Posts tagged Travel
Between the years of 1975-1979, modern day Cambodia was referred to as Democratic Kampuchea. It was governed in whole by the Khmer Rouge, a political group with such devastating objectives that one in every four of the people it governed was murdered in order to try and obtain them. Attempting to try and understand these objectives in a contemporary context almost seems without warrant due to the graphic detail in which the behaviour of this pernicious regime has been documented.
It is assumed that the majority of tourists who come to Cambodia today are most familiar with the atrocities which were committed by the Khmer Rouge on their own people. The international news coverage at the time broadcast shocking images captured at the killing fields in Choeung Ek and the torture facility at Tuol Seng (or S21), juxtaposing footage that depicted piles of skulls with Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge. This was achieved while attempting to shed light on the situation and trying to find reasons for the mawkish vulgarity that occurred throughout the country, which was an exceptional challenge. However, one of the first things I noticed while strolling through the café laden streets of Siem Reap was the sheer volume of material, in both English and French, available on the subject. Street children, amputees and established merchants alike have small libraries of literature available on the subject in the form of books and pamphlets assembled by mostly foreign journalists and reporters who had first hand experience of the carnage. I picked up a copy of Francois Ponchaud’s ‘Cambodia: Year Zero’ and grappled with the contents of each page in between visits to the Killing Caves of Battambang, Choeung Ek and S21. Though I remain unable to grasp any form of what might even come close to justification, the book did shed light on the objectives behind the killings, objectives that could only possibly have been penned by despots and fools in the throws of deep and sinister lunacy.
Ponchaud’s book was written and published while the Khmer Rouge were still in power and so a whopping degree of uncertainty remains in each paragraph. The book itself comprises of annotated broadcasts from Radio Phnom Penh, which bring to mind the genocidal condemnation of the Tutsis by Radio RTLM in Rwanda during the early 1990s. It also contains reports from Cambodian refugees, interviews conducted by Ponchaud as well as his own first hand experiences as a French missionary and one of the last foreigners to have been deported from Cambodia during the siege of Phnom Penh. It not only deals with the sickening ease with which the regime evacuated each and every city in the country, but also the ideology behind this drastic and painful upheaval. It provides accounts of the daily working lives of the Khmer people and the often contradictory fashion in which the regime implemented its vicious ideas.
The Khmer Rouge set out to create an egalitarian society whereby everybody would work in accordance with the needs of the nation, however, ultimate power was unquestionably given to those in the possession of firearms. Families were separated from their homes in towns and cities and sent to settlements in the countryside where they would work in the fields and rice paddies. For former city dwellers, or ‘new people’ as they were referred to, this meant adapting to an entirely new way of life. The sick, the elderly and the handicapped were worked into the ground with supposed attempts at creating the strongest communist society the world has ever seen. This was to be achieved by building the country from scratch so that every field was farmed, every house constructed and, much later, every invention created for and by the Khmer people. This meant that all foreign medicine and inventions, including cars, were disposed of. There was to be no foreign intervention, no imperialist influence and no outside help granted to the Khmer people as they rebuilt their country on a brand new set of foundations that were strictly their own. This was Year Zero. (It should be noted that the Khmer Rouge did receive a great deal of foreign aid, but chose to neglect the majority of it, particularly medicine. Imported guns, mines and other weaponry as well as modes of transportation were still used by the regime. The underlying principles of Khmer self-sustainability and Khmer communal ownership in themselves were based on the ‘foreign ideas’ of Proudhon, Marx and, more influentially, Mao Zedong.)
The country was utterly uprooted, the refugees that were able to flee the country were later informed of how every citizen back home was forced to comply with the new regime and graft for the nation. It was to be a form of self sacrifice not dissimilar to Stalin’s premise that the first generation of the new way would indeed suffer for the cause, and this was no secret. Workers died in their thousands as they toiled in the fields and were given very little to eat or drink. For they were, essentially, a slave nation conscripted to back breaking labour for the benefit of future generations who would live in the historic Khmer fashion, based on the principles of Jayavarman II and his lineage who built and maintained the Empire of Angkor. This was the plight of the Khmer people who complied with the regime. This was the plight of the ones who survived, the ones who submitted to the Khmer Rouge in leaving their homes and their families. This was the plight of the uneducated, the peasants and the poor, for the remainder of the Khmer people, a different fate lay in store.
