Phenom Penh & S21

My lonely planet says that Cambodia is filled with, "Historical contradictions mixed with hopeful optimism." This sounds like a country of magic. The land seems to feel more clear here, clear of trees, I mean, and the ones that remain dot out symmetrical paths around the houses.

I met Gary and Marta on the tour and we formed a de facto group in Cambodia. Gary is a PE teacher in London, and upon first glance, you know it. He is originally from South Africa and played his part in the South African army, which continues to affect his need for control, as far as I can tell. He has a tiger tatooed on his leg. Marta feels uneasy around him. Marta is from Spain. She is a pear shaped, new-agey woman, who dabbles in homeopathy. She studied EU humanitarian law in Brussels before working as a lawyer for a few years. Recently, she decided to go into the public sector and will start her job as a civil servant next month. She is taking the path directly to politician, and she is not shy to share this. Our group made an amazing mixture of personalities. Imagine a red cabbage, apple, and green lemon juicer...

For dinner, we went to the fruit market and bought all kinds of crazy fruits and vegetables. Marta is really conscious of what she puts into her body and how it makes her feel, so she only eats fruit for dinner. Some of her insights were really inspiring. I hope I can share them with you later.

The next morning we woke up at 7, because Marta let us sleep in, thank goodness. Then, we went to S21. S21 was a detention camp that served as a prison for those contrary to the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Over 14,000 people were killed here, and only 12 of those admited, ever left. It was truly a horrible place. The museum itself is filled with photographs and has been supplemented with the fantasticly detailed reports collected by the Khmer Rouge at the time. I'm no expert, but I will list here a summary of what I have learned through this museum and reading S21. Please correct me if I have gotten something wrong.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were a minority faction of the Cambodian political system when turmoil sent 1973 King to China. China told the king to throw his support behind the Khmer Rouge (communism brethern and all), which he did. This gave them the leverage to evacuate all the major cities. Almost overnight, in 1975, the cities were evacuted under the guise that the Americans were coming to bomb Cambodia. People struck with fear had no choice but to leave. Once people were away from the cities, Pol Pot (the new prime minister, according to the radios) abolished the current monetary system, making money worthless, and put all of the cambodian people back into the fields. Overnight, he attempted to turn all of cambodia into a classless, agrarian society. He gave people that were already poor farmers full party rights, but the Khmer Rouge's top brothers (a collection of well educated and travelled men) despised higher classes and viewed higher education as an infectious disease, so they treated it as such. Many from the cities were viewed as political threats and simply disappeared. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge saw their own people as the biggest source of threat, and were determined to extinguish this threat. Better a few people than the system, they thought. Their brutal hands and their poor farming practices and skewed medical treatment ended up killing around 1/4 of the Khmer population, however, before they were stopped by the Vietnamese in 1979.

I can't help but see these cities and these beautiful people walking by me with the lingering pain that this regime has caused.