Doshisha Days

When you cross the streets in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, you do so with equal amounts of trepidation and urgency. Stop signs and traffic signals are routinely ignored by the myriad assortment of cars, tuk-tuks, motor cycles and bicycles that drive up and down the tree lined boulevards. The French influence still dominates the city with its street-side cafes, and large villas with balconies open to the street. Milo and I stayed at the Lyon D’or, across the street from the Tonle Sap River. Phnom Penh is were the Tonle Sap and Mekong River meet and then diverge again, giving it a strategic location that has been used for centuries by the Cambodians, the French, the Vietnamese and now the Cambodians once again.

Our first stop in the city was the Royal Palace, home of King Norodom Sihamoni, and location of the Silver Pagoda, known for its delicate floor of silver tiles. The king actually made an appearance while we were touring the grounds and came within about 100 meters of us, admittedly not handshaking distance. From there we took a quick tour of the National Museum, housing the largest collection of Angkorian art anywhere in the world.

In the north of the city is the French Embassy, where in April 1975, hundreds of Cambodians and foreigners were sought refuge when the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian Maoists on steroids, took the city. Although the foreigners in the embassy were in the end expelled from the country, the fate of the Cambodians was much more insidious. Stripped of there possessions and forced out into the countryside, as many as 3 million people, over a quarter of the population, died over a 4 year period from starvation, disease, and at the hands of their fellow Cambodians.

One of the major centers where men, women and children were taken to confess their - in almost all cases, imaginary – crimes and to be disposed of – was Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, located in the heart of the city. Once the Vietnamese invaded their neighbor and drove Pol Pot and his men into the areas by the Thai border, they opened up the prison as a museum to both reveal the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, as well as to justify their invasion and occupation. The prison no longer caters to Vietnam’s patrons from the Eastern Bloc, but from tourists from all over world. Inside are cells where the Vietnamese found corpses still shackled to box spring mattresses, thousands of mug shots and files documenting the various prisoners who were interrogated, forced into falsely confessing and incriminating others in an endless lethal spiral and then sent to the killing fields. From the photos, one can see that neither children nor the elderly were spared this tragic fate. The head of Tuol Sleng, a man know as Duch, is still under house arrest on the docket of a painstakingly slow legal process which hopefully will bring him to justice before he dies, and like Pol Pot is left to the ashes of history.

From the museum, we visited the killing fields, where in 1981, mass graves were discovered and exhumed by the Vietnamese military. Now, there stands a white pagoda, a huge edifice filled with human skulls organized by age. Surrounding it are pits that were formerly filled with the remains of hundreds of victims of the one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century (although I feel that it would be inaccurate to label what happened in Cambodia Genocide, I do feel that the absence of this label should not diminish from the ghastliness of the crime itself).

We finished our trip in Cambodia on a high note, shopping in what is quaintly referred to as the Russian Market, due to the large amounts of Eastern Bloc nations that shopped there during the 1980s, watching the sun set over the heliotrope sky from along the river front, and indulging in a final meal of Khmer specialties. Our time in this fascinating country with a history of both grandiose empires and unimaginable human suffering, had reached its apex, and it was time to continue our wanderings. Still it was all but assured to both Milo and myself that this was not the last we had seen of Cambodia and I for one was already looking ahead to the next time I walk the streets of the “Pearl of Asia.”