The country was in a state of turmoil. The French had departed in 1953, leaving King Sihanouk in charge of an independent Cambodia before it was devastated by American bombing and rattled by sporadic interference from the Vietnamese. Sihanouk was overthrown and moved to Beijing after a military coup in 1970 by the desperately unpopular Lon Nol, who the Cambodian people were happy to see defeated later on by the Khmer Rouge. The details of this power struggle combined with the aftermath of the Vietnam war and, as Ponchaud points out, an apparent tendency amongst Khmers to follow their leader’s instructions no matter how off the mark they are, made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to alter the social dynamic of the country so quickly. The fact that they recruited young and uneducated soldiers, who had been plagued by the fog of war their whole lives, also created an environment that allowed for the immense butchery of the remainder of the population. It was the butchery that grasped the headlines and the attention of the world.
Intellectuals, officials who had worked with the previous administrations, anti-monarchists, anyone even suspected of criticising the Khmer Rouge or who refused to comply with their idiocy was condemned. This meant that they were either executed on the spot or taken away to be tortured and then killed. Choeung Ek and S21 are testaments to those who came under this category.
There were over 31 sites dotted about Cambodia that were demarcated as ‘killing fields’, this also included the caves I mentioned in Battambang. In order to reach those caves, one has to climb up a steep hill past several pogodas and Buddha statues, taking in the breathtaking scenery and a backdrop of endless fields and rice paddies. A graphic painting stands at the entrance, depicting two soldiers slitting the throats of their victims and tossing them into a dark cave filled with skulls. The cave itself is black and petrifying, it is lit up by a golden statue of Buddha and coloured by rags representing the clothes of the victims. These rags hang anonymous on a wire that stretches from one side of the cave to the other. When I arrived there, a man opened up a cage filled with human skulls and sat at the foot of the Buddha statue with a begging bowl. The bones have not all been recovered and the authorities are still finding remnants of human detritus in the depths of this dark and frightening place.
Choeung Ek in the capital Phnom Penh is the main site in Cambodia which was opened to pay homage to the victims. The famous memorial stupa hosts seventeen levels lined with human bones and skulls that have been categorised but not identified. I took the audio guide tour and walked slowly around the killing fields that surround it. Mass graves mark the walking route where bones and teeth still appear on the ground as they are unearthed after the rainy season. There are still mass graves here that have not been exhumed. The audio guide provides further insight into Pol Pot’s regime and the events that took place at Choeung Ek. It relays stories as to how prisoners were transported there after being tortured at S21. Groups of up to three hundred at a time were taken there in trucks, by night, where revolutionary songs would play from speakers hanging on the ‘magic tree’ nearby. A generator would heavily rumble in the background to cover the screams of the prisoners as they were held to the ground before having their throats gashed open with either knives, hoes or the jagged wood sprouting off sugar cane trees. The combination of the revolutionary music and the rumbling generators is demonstrated on the audio tour and is the most disturbing thing I have ever heard.
S21 is located seventeen kilometres away in the depths of the capital. Before the Khmer Rouge took over the city, it was a school. It is divided into four buildings that were used to teach young children before the regime converted the classrooms into prisons and torture chambers. Metal bed frames remain in otherwise empty rooms with pictures of the remains of the victims found there hanging on the walls. It is terrifying. The rooms themselves are silent, making it almost impossible to imagine the screams of the prisoners as they had their flesh systematically removed with burning hot pliers and other tools in attempts to extract phony confessions. Other rooms in the facility exhibit black and white portraits of the victims, ranging from the infants to the elderly. The Khmer Rouge spared nobody they believed would stand in the way of their fanatical ideology, the boldest example of that being the ‘killing tree’ in Choeung Ek, which was used to batter the skulls of newborn babies so that they would not grow up and seek revenge for the deaths of their families.
