It's a short hour and a half flight from Lao capital to the Cambodian capital. Phnom Penh has a population of 1.2 million in the city core. The name actually dates back to 1372 when some lady by the name of Penh found five Buddhist statues in a log floating down the Mekong. She then built a temple to house and worship these amazing statues from the lord buddha. In Cambodian language, the city means hill temple. From the outside world, the city is known as the Lexus city. You see high end cars everywhere. I saw my first street light this trip in this city. The city sits on the convergence of three rivers - Mekong, Bassac, and Tonle Sap. the city is dirty, loud, and a significant change from calm Laos. I miss the stillness of the Lao cities.
We visited the S.21 prison camp today. It was shocking and abhorring to hear the recent history of this country and the devastating effects of genocide first hand. This was a high school that was transformed into a prison and torture camp during the Pol Pot reign from 1975-1979 for a total of 3 years 8 months and 19 days. It hosted 17-20 thousand prisoners during this time. Only seven known survivors exist today. 2.2 million people died under the Khmer Rouge dictatorship. Pol Pot is the only dictator in history to not bring their country into an industrialized nation, he brought it back to the stone age. The methods of killing in this genocide were: poison, maiming to bleed to death, electrical whips during torture, water boarding slash drowning, buried alive, blunt force drama, and children had the worst deaths. Babies were bashed against trees, ripped in half, forced to be thrown around like footballs, and other horrendous actions. The four buildings, A B C D, have been preserved to show the conditions of the prison, blood is still on the walls, shackles placed everywhere, photographs of each victim and Khmer worker are throughout building B. Building A was the torture chambers with the water boarding, bed with arms and leg shackles, tin pissers, whips, electric charged whips, plus other torture devices. Building C was the living quarters which each classroom 20x20 feet housed up to 50 people in these 2x2 brick rooms. Building D housed the reminds that have been found on the premise. I was sick to my stomach the entire day. It's horrendous to know how severe it was when the world wouldn't intervene.
From there, we went to one of the 20,000 killing field sites. You literally can see bones and clothes popping up through the ground due to erosion. In this site, 70,000 people have been found. It's horrific to know people were dropped like flies into these graves whether they were dead or alive. Mothers had to watch their children being killed before being allowed to die. It makes you wish that the world had intervened in time to prevent this all. The Wat on the killing field housed 8,000 bodiless skulls.
A broad overview of the timeline:
1970 - secret bombings of Cambodia - Khmer Rouge kicked everyone who was not a national Cambodian out of the country
1975-1979 - Khmer wiped out all class systems, brought country into darkest age known thus far, genocide of all educated/wealthy/children/elderly/dissidents/opposition
1979 - Vietnamese invade Cambodia on behalf of Pol Pot which then protected the regime from foreign intervention. Thailand during this time actually protected Pol Pot.
1996-2006 - tribunal set up and formed to prosecute crimes against humanity
1998 - country finally had a semblance of peace without fighting
2010 - justice finally served for those at fault (top 5)
2011 - firing erupted between Thailand and Cambodia over border disputes, military believes difference lines of borders which makes the country unstable yet again
For one of the girls 21st birthday, we went to a restaurant called Friends. It is an unitive to help street youth be trained with skills to help them succeed in the restaurant industry. Food was amazing and all locally grown. I had a delicious pineapple, star fruit, banana smoothie. Everyone went out to a predominately Asian club called the FFC (Foreign Correspondene Club) which was a riot to invade with 30 white kids.
It was 42C today and muggy as an Arkansas summer.
AFN
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