Eric Prokesh Writes from Phnom Penh

Eric Prokesh and David Astudillo snapped this picture of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Phnom Penh, housed inside a wonderful old French colonial building.

Phnom Penh:

Dusty, yes. Poor, obviously. French colonial buildings cry out for repair and one sees the mere beginnings of signs of new construction. A maquette of twin towers yet to be built stands in front of a cleared site on a prominent corner near the Independence monument.

And yet there is an admirable vitality here. Admirable because this city which had swelled in war-time to 2.5 million people, was depopulated in one terrible day in April, to a barrack town of 50,000, by Pol Pot, in 1975. A whole generation of teachers, engineers, doctors, in fact anyone with soft hands, was murdered-nearly one quarter of the population. The “fortunate” who survived, worked starving in a vast series of concentration camps with iron-age tools. This dark dream of a madman was achieved in less than 4 years. Since then…invasion, a near state of civil war lasting into the 90’s, Cambodia has only recently enjoyed relative stability.

It is with some reluctance that I write about these past events-familiar to most, but they are visible everywhere in the present. In the smiling drivers who offer to take you to the Royal Palace, National Museum and the Killing Fields. In the abundant books about the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, on sale in the airport bookshops, tourist sites and from street hawkers. In the many victims of landmines who are everywhere to be seen. Finally and foremost, by Cambodians themselves, who summon up the courage to talk about these nightmarish events.

Phnom Penh now reckoned at 2 million, has doubled in size in only 10 years. Two lane avenues become four or five with scooters, Tuk-Tuks (small buggies pulled by motor-bike) delivery vans and the SUV’s of the moneyed classes entangling and jockeying for space. Investment from the rest of Asia, though not yet as conspicuous as in other mini-dragons, is pouring into the country. The Psars-Central Market and Russian Market and numerous smaller markets are always packed and busy.

Phnom Penh at Night:
We head toward the river in an open tuk-tuk -better for communing with all of the traffic and street life we see. And lively it is. Traffic nearly as bad as daytime. Scooters sometimes carrying as many as four, parks near the monuments and river full of couples. Tourists, expatriots-there are many and locals fill Sisowath Quay and its many riverside bars and restaurants. The Cambodians seem to love the night. And this is Monday.

Much of the food here, Khmer, Thai , Vietnamese, French, is quite good. The clubs-The Foreign Correspondent’s Club through which every visitor to Cambodia passes and which does still see an occasional journalist, the techno Metro with its famously beautiful waitresses, and the Heart of Darkness-the disco where Cambodia’s young elite, foreigners, and other shadier types mix, to name just three, are fun and fascinating. And it’s all unbelievably cheap. A bottle of drinkable French vin ordinaire costs $10.00. Good Martinis cost $3.50-$5.00. Our night on the town costs $75.00 for dinner with a bottle wine, drinks, and waiting driver. Returning home, tired, the dust stings our faces. The city is still active. We drive by a small produce market setting up for the next day, and catch the aroma of pineapple and stinky-fruit.

National Museum:

Near the Royal Palace, centered around a lovely garden, fragrant with jasmine, is worth a visit. Ancient bronze objects, ceramics, and 19th and early 20t century artifacts from the monarchy are housed here, along with many images of the Buddha for whom one is given flowers by the faithful to make an offering. A great deal of scholarship remains to be done here, as many pieces are still unattributed as to age.

Royal Palace:

Is a rather recent creation-early 20th century and may not be to everyone’s taste. Along with the royal buildings, it contains the Silver Pagoda with its silver floor tiles-mostly covered and an iron, belle-epoque house, the gift of Napoleon III. Cambodian designed, French built, the fanciful and charming architecture reminds one more of a set for The Opera-Comique than anything authentically Asian.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum:

Now looks like what it once was-a high school of several block buildings, three stories high, with a play ground in front. The Khmer Rouge remade it into S-21-a processing center and temporary weigh-station for those it had marked for death. Its special targets were professionals and the educated whom Pol Pot regarded as beyond redemption and obstacles to new order he tried to force on Cambodia.

Our guide is a thoughtful looking woman in her forties. I hesitantly ask her if any of these events touched her. She tells us that both her father and brother were killed and that she and her mother made a 300 km forced- march to a work camp near the Thai border where she saw many die.

Inside the bare, tile floored, rooms, are enlarged portraits of some of the victims, who were photographed and processed with bureaucratic efficiency. Other rooms contain the crude instruments of torture- hammers, axes, rebar shackles. Another room has a trough and tub used for what sounds suspiciously like water-boarding.

About 17,000 people are thought to have passed through here on their way to the killing fields of Choeung Ek. Empty and clean now, to understand what this place once was, you have only to read the prison rules which are posted in the courtyard. The most chilling forbids prisoners to scream or cry out during torture.

Choeung Ek Killing Fields:

In this place, about the size of a soccer field, it is difficult to believe that the small pits, now filling in again with each rainy season, could contain so many. It is less grim than the institutional Tuol Sleng prison, because mitigated by nature. But here even nature was murderously used by the Khmer Rouge who made genocide an efficient, if low-tech affair. Our guide Sal, points out a tree near one of the graves on which infants were killed and to the razor sharp triangles of palm tree bark, effectively used as knives. The Khmer Rouge didn’t waste bullets. They also cynically used children to do this work, ensuring that future war-crime trials would be nearly impossible.

Sal, an impressively intelligent young man speaks with a confident and spontaneous English which would have guaranteed execution when this place was in operation. He is from a family of farmers so his parents were spared death. Yet, he remembers, that even a family vacation was tainted by the memory of this time when they happened to pass the camp where his parents were once forced laborers.

The ground around Choeung Ek is littered, with shreds of cloth-the clothes of the dead. Like so many tiny leaves, they are still surfacing along with bits of bone. In the center of Choeung Ek, a slender pagoda-shrine rises in which the skulls of 9,000 are housed behind glass. On May 20th, Sal tells us, Cambodians come to pray and make offerings at this horrible, holy place and many others like it around the country.

Leaving:
This place has gotten under my skin and I leave unsatisfied and haunted. Angkor Wat in its configuration, architecture and bas-reliefs, asks nothing less of the spectator than to contemplate the beginning and end of the universe. The gentle Buddhist people I meet seem incapable of unkindness much less genocide. And yet for less than four years, not long ago, this was anyone’s idea of hell on earth. I overheard a guide at Angkor Wat say ‘Cambodian people not real Buddhist-still believe in Vishnu’. Is the answer in this spiritual dichotomy of interior peace and churning destruction and regeneration? I am too ignorant to know. What I do see now-the energy, which can’t be faked, is certainly regeneration and a tangible sign of hope.

Photo Credit David Astudillo & Eric Prokesh