Cambodia - Days 1 and 2

Though I was very excited to see Cambodia I was also saddened to leave Vietnam. I really wish I had had more time to explore Vietnam. Nonetheless, I was very much looking forward to seeing Angkor Wat. Our flight to Phnom Penh (pronounced pa-nom pen) was uneventful and by now I was getting used to the idea of flying in foreign countries where air-safety regulations may be more lax. During the first few flights in China there was that persistent fear that the plane might fall apart in mid-air. As the plane descended through the clouds on its way to land in Phnom Penh I looked out my window and all I could see was muddy water everywhere. The entire Earth looked as if it was covered in watery reddish-brown mud, dotted with occasional islands of green. It was an eerie sight made all the more disturbing by the fact that the plane began to land when there was no airport in sight. As I would find out later, Phnom Penh is situated at the confluence of three rivers, the Tonle Sap, Bassac, and Mekong, which become engorged with water during the rainy season.

The airport in Phnom Penh was the first really small airport we’d visited in Asia. The airports in Beijing, Xi’an, Saigon, and Bangkok were huge, sleek international airports that were much nicer than most of the airports I’ve seen in the U.S. The airport in Phnom Penh was a single tiny terminal with doors that led directly onto the tarmac. In order to get to and from the airport you take a shuttle bus (which was the standard practice even in the large airports in China). Once inside the terminal our group spent several minutes in confusion as our trip leader gave us instructions about getting through immigration that conflicted with the instructions from the immigration officials themselves. It took a while but finally we all got through customs, got onto buses and went to our hotel in downtown Phnom Penh.

Phnom Penh isn’t a usual city. It doesn’t have any large buildings or a financial center or anything like that. In the very center of the city is a large man-made hill with a Buddhist Stupa on it for which the city is named (Phnom Penh means “Penh’s hill” in Khmer, the language of Cambodia). In the early 1970’s during the reign of the Khmer Rouge (the Maoist revolutionaries led by Pol Pot who took over the government of Cambodia) the entire population of Phnom Penh, several million people, was evacuated from the city and forced to live in the countryside. The Khmer Rouge told the people that there was going to be imminent bombings by the U.S. military so the city had to be evacuated immediately. In fact it was part of Pol Pot’s plan to start an agrarian revolution in which everyone was a peasant working on collective farms and living in communes where everyone was equal. For several years the city was abandoned, and I don’t think it totally recovered (nor did the economy) which partly explains why the center of the city is dominated by a large hill rather than large buildings and other things that are typical of a nation’s capital.

After checking into the hotel we had some time to rest before we had to meet at the buses for a boat ride on one of the three rivers in Phnom Penh. Right as the boats were pulling away from the dock it began to pour, which made the trip down the river a lot less interesting than it could have been. There was one highlight however. There was a small floating village on one side of the river that housed around 28 people (the population used to be significantly larger). Through the rain I could see tiny shacks with people sitting underneath awnings made of tarpaulin. Here were people living in cramped quarters without electricity, proper sanitation or clean water smiling and waving at us and they looked generally delighted to see us. The heavy rains made it difficult to enjoy the scenery of the river so the trip was cut short and we all headed to a restaurant for dinner. I don’t remember what I ate though I do remember being disappointed because the buffet seemed to be comprised of Chinese and Vietnamese food. I don’t recall ever eating native Cambodian cuisine the entire time I was there. After dinner I went to bed with the reminder that tomorrow we would be visiting the genocide museum and the killing fields.

Our first stop in the morning was the genocide museum which is actually Tuol Sleng (also known as S-21 or Security Office 21) the prison that housed political dissidents and various people whose only crime was being educated. Tuol Sleng was originally a high school that was converted to a prison during the Khmer Rouge regime. It was surrounded by sheets of corrugated iron and electrified barbed wire fences so that prisoners could not escape. All of the children who had attended the school were imprisoned there first because educated people posed a threat to Pol Pot’s vision of a peasant revolution. Tuol Sleng held up to 1200 people at any one time in its four buildings that were meant to hold no more than a few hundred school children. Prisoners were shackled to the floor and routinely beaten and tortured. Many people were executed at Tuol Sleng, some 10,000 in all from 1975 to 1978 alone, and hundreds of thousands passed through it on their way to the killing fields.

The Cambodian government has preserved Tuol Sleng as it was when it was in use. In the bigger rooms of one building which used to hold classrooms there are rusting iron bed frames and plastic containers that the prisoners used as toilets. On the walls of many of these rooms are pictures of prisoners chained to the bed frame lying in pools of their own blood, thin and starving. The people that were told to make photographic documentation of the prison were former prisoners themselves. So, when the time came they took all of the pictures and hid them or turned them over to Vietnam when they invaded Cambodia so that the world would know what happened.

