Week 2 - Getting the feel of the city

"In the end, it was enemies created by the regime itself - foreign and domestic, armed and unarmed, political operatives and sullen survivors - people alienated by the regime's attempt to destroy perceived enemies, who brought about its downfall."

Reading Ben Kiernan's The Pol Pot Regime, as much due to its interesting subject matter, as for a better understanding of the people being tried by the court. Despite having a background knowledge of the Khmer Rouge, and the regions politics post WW2, I very much need to know more, and this is a great (big) book for that.

As a way of making a bit of extra money on the side, as, let’s face it, unpaid interns don’t earn very much, I have secured a 5hour a week English teaching job, after work twice a week. Working in a language school very similar to what I was doing in Japan was certainly not on my list of things to do here, but $60 a week in cash will go a long way to covering my living costs (rent is $150 a month + food). My only student will be a Japanese dentist, and hey, how hard can he be! 

 (Grilled bananas, really rather nice)

Taking a tuk-tuk (motorbike with a trailer on the back) home from the school, I passed the Anti-Corruption Headquarters, and was thinking what a hard job they must have here, when I spotted across the road a Rolls-Royce car dealership.  In a country where the GDP = $2,600 per person a year, $200,000 cars are clearly not within the reach of the average person. With Cambodia being ranked 160/177 in terms of the most corrupt states, the Anti-Corruption office clearly has its work cut out. Stories of illegal logging, land rights, people smuggling and just plain old racketeering abound, and the number of shiny cars and huge villas I have seen would seem to attest to this.

Such rampant capitalism is hard to ignore, and it makes it even harder to believe that for a few years in the 1970’s, the country was in the grips of a brutal communist dictatorship. The Khmer Rouge walked into Phnom Penh in 1975, after fighting a largely rural civil-war against the corrupt, Western supported government. Fighting against all of the usual things revolutionists tend to – corruption, nepotism, entrenched political class, foreigners, taxes etc. – they initially found the sympathetic population supportive. It is only upon visiting S-21, the prison/torture chamber set up in Phnom Penh to house their enemies, that one sees how whatever worthy and important causes led to the Khmer Rouge’s creation, by 1975, it was morally rotten to the core.

 (The school buildings)

The school buildings which form S-21 are, remarkably, similar to the school I taught at in Kazakhstan, following a very similar format – stairs at either end, lots of concrete, and an educational environment about a million miles away from the one I was lucky enough to enjoy in Britain. What I mean by this is that trying to imagine the horrors (of which there were many) that were perpetrated in the school before the Vietnamese liberated Phnom Penh in 1979. Sitting in grassy, spacious and remarkably peaceful grounds for the city, with school exercise equipment still providing further evidence of the benign role the buildings were intended for. And it is the buildings that are the focal point of the whole museum, with little in the way of exhibits, information or gloss, but rather open access to the rooms and corridors where the horror happened. Photos of the prisoners have been enlarged and fill walls of space, a gory nod to the Nazi-like efficiency of the bureaucracy employed in torturing and condemning to death 20,000 people. Their faces hint at the suffering, and add a human side that the bleak rooms otherwise lack. Many of the victims, in the later years of the Khmer Rouge, were Khmer Rouge themselves, sacrificed in an orgy of infighting and paranoia, rather like Stalin’s purges.   

 (Gym bars)

 (Keeping people in)

 (Classrooms divided into smaller cells)

 (3 different facial expressions, all in pain)

 (The classrooms)

 (Rooms of photos of victims)

It is certainly worth a visit, the $3 entrance fee certainly not being a hindrance, and it has been useful to try and place myself within the realities of the Khmer Rouge period, as sitting in my air-conditioned office an hour outside of town, surrounded by foreign interns, it can be hard to imagine how things must have been.

On a lighter note, I now have a bicycle – racing red – which will hopefully survive the next 5 months. A re-cycled (up-cycled?) Japanese shopping bike, it is rather creaky, but hey, it has a basket and only cost $34. I also have a rice cooker, which cost rather more, but means I’ll wake up to freshly cooked rice, or having it waiting for me after work, and I can make soup/porridge/steam vegetables etc, all rather conveniently. 

And that pretty much sums up week 2 in Cambodia- Consumerism, Corruption and Communism. 

Went to watch Cambodian Kick-boxing last weekend. Not out of any burning desire to see men fight each other, but rather for the experience of watching a classical sporting event in the country of its origin. Watching Sumo in Japan was more about the rules and rituals than two morbidly obese men slap at each other, and it was much the same with kick-boxing. Live traditional music from a group of children, a rowdy group of locals getting very much into the spirit of things (financially as well as vocally), cheap and tacky sponsorship moments, and no entry fee!  

 (The winner)