a wooden desk or chair or two as well... And you can clearly see from the picture details that this is the exact room and the exact bed frame where that person died a horrendous death... The only things missing from the space are that the actual body has been removed, and the puddle of blood and filth beneath them has been washed away and the smell along with it... You are standing on the same tiles where that puddle of muck was... and bearing witness as you may!

The second thing is that in many of the larger rooms there are many display boards with hundreds of the pictures that the KR took of their "victims" before they were interrogated... There are no names or dates or other details...The thing about the pictures is that you get to see their expressions (which is of course the point)... Some angry, some sad, some defiant, some afraid, many blanc or uncomprehending... Its quite a mirror on ones own feelings and thoughts... I as usual found myself "feeling" more when I saw the women's faces than for the men...Still not sure why that is?

So, I walked around the place and read the information available and looked... and thought... And then I went back out to find my tooktook driver and we headed off to the second site...

This was the actual "killing field" site for that prison facility and it was about 15km away, on the outskirts of the city. The site is now a park/memorial and they have an extremely well set-up little self guided audio tour... You pay your entry fee and they give you the little audio set and off you go to slowly walk around the tour sites.  Like I said, its very well done and has some quite moving snippets from various survivors from the period.
The site is actually surprisingly compact... There are none of the original structures remaining (they were all flimsy and temporary anyway), but there are about fifty quite small pits (say 3mx3m on average). There is also a small dam/lake, and some orchard trees that were always there. The whole site is only a couple of hundred metres square, but in those fifty odd little pits, they found over 8000 bodies!!! (And to date, over a hundred of these types of sites have been found in Cambodia!)
And one of the more horrific little sites is a large old tree against which the KR executioners regularly took babies from their mothers, gripped them by the legs, and simply smashed them against the tree trunk... after which the mothers were themselves bludgeoned to death (no bullets were used as that was too expensive!)........ again, words simply fail me...

The main structure at the site is a new one. Its a memorial stuppa that has been built to house the bones of those exhumed at the site. There are about fifteen layers of shelves in the structure that is probably about 20m tall, and the skulls are all plainly visible from outside since the structure is effectively made of four stout concrete columns with glass walls. And of course the visibility is the point...Lest We Forget!
Its not at all ghoulish and I thought it was all done very respectfully and openly...

And so, that was basically "the tour", and on reflection, I guess I was expecting to have more "feelings" evoked in me by being at the places in person so to speak... You know, maybe feel something dark, or sinister, or oppressive about the buildings or the site or something. But truth is, for me, they felt completely blank... Now I could easily, and of course did, evoke very strong feelings of all sorts by thinking about what happened, but thats "self inflicted"...The places themselves evoked nothing in me!

So, its the "thinking path" for me again, and I've done my usual session of pondering about it all and trying to understand... And I think Im a reasonably able person when it comes to seeing other perspectives. I can usually find a way to see how someone can feel the way they do about something, or do something that I would not do myself... And for lots of aspects of these atrocious human acts, I can see how they come about... Its power and greed and fear and anger mostly... All very human and all of us have these failings, limitations, frailties etc. So, I get that, but I can not for the life of me (I cant decide if thats an apt, inapt, or inept turn of phrase in this case ;)  ) fathom how it is that people can inflict these kinds of cruelty on other people who have clearly not done something to the person doing the torture...
I can of course see how people can be made to do just about anything by force, fear, and manipulation... But thats not the case here. Well Im sure it has its place but its not my main point... My thought is that to do these things to people I like to think that I'd have to be forced to do it... That Id feel guilt or regret... And that if I had to do it repeatedly, Id probably find a way of mentally walling myself off from the pain of inflicting this sort of suffering on others... Yes, I get the "dissociation" thing,  And I get the "reallocation" of anger/pain from one subject to another;  And I get the idea of power and control...But none of that covers it either... There is no doubt in my mind that the people inflicting the torture were actively enjoying it... a lot!, and not for any purpose other than to inflict as much pain as they could!
And its not like its just a few rare pathological people with this ability to dissociate from any guilt, No, on the contrary, throughout history, "thuggish" behaviour is an easily harnessed tool for regimes who want to control populations... It seems that there are lots of us who have the ability to do this... and that means, given the right circumstances its probably a latent aspect in all of us...

