I wanted to go to Phnom Penh for a variety of reasons, not least the exoticness of the name and all it conjured up of the far East and stories I read when I was young. But there is another side which those of us who grew up in the seventies think of, and that this of course is the association with the Cambodian civil war and the Khmer rouge. They came to power in 1975 and in the three and a half years until they were ousted by the Vietnamese killed either directly, or through starvation, a quarter of the countries population - a level of atrocity I find hard to imagine. What I also find incomprehensible is that despite everyone knowing what they'd done, the Australian, UK, American and many other governments continued to recognize the Khmer rouge as the "legitimate" government for ten further years in a perverse refusal to recognize the communist government of Vietnam could actually done something good. That ten years meant more people died in guerrilla warfare before the remenants of the Khmer rouge finally self destructed. Something I'll try to remember next time I hear my government trying to justify the indefensible.
During the morning I went to visit one of the Khmer rouge jails that has been preserved in the city and also one of the " killing fields " where 9000 bodies were disposed of in mass graves. Profoundly depressing. I took very few pictures at these places and i won't put any of these, except the one of the preserved sign, because they all tend to make the places look prettier and more pleasant than they should ever appear.
The afternoon Megan and I spent walking around the city, mainly taking time in the rather grand Central Market but also walking up the banks of the Mekong river (from whence you can get a boat to Vietnam - now that's definitely something to do in the future) and watching Cambodians out enjoying themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment