I'm currently sat in seat 35D on a Vietnam Airlines flight to Hanoi, Northern Thailand. Never having mastered the art of sleeping on any form of transport, I long ago surrendered to the fact that despite my love of sleep (and it actually being a long held favorite pastime), for whatever reason if I'm not horizontal, preferably sprawled out, its not happening. In addition, my seat appears to have been designed for people with slightly better posture than myself, kinda bending in then out again just at the base of the spine, a little like the smooth curve you'd find on a shoe horn. My attention has just been turned to the half pint of milk I've been given for my tiny cup of coffee.
..and so in any case, a welcome opportunity to read, write and reflect on the past several days in Cambodia.
So much has been written about the recent bloody past of Cambodia and the tragic events that surrounded the installation of the Pol Pot regime that it's easy to quickly become engulfed by the huge quantity and variety of books on the subject. However, one I would highly recommend is Surviving The Killing Fields, The Cambodian Odyssey of Haing Ngor. It's a chilling and personal account of life before, during and after the Khmer Rouge.
Interestingly, my own initial introduction to the consequences of the horrific events that unfolded and their residual bloody stains on modern day Cambodia didn't come by way of reading one of the many books that litter the city's bookstores. Rather by way of conversation with my taxi driver 'Polly', charged with taking me from Siem Reap airport in to town. Polly's story, albeit briefly recounted for me in the space of ten minutes, is, I have no doubt, indicative of the suffering, upheaval and loss suffered by thousands of other Cambodians during the time of the Khmer Rouge.
At a very young age and with both parents murdered by the Khmer Rouge, Tam Pally as he was known then, fled to the Northern territory of Cambodia, on the border with Thailand. He was taken in by a Thai family and afforded the nickname 'polly' and adopted the family surname in order to better integrate within the community. There he spent several years both at school and then college, the period of time during which his native country Cambodia was being torn apart by civil war and the systematic annihilation of thousands of his fellow country men and women by the Khmer Rouge. Having returned to Cambodia after the fall of the regime, Polly started a family, which he now looks after by making ends meet with taxi work and acting as a tour guide. The way he stated so matter of factly that his parents had been killed by the Pol Pot regime, made me wonder how deep we have to bury such grief in order to go about our lives as 'normal' as possible.
Cambodia's recent history doesn't make for light reading. The well documented atrocities of the Pol Pot regime and indeed the events leading up to the military coup in 1974 will forever leave a bloody footnote at the bottom of any informed social commentary regarding modern day Cambodia. Wherever you seem to go in Cambodia, you're confronted with the stark consequences of such blind sighted violence; men, women and children without arms and legs are a common sight and serve to bring home the difficulty of leaving the past behind. The war maybe over, but the suffering continues, be it physical or worse, psychological; I can't even begin to imagine the mental trauma of losing family and friends under such brutal circumstances. It's a violence that grips you hard around the jugular and shakes you to the core; it leaves you dispirited, depressed and upset. These people are in every sense worse off than before, much worse off. This in turn must exacerbate the frustration, anger and loss that Cambodians feel when trying to piece back together their fragmented lives and get on with the everyday business of just survival.
A brief visit to The Killing Fields was a poignant part of my own understanding; it wasn't so much the mass graves that hit me hard, more so the items of clothing that you could still see poking through the mud and dirt. These were worn by people who likely knew their time was up; worn by real people just like you and me, men, women and most likely lots of children who had found themselves, through no fault of their own at the end of the line. Mercilessly tortured and executed by soldiers barely into adolescence, with little or no understanding as to the 'whys' and 'what fors' of their actions. This is a point to re-emphasise; many of the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge regime were no older than 12 or 13 yrs old; from the countryside, with little or no education and thus providing the perfect fodder for cold blooded indoctrination and manipulation on a mass scale. Estimates vary as to the exact number of lives lost during the 1974-79 Cambodian genocide, but it's accepted somewhere in the region of 1 to 1.5 million people. Such a tragic and pointless waste of life that I'm actually a little lost for words.
As I Ieft The Killing Fields, for me a place for reflection and contemplation, my mood was sombre. I was asking myself what lessons could be learned from such a tragedy. Any? Or was this just another bloody event in the ongoing cycles of civil war and unrest we have witnessed so often in the past 100 years, more over in the past 50 years of so called 'peace time'. I don't have the answers, lots of unanswered questions, but not the answers. Does anybody? I was startled out of my morose thoughts by a question from my taxi driver that both surprised and angered me " did I want to go to an artillery range and shoot some AK-47's?" it would seem this was considered part of the tourist tour. The bitter irony of such a remark given the nature of the site and all that it represented needs no expansion or explanation; but it did leave me wondering, was this just a cheap and dirty opportunity to cash in on tourists hungry for a bit of full metal jacket, or did this represent something deeper in the Cambodian Pysche, a penchant for violence that has been deeply ingrained into their societal ethics?
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