It is a nasty experience, discovering the recent history of this otherwise beautiful and fascinating country. So why seek it out? The memorial stupa at Choeung Ek is a testament as to why this is indeed essential. Through trying to understand what happened in Cambodia and by visiting these gruesome sites, a greater level of sympathy is construed between the present and the past. What the Khmer Rouge did to their people should never be neglected or forgotten. The more that is uncovered concerning the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, the more likely that the people affected by this horrendous chapter in history will be remembered.
The Killing Fields, Choeung Ek
Skulls at the Memorial Stupa, Choeung Ek
A former classroom, a former torture chamber, Tuol Seng
I found it to be a rather odd sensation, swinging back and forth gently in a thick, mesh hammock as the sun rose over the Four Thousand Islands, or Si Phan Don, while reading Orwell’s classic. It was the first time I had read Burmese Days, and the ringing of colonial humdrum split right through my level of concentration, lighting up not too distant memories of the rest of my time Laos and the colonial remnants I had experienced there. From Luang Nom Tha in the brilliant North West, to Don Det in the deepest South, the colonial history of the country was apparent in every corner under shades of UXO and other bloody reminders of the US bombings during the Vietnam War.
Though Orwell’s novel is a gauging testament to the negative consequences of colonialism, it focuses predominantly on the impacts a colonial power, in this case the British Empire, had on the individual level as well as the bureaucratic one. Flory, an Englishman who has spent most of his life living in and around a very small village in Burma, is tormented by loneliness and self-pity despite indulging in native curiosities and trying to befriend a select few of the local people. Flory’s actions consequently ruin the lives of those Burmese people he draws close to him due mostly in part to his cowardice, a negative attribute that grows with the conversations and contact he has with his British associates and representatives of the Colonial power. Orwell also brings life to a whole host of other British characters who seem to detest the ‘natives’ with their every breath - condemning the Burmese to prostitution, corruption and scandal. Needless to say the book is a most gripping read and one that I would sorely recommend, but reading it in Laos provided additional dimensions to the story (it is only a story after all, despite characters being based on people Orwell met when he himself served in Burma).
I am now in Cambodia, a country with a past bloodier than is possible to fathom. The sickening atrocities that occurred in every town and city here were simply appalling. Indeed, the fact that genocide took place here is no secret the Cambodian people seem to be intent on trying to keep; almost every street vendor in Siem Reap sells copies of books about Year Zero (one of which I have just started), the Pol Pot regime, the Killing Fields etc., and there are some excellent films available on the subject. What I find particularly astounding though are the historical webs that link colonial history to the brutality that followed; with the United States, Russia and China of course spinning a great deal of this great misfortune, despite their not being present as official colonial powers. Today I will visit the Killing Caves of Battambang.
A short entry I put together concerning my first visit to the Thar Heritage Museum in Jaisalmer, India, on 12th September 2011. I have a short video series to go with this document that I hope to be able to post as soon as I find myself with a good Internet connection and a spare day to catch up with things. Tomorrow morning I will leave Luang Prabang for Phonsavan, Laos.
The Thar Heritage Museum is located down a backstreet of Jaisalmer’s main bazaar, which is a fair trek from the city fort, at least in the blistering heat that is customary for the region. The cows do a good job of blocking the main drag as they gurn on plastic bags and other rubbish they find piled up on the corner of every side street, while auto-rickshaws and motorbikes blast their horns at every available opportunity as the shop keepers call and beckon every white person that walks past. It is a busy place to say the least; full of bright colours and peculiar odours, busy people and unexpected wildlife. That only makes finding the Thar Heritage Museum more interesting, in that the location of the bulding adds yet another quirky dimension to this already out-of-the-way and less frequented attraction.