And thats a very scary thought!
And, I think its a peculiarly "human" trait!... Yes, dogs and some other animals can become habituated to killing livestock or people etc, and yes, they can clearly enjoy what they are doing, but I dont think they can or do deliberately think up ways to deliberately inflict more pain... either physically or emotionally...


Most of us live our lives without that "necessary stimulus" it seems.. There are of course some very few who become mass murderers, and many more who become pathological liars, and many more of us still who seem to treat ethics as more or less a "convenience", but for the most part most of us manage to act in "Socially Acceptable" ways, most of the time.
But I think the kind of mental processes that enable people to enjoy performing the kinds of atrocity that were done here require us to really and absolutely "take the gloves off" on our psyches so to speak. And its pretty alarming to see what that can lead to!
Now obviously it can happen (and history shows us that it frequently does), but I really honestly have not been able to find it in myself...
But, I think that just demonstrates what a fortunate life Ive had... I think its one of those things, like living through a war or surviving a natural disaster... No one who has not been through it themselves can ever know what it means, and there is ever-after a gulf of understanding between those that have experienced it and those that have not..  A bridge that once crossed can never be returned across...

And so, in the end, I simply dont understand... and I guess I should be grateful for that...

Cambodia Impressions

So, Im here in Cambodia, and Ive had a short visit to the city of Siem Reap and the temples of Angkor.
But I figure that is hardly a fair impression of the country, so I decided to spend a bit longer and took a bus trip to the capital city of Phnom Penh.

And, again, the bus trip took pretty much the whole day and I got a pretty good look at the countryside along the way. The country I went through is pretty flat... Actually, its Exceedingly flat!... Its part of the flood plains/drainage system of the massive Mekong river.
Now, it is only just the start of the dry season here, but Id have to say that if "global warming" causes the sea level to rise pretty much at all, then most of this part of Cambodia looks like it is at serious risk of being flooded!

All of the country that I travelled through was one vast, cultivated swamp!... No self respecting Cambodian farmers house in this area is built without stilts of about three metres in height. The land is covered with rice fields and coconut palms are sprinkled about the place too. There are mango and papaya trees around the simple wood, thatch mat, and corrugated steel homes, and there are lots of water buffalo and Brahman cattle about the place too. There seem to be relatively few chickens but many more ducks as livestock.
One thing that I was a bit surprised at is that pretty much every household in the country (and they are very simple agrarian dwellings)  has its own "fish farm"... Thats over stating it a bit, but essentially, every house has a pond or, more accurately, enlarged road-side ditch with brown muddy water in it, and its used for most water requiring activities like watering the stock and washing the kids,... and farming fish...
It seems that since the land is too wet for goats and chickens, the people have substituted fish and ducks for their dietary protein needs (which makes perfect sense of course). Just take a walk through any market and you will find an amazing variety of aquatic life being sold for food... There are many sizes and varieties of eels and catfish and Perch and other fish that are barely bigger than your little finger, but apparently thats not an issue and if they taste OK, thats enough... There are also plenty of sizeable frogs (sold by the Kg!) and the occasional tortoise too.

Virtually the only `solid land` that I saw in my journey was the dike that the road was built on... There also seemed to be a thriving trade in land... Not `lots` of land but rather earth its self.... a rare and valuable commodity around here (a whole new meaning to "real estate agent"!!).

Anyway, the vast expanses of the countryside were paddy fields... Not in that romanticised view of verdant green rice fields sculpted onto the sides of rolling hills, interspersed with idyllic little thatched cottages and happy little farm workers in the paddys planting rice;
But rather in the form of vast expanses of flat flooded land with mind numbing drudgery under the hot sun and covered from head to toe in brown mud, day in, day out,... forever... Its a simple and constant struggle to survive for the farmers !

