Phnom Penh, Cambodia--Part I
In Angkor visiting the ruins of temples and walled cities, the vast scale and impossible intricacy left me mystified and awed. In Phnom Penh visiting the memorial sites of the Cambodian genocide, the magnitude of the terror and inhumanity was disquieting.
Choueng Ek, the killing fields, lie about 15 km southwest of central Phnom Penh. Riding on the back of a motorcycle, I watched the haphazard flow of traffic thin out to a trickle on an unlined two-lane highway, the low-storied buildings and bustling marketplaces giving way to fields and lonely houses. Choueng Ek was once a grove of Longan trees, Longans being lychee-sized fleshy white fruit. The killing fields have since been turned into a memorial to the thousands of dead. There's a stuppa at it's center, replete with pagoda-like roofs with their winged and serpentine khmer ornamentations. Enshrined behind the glass walls of the lower half of the stuppa a tower of shelves about 12 feet high holds hundreds of skulls, looking more like an anthropological archive than a memorial. On the floor beneath the shelves a ragged mass of clothes is gathered in an unfolded pile. Throughout the compound there is a rambling collection of exhumed graves and building sites (most of the actual buildings have been dismantled). The accompanying signage is at turns coldly factual (this is where the transport trucks stopped) or gruesomely explicit (body counts of beheaded victims in one pit, women and children in another, a list of torture instruments found, a tree trunk on which infants were beaten to death with one fell swing). The main sign in an information kiosk gives a moving testimonial to the extent of destruction and upheaval under the madness that was the Khmer Rouge. Elsewhere there are objects without a single word of explanation and since I declined a tour guide I will never know what meaning if any these things held, I cannot help but give them some ominous eligiacal significance: differently sized mounds of dirt covered with bright multi-colored swatches of fabric; nestled between trees, what looked like a spirit house (spirit houses being the ubiquitous animist shrines in SE Asia that usually look like very elaborate birdhouses) holding bundles of shattered bones instead of the usual offering of food or flowers; and in one remote corner a smoldering pile of trash.
The surroundings are fairly idyllic; if you didn't know where you were, maybe you would guess you were in a park or village meeting place. There's a creek directly behind the compound, a densely packed lotus pond, well-manicured shrubbery and bright boungavilla. The silence evoked by solemn places is always punctuated, transgressed in counterpoint, by the mundane sounds of the present. Far from the commotion of the city, the only sound besides the usual chorus of bird calls is the sound of children from two adjacent grade schools, each on either side. As I sat on a bench by the mass graves the slight wind carried the sound of children reciting numbers in English, the universal din of school yard retorts and the screams of play. There are no ghosts here; they have all fled. More vanquishing than the lack of proper burial rites, a proper cremation for their exhumed bodies, or even the foreign interests in this site as an enterprise: the spirits cannot abide by the ignorance of successive generations, more and more children losing a sense of the monumental sufferings of the past. Almost three decades later and they have only now assembled a tribunal to try war criminals. I read another news item in a Phnom Penh paper about how a textbook on the genocide had just been published, but is still under the scrutiny of a textbook committee. The committee has asked for rewrites freeing current figures in government from any complicity.
After Choueng Ek, my driver asked me if I wanted to go to the shooting range. Shooting range, I asked, wondering if it was another historical site. Just 1 kilometer, he said, pointing further south down a dusty stretch one side of it undergoing some kind of construction. He held up his arms and mimed aiming and shooting a semi-automatic, pak pak pak pak, no okay, he asked. I said sure, complacent as always. After some minutes of bouncing and dust clouds he turned off into a narrow road, past a military post and pulled into what looked like a restaurant, an open air shed with tables, chairs and a billiard table facing a dirt parking lot. A young teenage boy came out to greet me. What is this place, I asked him. Shooting range, he replied and brought me to a wall festooned with maybe a dozen assault rifles hanging on racks, the guns aligned symmetricaly outwards like the arms of shiva. Would you like to try, the boy asked me. I declined and pulled out my camera to at least take a picture. Please, no photos, the boy said politely. Then I recalled the billboards I saw in Siem Reap of the recent ban on guns, Cambodia historicaly being a hub for trafficing of stockpiled arms and ammunition. I got back on the moto and as we drove away, my driver muttered something and chuckled. I guess I was the wrong kind of tourist.