I walked from room to room feeling increasingly solemn and unnerved. It was a nice morning in Phnom Penh, the sun was shining, but there was an eerie silence throughout the prison. In the courtyard area in between the buildings there were two poles erected with another pole laid across them from which prisoners were hung upside down and electrocuted until they passed out. Then they were dunked headfirst into vats of sewage water until they woke up again and the process was repeated. In another school building there was a room sectioned off haphazardly with bricks into tiny cells. In other rooms there were boards with hundreds upon hundreds of pictures of people who had stayed, and probably died, in the prison. There were infants, children, women, men, and every one of them looked starved and close to death. In another building there were stories of Cambodians whose family members were sent to Tuol Sleng or disappeared mysteriously and were alleged to have been sent there. Every story ended in tragedy, it was heartbreaking.

In the West when we think of genocides we usually think of the Holocaust, which was certainly the worst. However, almost 2 million people, which at the time made up 25% of Cambodia’s population, were either executed or died of starvation during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. A further 2 million fled into neighboring countries. By the end of the horror Cambodia’s population had been reduced by half. As I walked through Tuol Sleng I kept wondering how anyone could do these terrible things to another person. It reminded me of Stanley Milgram’s famous psychology experiment that showed the influence authority has on people, but even the results of that experiment seemed inadequate in explaining all of the pain and suffering that was unleashed in Cambodia.

The social psychologist Stanley Milgram devised an experiment to answer the question of whether the Nazi war criminals who were responsible for the Holocaust could have committed those simply because they were following orders. In Milgrim’s experiment he tested how much pain an ordinary person would inflict upon another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimenter. The details of the experiment are complex and not important now, but the results were alarming. In many instances the subjects were willing to give several 450-volt shocks to the people they were punishing (in reality there were no real electrical shocks and the person being punished was an actor unbeknownst to the subjects of the experiment), which is enough to kill a person.

There was a related experiment performed in Stanford in 1971 in which undergraduate students were split up into two groups comprised of “prisoners” and “guards” (they were paid $15 a day to participate in the experiment). The experiment took place in a mock jail in the basement of the Psychology department building. Guards were given batons and a military-style uniform as well as sunglasses to prevent eye contact. The guards worked in shifts and could go home at the end of their shift. Disturbingly, on some occasions the guards chose to work extra shifts voluntarily without extra pay.

The participants who had been chosen as prisoners were told to wait in their homes to be contacted on the day the experiment began. Without any warning, they were "charged" with armed robbery and arrested by the actual police department, who cooperated in this part of the experiment. They went through actual booking procedures and were sent to the “prison”.

The guards had been told that they could do anything they wanted to the prisoners as long as it did not involve physical violence. Despite this rule, the experiment quickly became a mess. On the second day a riot broke out and the guards attacked the prisoners with fire extinguishers to quell the revolt. The prison became dirty and bathroom rights became privileges which were frequently revoked. Some prisoners were forced to clean toilets with bare hands. Mattresses were removed from the cell block and the prisoners forced to sleep naked on the concrete floor. The prisoners endured forced nudity and in some cases even sexual humiliation.

Even the lead researcher, Philip Zimbardo, who acted as the prison superintendent began to get engrossed in the experiment. When a rumor began circulating about a planned prison break Zimbardo called the local police department and tried to have the prisoners moved to a real jail since they were more secure. Today an experiment like this would be highly unethical and it is criticized to this day as being “unscientific”. The experiment was concluded after six days of a planned two week experiment. However, it was not stopped due to the objections of any prisoners. According to Zimbardo, the prisoners began to internalize their roles, that is, they sincerely believed that they were prisoners. At one point they were given the option of parole as long as they forfeited the pay they received from participation in the experiment. They all accepted that option, but when they were all denied parole they did not object. In the same way many of the guards began to exhibit truly sadistic behavior, and these were normal psychologically-balanced college students.

These two experiments, especially the latter, help to explain how people can do the things they did to others in Tuol Sleng but they don’t make the results of the genocide any easier to accept. It’s not that the people in the experiment had any inherent disposition towards sadistic and cruel behavior, just as many of the guards of Tuol Sleng did not, instead the situation and the surroundings were the cause of the behavior. Which isn’t to say that the Khmer Rouge should be exonerated, quite to the contrary, it’s a shame that the Cambodian government took so long to seek the United Nation’s help in setting up the genocide tribunal that is currently being organized (though not surprising given that Cambodia’s Prime Minister was once part of the Khmer Rouge).

