Those of you who have been reading along with my blog since the start of my trip more than four months ago know that in my posts I aim to enlighten. While I feel it's important to share my experience, I want to make sure there's something you can take away from reading other than just "Oh good, Mac is having a great time." That is why, although it's a dark subject, I wanted to talk about the one aspect of this culture that I just can't stop thinking about. The one event that took place here that shaped life so thoroughly. And the event that I've spent the last several days learning about and trying to understand how and why it happened: The Cambodian Genocide. While I am the farthest thing from an expert on the topic, I visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (S-21 Prison where they tortured and killed enemies of the regime) and I visited the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek (where they systematically killed over 20,000 men, women and children). While such terror can't be fully comprehended by outside eyes more than 40 years after the event, I have spent several days reflecting on this event, what it means for modern-day Cambodia, and most jarringly, what it means to be an American as our country played a large role in the event.
First, a little historical background. In 1975, a communist party called the Khmer Rouge overthrew Cambodia's Khmer Republic, a U.S. backed government that had been in power since 1970. I'm pulling the rest from Wikipedia because it's just easier lol - Following their victory, the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, installed a government called the Democratic Kampuchea and immediately set about forcibly depopulating the country's cities, murdering hundreds of thousands of their perceived political opponents and carrying out the Cambodian genocide in which 1.5 to 3 million people (around 25% of Cambodia's population) died.
The Khmer Rouge regime was highly autocratic, xenophobic, paranoid, and repressive. The genocide was under the guise of the Khmer Rouge enforcing its social engineering policies. Its attempts at agricultural reform led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, even in the supply of medicine, led to the death of thousands from treatable diseases such as malaria. Part of the purification included numerous genocides of Cambodian minorities. Arbitrary executions and torture were carried out by its cadres against perceived subversive elements, or during genocidal purges of its own ranks between 1975 and 1978.
I had known Cambodia had a rough past but I had no idea the extent of the attrocities. When I learned that a quarter of the population died, I was flabbergasted. I couldn't comprehend how this was not a more talked about event, how this wasn't a subject covered in my high school world history classes and how, like the Chilean dictatorship, just how much of the world's major events we don't talk about in the U.S.
The Genocide Museum and Killing Fields were the most powerful museums I've ever visited. Patrons walk through the prison where they tortured thousands of people, most of whom didn't know anything and didn't pose any actual threat to the regime. Barbed wire still encircles the premise, the bed frames where they carried out torture are still in their places, and the walls still covered in blood. You could just feel the souls' unrest in this place. The air itself was suffocating. Death loomed. The Killing Fields, although situated in a gorgeous patch of countryside, were the burial grounds of thousands of victims. Bones and clothing poked through the ground as you walked across dykes between massive burial pits. Chemical deposits of DTT, which were used to mask the musk of death could still be seen in the ground alongside clubs, hatchets, and other objects that served as cheaper means of murder than bullets.
Harrowing as it was, I'll spare any further gruesome details. My aim here is not to provoke but to show the extent of the tragedy. To get the real experience, you'll just have to come to Cambodia. But I must have walked around Tuol Sleng for the better part of four hours, dialing in every number the audio tour had to offer, listening to the history, testimonials and anecdotes. I even had the privilege to hear from a survivor who had been transported against her will to till the fields under unbearable conditions that took her whole family from her.
After I left the museum, I just meandered around Phnom Penh for a couple hours, my mind bogged down with horrors. I just wanted to observe people in the streets and find out how looking at the culture through the lens of the recent mass death changed my perception of present life.
I was first struck by the realization that most Cambodians I saw probably lost someone they loved. Older men had lost brothers, sons and wives, younger women had lost fathers and aunts, even young kids probably had grandparents that were taken from them before they were born. If one in four people died, extrapolate and just think of how many people that affects. Just about everyone.
My second thought was just how much this event had set the country back. I don't know if Cambodia has ever enjoyed a great deal of prosperity but there's no doubt that compared to Thailand, Cambodia is far-underdeveloped. People here hustle harder than I've ever seen - they'll ask you repeatedly to buy their merchandise or if you need a ride and their insistence does not stem from a cultivated work ethic but from a clear need to make enough that day to feed their family.
My third thought was introspective and concerned my American identity. In the museum I learned that in 1975, a great deal of Cambodia wanted to move away from the western influence of America that was a foundation of the government then in power. Thus the initial Khmer Rouge victory was a result of a marked counter-movement to everything my country valued. I also learned just how much American presence in Vietnam devastated Cambodia as we dropped millions of tons of bombs onto the Cambodian countryside, killing thousands of civilians and farmers. Around this time I just started to get angry. There is still a profound resentment of Americans in Southeast Asia and I understand why. Why must the place I was born be such a burden for me to bear? Why must values that I don't even associate with comprise my identity? Why should I be the modern incarnation of a thousand shitty choices soft-handed, white men in office made before I was even born? My immediate response to my own thoughts were that I should be so lucky to even have privileged thoughts as these. But what good is privilege if you're trapped in it? A thousand thoughts like this shot around in my head like an atom's rogue electrons until I just wanted a beer.
When all seems bleak, it's difficult to look on the bright side. But if there's one silver lining in this whole experience for me it's that with great struggle emerges tremendous beauty. And that beauty takes the form of Cambodian faces. Everywhere I go, I see smiles. I see laughter. I see people with far less enjoying life far more. And I can only attribute this to the triumph of the human spirit. The unquenchable desire to move away from the darkness of the past and embrace the light of hope. A drive that can only come from being down so long that there's no place to go but up. And every time a Cambodian smiles at me on the street, it carries far more weight than a smile from an American because it is a smile born of beauty, one of rebirth and a smile that illuminates the faces of the thousands before them who were deprived of their smiles. As my tears grace my keyboard I know that it's time to stop writing and time to start thanking these people for their endless strength. Even seeds ripped from their flowers can rise once again.
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