Cambodia

As promised, though somewhat delayed, here's some pictures I took on holiday in Cambodia last year. Be warned - if you deliberately avoided reading my post on Auschwitz, you probably want to give this one a miss too.

Okay, so we flew out of lovely Laos into Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. Phnom Penh is not lovely - the poverty, dirt and rampant corruption are right in your face. Mind you, I did myself no favours by deciding to read some books on the local background. There seem to be only 2 types of book written about Phnom Penh: those about the sex trade and those about the Khmer Rouge regime and the genocide in the 1970s - both of which make you want to hand in your resignation from the human species and join one with something more positive to offer the planet. Cockroaches, say.

I'm not suggesting that tourists should avoid the place. Cambodia is a country bravely trying to haul itself out of the shit accumulated by a political regime so awful it beggars belief. It has a lot of positives going for it - but the shit's pretty deep, especially for the many landmine victims begging on the streets.

This is our Cambodian guide, pictured in front of the Royal Palace. He's a year younger than I am, I think, which made him seven years old when Pol Pot and his regime took power. He and his family were marched out into the countryside, as were all urban dwellers. His father was executed for being a dangerous intellectual (he was an engineer). He was seperated from his mother and put into a children's work-camp, where he survived starvation by eating snails out of the ditches. His two little sisters both died.

In three years, eight months and twenty days up to a third of the Cambodian population was wiped out, by their own government, through execution and very deliberate starvation.

This is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. It looks like a high school because that's exactly what it was before the Khmer Rouge turned it into prison S-21. Political prisoners (that means doctors, teachers, monks, foreigners, anyone who could read or spoke a foreign language or wore glasses) were tortured for "confession" here before being taken out to the Killing Fields for execution. The top floors were wired with mesh to stop prisoners commiting suicide.

This is a translation of the rules which were written up on the walls for prisoners. You can click to enlarge and read, but actually this was the thing I found most difficult to cope with - more so than the bloodstains and the bones, even.

The Killing Fields site (only the most notorious of many mass graves) lies on the outskirts of Phnom Penh and looks like an orchard once more. Possibly around 17,000 were killed here - mostly bludgeoned to death - and buried in pits like the excavated one pictured above. When you walk around you can see bits of bone and rags of clothing sticking up out of the soil, still.

This is the memorial stupa built to the victims. It is filled with skulls.

I'm glad I saw all this as part of our Cambodian visit. History is not all pretty romantic ruins, and not to face it would have been an act of cowardice. But I still feel churned up.

Next (and final) set of photos: the temples of Angkor.