After our sobering walk through Tuol Sleng we took a bus outside of the city to visit one of 334 killing fields where hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were executed. The centerpiece of the killing field was a stupa (a 6 or 7 tiered structure which houses the dead or religious relics of Buddhism) which housed hundreds of skulls stacked upon one another. The fields themselves were not much to look at, mainly pits marked with signs such as “Hundreds of decapitated heads were excavated from this hole”. There were fragments of clothing laying everywhere, half-submerged in mud, grim reminders of what the pits once held. Those who were taken to the killing fields did not have a merciful death. The Khmer Rouge did not believe that the lives they were taking were worth the price of the bullets so they used knives and serrated palm fronds to cut people’s throats.

Pol Pot, inspired by Maoism, envisioned a Cambodia free of the corrupting ideas of democracy and capitalism. In their place would be a peasant revolution where everyone held the same views and was equally (poorly) educated. To achieve this required, in Pol Pot’s words, “getting rid of the weeds by the roots”, namely getting rid of the Cambodian intellectuals. Those that didn’t flee the country were subjected to the “hand test” in which the Khmer Rouge checked citizen’s hands. Those that spent a life of doing manual labor would have calloused hands and would be spared, but those who did not perform such labor would have smooth hands, a sign of being educated, and they would be sent to one of the killing fields.

Of all of the chaos and suffering he caused in Cambodia Pol Pot would later say, “I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country”. He went into hiding after the fall of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s and was never turned in to the authorities. No one was ever held accountable for the genocide, and as I mentioned before the current Prime Minister of Cambodia was once in the Khmer Rouge. I found it interesting that our tour guide explained to us that Pol Pot and the others did what they did because they were not real Cambodians themselves, ethnically they were Han Chinese and they introduced “poisonous Chinese ideas” into Cambodia. Our tour guide placed a lot of emphasis on the fact that the Chinese were essential responsible for the Cambodian genocide. I’m not sure whether or not that is true but the way that he kept saying it to us sounded strange, as strange as if a tour guide in the U.S. was to say that the South was responsible for the civil war when clearly, both sides bear equal responsibility.

Near the killing fields Michael, I, and some other kids from Semester At Sea had our first encounter with Cambodian orphans. They looked cute and when they offered to pose for pictures Michael and the other students accepted, only to find out that they had to pay the children for the privilege of taking their pictures. The children spoke good English because they were taught by Buddhist monks at the local monasteries. As we were leaving the killing fields several of the orphans stood nearby watching us get back on the bus, and I was able to take a picture without their noticing.

The rest of the day was far less interesting and depressing. After the killing fields we went to the “Russian market” in Phnom Penh, so-called not because Russians work there but because it is a place for foreigners to buy goods. Michael and I bought a stack of pirated DVDs and some t-shirts for $20 or so and afterwards everyone went to lunch at another restaurant that did not serve us Cambodian food. After lunch Michael and I went into a nearby supermarket (that was within a mall) which was a strange sight to see in Cambodia. Apparently we were an even stranger sight because we got quite a few stares from the regular customers. It’s been interesting to compare the different grocery and convenience stores in each country. Hong Kong had some of the nicest grocery stores with an interesting selection of food, but Cambodia was fun too.

When Michael and I went back to the bus I sat down and noticed some beggars outside of my window. I made the mistake of staring at this one woman who was holding a baby, and when she took notice of me she started pounding on the window. I turned my head to look away but could still hear her pounding on the window and repeating something in Khmer. It was heart-wrenching, and even really annoying, but there was nothing I could do. If I gave one beggar money they would all flock to me so the best thing was to ignore them, as difficult as that was. This is something everyone on SAS would have to grapple with in Cambodia (and especially in India).

After lunch we visited the Silver Pagoda and the Royal Palace. It was unbearably hot and humid (it eventually started raining and I forgot my raincoat on the bus) and I had to use the bathroom badly for a few hours so I don’t remember much about either of these sites. To make matters worse I forgot my camera on the bus too, so I do not have any pictures. The Silver Pagoda is a Buddhist shrine that is famous because it has a gold Buddha stature that is covered in diamonds, thousands of them. The floor of the pagoda is covered in silver tiles. Later we went to the National Museum and saw stone carvings and pottery from throughout Cambodia’s history. Our guide explained what some of the carvings in the stone blocks taken from temples like Angkor Wat meant, giving us a taste of what to expect once we flew to Siem Reap.

It was now time to fly to Siem Reap which is where Angkor Wat and the other temples are located. By the time we arrived it had already been a long day and unfortunately it was not quite over. After checking in to the hotel we all went to dinner and were treated to a “cultural show” which included traditional Cambodian dancing and music played by live musicians. It was really cool; especially the apsara dancing, a type of dancing that involves strange contortions of the hands (the dancers practice from early childhood to master apsara). The music was really amazing; the girl who sang most of the songs had a wonderful voice. After dinner we went back to the hotel and Michael and I went to bed quickly because we had volunteered to see the optional sunrise tour of Angkor Wat which meant that we had to wake up at 4:30 AM. Believe it or not, we actually woke up that early, and it was definitely worth it.