I first read about the museum in the Roughguide to Rajasthan, Delhi and Agra. The book, which I happened to be borrowing from my Sister, had so far been a trustworthy and reliable source of information on the trip so far and it had promised a rather interesting experience at this museum in particular. The Roughguide mentions that despite the exhibition being interesting enough on as it stands, it is brought to life by the sole collector of items, Mr Laxmi Khatri, who is able to accompany on your tour of the museum ‘if he is on hand’. Upon arriving at the museum, it appeared as though he was not. A young boy sat twiddling his thumbs at a table by the entrance and bolted up the stairs to unlock the museum for us as soon as we popped our heads curiously around the door. ‘Please. Go.’, he said before pelting out off the entrance through which we had came as we made our way slowly up the steps towards what we understood to be an exhibition. The room was dark and random assortments of items belonging to different areas of interest lay cluttered around the floor below shelves of nik naks associated with camels, pottery and religion. Before no time at all, Mr Kharti appeared. “Welcome to the museum!” he said as he made mad dashes about the place, turning on light switches and fans. “You are the first visitors here in over a week!”… this was almost akin to what I had been hearing from rick-shaw drivers across Rajasthan for the past two weeks – “you are my first customer of the day” they would say, as if that would make a difference to the amount of money they would receive in addition to their fee. Mr Khatri however, had an element of honesty in his voice that clung to chipped and flaking walls around the museum. He then introduced himself formally, “My name is Laxmi N. Khatri”, he said, “and you are?”. We briefly introduced ourselves and he launched straight into an academic flow about the items that surrounded us. It was a fascinating journey; not only was Mr Kharti responsible for collecting each of these items and displaying them, he also paid for the rent of the building and the maintenance of the place out of his own pocket. “It is not cheap to keep this place going” he said in a sad tone, “but I feel like I have to. People come here and they want to learn about the Thar heritage and culture, and this is the only place where they can really do that”. I pressed him on this issue as there were several museums in town that offered information and exhibitions on desert culture. “Yes, that is very true” he said, “but they are all funded by the government and therefore only exhibit things about the social elite. They do not show anything about the real lives of the working people of Jaisalmer and the Thar desert people”. He proceed to explain in great detail a whole host of items used for cooking and calculating measurements. As if this were not interesting enough, he then led the way back down the stairs we had come up and into a smaller room where he had two small exhibits; the first was called ‘Opium Party’, which comprised of a series of items arranged in such a way that shed light on how the desert men spent their evenings chasing the dragon, and, ‘The Office’, which was one of the most intriguing displays I have ever seen at any museum, ever. It consisted of a seating area and a desk, surrounded by hand written volumes documenting transactions between local business people and passing travellers from all over Asia. The exhibition also hosted scales, weights and gadgets all from the same period, which would most certainly be a fascinating for any economic historian interested in the region.
The sad thing about ‘The Office’ and every other part of the museum, was the state in which these items were in. Nothing seemed to be well kept or preserved, despite their cultural value and significance, instead they lay in piles around the floor. This was the best that Mr Kharti could do when taking his finances into account, even though he had received honours from Indian state officials and academics in the past, his museum severely lacks the funding and attention it needs. The majority of the tourists that come through Jaisalmer are part of large organised groups, that do not go to the Thar Heritage museum because of its run down state and lac of prestige. The objects and items there are only really brought to life my Mr Khatri himself and he can not cater for more than small groups of about ten tourists at a time – though he is rarely graced with such numbers. We shot a few clips of Mr Kharti in action and I am trying to work with Mr Khatri in putting together a new website for the museum, though at the present time he is seemingly difficult to contact. If you find yourself anywhere near the Thar Desert in the future, I more than recommend paying the museum a visit – it is definitely a must.
Mr Khati curating items in ‘The Office’
Books and novels are an inevitable part of the backpacker’s luggage allowance. In some cases, taking a few hours to read presents the opportunity of transporting one’s thoughts and focus away from the immediate environment. However, due to the nature of the backpacker and the endeavour that they set out upon, that is not so likely to be the case. More often that not, it is the environment that creates the perfect opportunity to sit and dwell on what one is reading.
I have been reading William Dalrymple’s ‘The Last Mughal’ rather intently since arriving in Laos. A combination of gorgeous mountain views, a relaxing environment and an 23:30 curfew in Nong Kheaw made for more than ample reading time and I seem to have raced through the book in a few days.
