Our man in Asia, Part 5

Phnom Penh, Cambodia   It was a grueling seven-hour bus ride from Saigon to Phnom Penh, including an hour-plus hassle at the border crossing. The landscape changed immediately at the border. Vietnam is lush and green. Cambodia is dry and not lush. One of the people on the tour had just finished a 55-day tour through Africa and proclaimed that roadside Cambodia looked like Africa.  

Cambodia is a kingdom, but the king actually lives in Germany and only shows up on special occasions.  

Phnom Penh itself looks fairly lively, though not vibrant like the cities in Vietnam. But considering Cambodia’s tragic past, it’s surprising it looks at all energetic. It’s that tragic past that is the story that is told over and over. First, it was the horrors of French rule. Then the Japanese occupation, followed by the consequences of the Vietnam War.

The war left a legacy of untold death and maiming from hidden land mines that continue to haunt the country today. (One guide showed us a map of where the various wild animals were clustered in Cambodia — elephants, tigers, etc. Then he casually mentioned that most of them have been killed by land mines. Some of the heroes of the struggle to find these landmines are the trained rats that can sniff them out.)

Worst of all was the genocide of the Khmer Rouge regime that terrorized the country from 1975 to 1978, slaughtering some two million people, about 20 percent of the country’s population. This was the ruthless ideology of Communism at its worst. The cities were emptied and the population forced to go work on collective farms. (Phnom Penh was literally a ghost town during this period.) Then, all the “enemies of the people” — such as all educated people, artists, and even people who wore glasses — were rounded up and summarily killed. This was carried out at the infamous “killing fields.” There were over one hundred of them. 

We were taken to one. Now, the field is a site of large holes in the ground where mass graves had been identified and dug up. Only large body parts were removed and put into glass-enclosed displays of skulls and other bones that dot the landscape. Smaller bones and traces of the victims’ clothing are still visible in the cleared killing fields.  

The guide who took us around the killing field as well as the prison in Phnom Penh said that 42 members of his extended family were murder victims. The reign of terror was finally stopped when Vietnam invaded the country. Many of the members of the Khmer Rouge remain in power in the country, but the tactics have been softened.  

Now there’s a strong push to recapture the culture that was destroyed. We went to a presentation of tradtional Cambodian dance. But that dance has had to recreated through exhaustive research, since all of the dancers and artists who had knowledge of the art were murdered. The same is true of the art created over the centuries. It had all been summarily destroyed by the Khmer Rouge.  

All unbearably tragic.  Despite this, the people were the sweetest and most accommodating I’ve ever encountered. 

Don will be filling in more of his travels before he returns next week — or maybe after. It’s been difficult to find the time and wifi to keep us current.