And even that main `highway` that I was on was barely a two lane paved road ... With plenty of pot-holes and mud and dust in the mix too.
And the vehicle of choice across the land... Well its the little motorbike of course. The country is absolutely full of little 100-125cc motorbikes, and they are all of the `step-through` frame style rather than the `leg-over`type too. (A bit different to Central and South America).
And most of the took-tooks here are different from those on Thailand too... They`ve mostly adopted a `trailer` type solution to the problem here... They bolt on a bracket over the top of the back seat (which means the bike can be disconnected and used as just a bike as well) and then they can attach any old motorbike to the passenger trailer ... which comfortably seats two westerners, or squishes in four, or seats a good six to eight of the locals,... or pretty much ALL of whatever it is that you want to transport anywhere, regardless of size or weight if you are a local :))

And the city traffic is a pretty interesting experience too... Its certainly more chaotic than most Central American cities, but it also has far fewer cars (though trucks are very prevalent) and far fewer traffic lights too.. But the traffic seems well adjusted to cope with lots of motorbikes going in every direction imaginable ... Including a `counter flow`stream of traffic up the side of pretty much every òne-way`street you see :)) The dominant rules seems to be `make allowances` for others, and `dont make any too sudden changes in direction... In any event, it seems to work quite well, and I think I wouldnt have too much trouble adapting to it on a motorbike :))

A Visit to Angkor

When I decided to go visit my family, I also decided to stop off in SE Asia on the way back to Canada.

Its a very long flight from Vancouver to Perth and there is no such thing as a direct flight...
And if there was then it would be something like 18-20 hours long!.
I ended up booking my flight through Hong Kong for price and availability, but I have no real urge to spend any time there.
But for the return flight, I decided Id use the stop-over to take another little break somewhere in SE Asia. Even though Ive been to Thailand before, I decided to book a short hop return flight to Bangkok to use as a "base of opperations" and take the opportunity to do a little touristing...

And, first on the list of things to go see was the well known temples of "Angkor Wat"...
But thats not in Thailand, its next door in Cambodia. So, after a day or two of acclimatising to the tropics in Bangkok, I hopped on a bus for the day long trip across the boarder to the city of Siem Reap. And then I spent a day checking out the legendary temples...

I should state here that I didnt really have too great a expectations of the place for a couple of reasons... First off, the temples have been a major tourist attraction since the end of the second world war (barring a decade or so when the Cambodian boarders were closed to all foreigners). So, I expected that there would be absolutely nothing that was remotely "un-touristy" or "remote/authentic".
And secondly, I've had plenty of encounters with other travellers over the years who have been there and have told me more or less what to expect.



So, with those thoughts in mind, Id decided to go see it anyway and in the end, I got about what I was expecting...
Thats probably a bit hard on the place really because its a very impressive group of temples and it is without doubt a marvel for its time (1000 -1500 years old or so). And it is clear that there were massive feats of earth moving and stone carving canal digging, and engineering etc. The structures are, in my mind, on par with the Aztec and Inca citys of central America and Peru, and the Hindu city of Kajuraho too.
... Incidentally, Angkor Wat has a great deal more in common with Kajuraho than I had thought... I'd thought Angkor was a Buddhist temple, but it was in fact built as a Hindu temple to the god Vishnu, and later became used as a Buddhist temple (Many of the temples at the site have mixed Hindu/Buddhist architecture/symbology.

Back to my personal experiences...
The challenge for me though was as expected... the tourists (of which, I was of course one)... There were absolutely "Hordes" of us and especially groups of Japanese tourists... And they were all very nice and polite, if a bit noisy. And the site is more or less "in Japan's back-yard" so to speak, so I have absolutely nothing against them (or anyone else for that matter) being there and "doing their thing " at all... Its just challenging for me personally... The site sees more than 10,000 tourists each day!!

Anyway, other than that, I guess I found it all a bit "smaller" than I'd expected... Its funny how we form our expectations of scale... I guess it mostly comes from other people's descriptions in our imaginations, and Holywood's imagery...

Lots of pictures, and I find that I'm "Way out of practice at photo taking", but here they are:
 

They say we are all ``Budhas in progress``