The author tells the story of the Emperor Zafar (1775 - 1862), the Mughal’s relationship with the British and the city of Delhi shortly before and after the sepoy rebellion of 1857, which saw the deaths of thousands of people and the absolute destruction of one of the most fascinating cities that ever was. Through citations and references gathered from archives in London, India and Myanmar. Dalrymple has created a truly remarkable account of Delhi life and society in the 19th Century as well as an explanation of the often frightening and extreme diplomatic engagements between the British and the Mughals.
A very crude outline of the story is as follows. The British recruited thousands upon thousands of Muslim, High Caste Hindu and, crucially, Sikh soldiers during their advances across Asia. The Empire provided a basic salary, training and shelter for the soldiers as they moved from place to place with their imperialist agenda, allowing for law and order to be maintained in each city and province as they did so. Due to a lack of cultural understanding, the Hindus soldiers were subjected to performing military tasks that went deeply against the grain of their religion and they rebelled. There were a range of tasks in particular that sparked this rebellion, but the main cause, it seems, involved biting cartridges that were greased with cow products in order to load their weaponry. Cows are of course considered sacred in the Hindu religion and so it is no wonder that there was a negative reaction. Groups of soldiers, or sepoys, began to rebel without the driving force of a military leader, or indeed an immediate plan, and they began butchering the British Men, women and children who resided in the capital and the surrounding areas. The rebels then advanced to the Red Fort in Delhi where they asked for the blessing of Zafar so as to legitimise their acts of violence. Muslims and Jihadis also joined in with the proceedings, emphasising that it was time for the Mughal Empire to reclaim its preponderance over the British and to rid India of all the Christians who had moved there.
The story delves deep into the lives and the thoughts of its characters in accordance with their diary entries and correspondences. Most intriguing are that of Theo Metcalfe, who swears the most brutal revenge when his friends and family are butchered by the sepoy rebels; Zinat Mehal Begum, the Emperor’s favourite wife who plots and schemes with the most sharp and tender cunning; Ghalib the Poet, a wonderfully talented Urdu wordsmith and commentator and also one of the few Muslim survivors of Delhi after it is rampaged by the British; The Reverend Midgely John Jennings, a crafty religious fanatic intent on converting as many people as possible to Christianity; Harriet Tytler, the wife of a British soldier who ends up giving birth in a cart during the British siege; John Nicolson, a heroic brute of magnificent proportion who insights little but inspiration and fear in his fellow Englishmen; and The Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II himself, a timid and intelligent Emperor who clearly finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Through the words of these choice characters and of those around them, it becomes apparent that the form of revenge the British chose to take was typically ghastly. They ensured their share of barbaric carnage after taking the city of Delhi by force in September 1857. The degree of intolerance and ignorance displayed by both sides of the rebellion are disappointing to say the least. What Dalrymple is able to achieve however is a positive insight as to how these errs might be avoided in the future as he points to the current situation in India and Pakistan as well as the Middle East.
I tried to imagine Dalrymple in Delhi as young man, formulating his apparent bond with India and its past. The man clearly has a love for the country and its history and I wish to learn more from this fantastic scholar. As it happens, I stumbled upon a bookshop today in Luan Prabang and found a copy of one of his first book, entitled ‘In Xanadu’. Tomorrow I shall try and exchange my copy of ‘The Last Mughal’ for this earlier title and continue with my reading escapades in the sweet serenity of the fantastic landscape that seems to surround every settlement in this wonderful country of Laos.
Today we are moving on to Muang Sing from Luang Nom Tha. Our time here has been an absolute joy and I long to stay in Laos and explore this remarkable country no end. I hope to start posting photos from Thailand soon.
After spending 10 days in Chiang Mai, I am now posting from Chiang Rai, which is further North on the Mae Kok River. I am staying here for a few days before heading to Laos by boat. I plan on taking my time exploring the roads fewer people have taken there - starting at the border crossing of Huay Xai and heading North to Luang Nam Tha and Muang Sing before beginning the journey South.
Wat Suan Dok, Chiang Mai
Thanalai Road by Dusk, Chiang Rai