Choueng Ek, the killing fields, lie about 15 km southwest of central Phnom Penh. Riding on the back of a motorcycle, I watched the haphazard flow of traffic thin out to a trickle on an unlined two-lane highway, the low-storied buildings and bustling marketplaces giving way to fields and lonely houses. Choueng Ek was once a grove of Longan trees, Longans being lychee-sized fleshy white fruit. The killing fields have since been turned into a memorial to the thousands of dead. There's a stuppa at it's center, replete with pagoda-like roofs with their winged and serpentine khmer ornamentations. Enshrined behind the glass walls of the lower half of the stuppa a tower of shelves about 12 feet high holds hundreds of skulls, looking more like an anthropological archive than a memorial. On the floor beneath the shelves a ragged mass of clothes is gathered in an unfolded pile. Throughout the compound there is a rambling collection of exhumed graves and building sites (most of the actual buildings have been dismantled). The accompanying signage is at turns coldly factual (this is where the transport trucks stopped) or gruesomely explicit (body counts of beheaded victims in one pit, women and children in another, a list of torture instruments found, a tree trunk on which infants were beaten to death with one fell swing). The main sign in an information kiosk gives a moving testimonial to the extent of destruction and upheaval under the madness that was the Khmer Rouge. Elsewhere there are objects without a single word of explanation and since I declined a tour guide I will never know what meaning if any these things held, I cannot help but give them some ominous eligiacal significance: differently sized mounds of dirt covered with bright multi-colored swatches of fabric; nestled between trees, what looked like a spirit house (spirit houses being the ubiquitous animist shrines in SE Asia that usually look like very elaborate birdhouses) holding bundles of shattered bones instead of the usual offering of food or flowers; and in one remote corner a smoldering pile of trash.
The surroundings are fairly idyllic; if you didn't know where you were, maybe you would guess you were in a park or village meeting place. There's a creek directly behind the compound, a densely packed lotus pond, well-manicured shrubbery and bright boungavilla. The silence evoked by solemn places is always punctuated, transgressed in counterpoint, by the mundane sounds of the present. Far from the commotion of the city, the only sound besides the usual chorus of bird calls is the sound of children from two adjacent grade schools, each on either side. As I sat on a bench by the mass graves the slight wind carried the sound of children reciting numbers in English, the universal din of school yard retorts and the screams of play. There are no ghosts here; they have all fled. More vanquishing than the lack of proper burial rites, a proper cremation for their exhumed bodies, or even the foreign interests in this site as an enterprise: the spirits cannot abide by the ignorance of successive generations, more and more children losing a sense of the monumental sufferings of the past. Almost three decades later and they have only now assembled a tribunal to try war criminals. I read another news item in a Phnom Penh paper about how a textbook on the genocide had just been published, but is still under the scrutiny of a textbook committee. The committee has asked for rewrites freeing current figures in government from any complicity.
After Choueng Ek, my driver asked me if I wanted to go to the shooting range. Shooting range, I asked, wondering if it was another historical site. Just 1 kilometer, he said, pointing further south down a dusty stretch one side of it undergoing some kind of construction. He held up his arms and mimed aiming and shooting a semi-automatic, pak pak pak pak, no okay, he asked. I said sure, complacent as always. After some minutes of bouncing and dust clouds he turned off into a narrow road, past a military post and pulled into what looked like a restaurant, an open air shed with tables, chairs and a billiard table facing a dirt parking lot. A young teenage boy came out to greet me. What is this place, I asked him. Shooting range, he replied and brought me to a wall festooned with maybe a dozen assault rifles hanging on racks, the guns aligned symmetricaly outwards like the arms of shiva. Would you like to try, the boy asked me. I declined and pulled out my camera to at least take a picture. Please, no photos, the boy said politely. Then I recalled the billboards I saw in Siem Reap of the recent ban on guns, Cambodia historicaly being a hub for trafficing of stockpiled arms and ammunition. I got back on the moto and as we drove away, my driver muttered something and chuckled. I guess I was the wrong kind of tourist.
posted by JGLuzifer at 7:32 AM
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