Little Cambodia

Back from the Angkor Wat pilgrimage... We spent just three days in Cambodia, which is far too short to become familiar with the country, it feels like being part of a japanese group doing Europe in two weeks... But anyway we wanted to see Angkor and this we did. And it was worth it I would say - though getting there overland from Bangkok is quite an adventure. Roads in Thailand are good, so traveling by bus is no big deal. As soon as we crossed the border to Cambodia the road turned into a muddy something with enormous holes. The rainy season had started on time, so all vehicles are covered in mud - not a nice time to ride your motorbike... The bus we went from the border onwards was one of those old rattling types and provided some 6 hours of bumpy zigzag turns. After three hours we stopped - flat tyre. It was fixed in 30 minutes in a tiny garage... It was nighttime when we arrived and we where tired, so we accepted the offer to stay in "my uncle's guesthouse" the guy accompanying the bus made...

Cambodia is still a very poor country - looking out of the window I saw people working their fields with a pair of oxen and a wooden plough, there are small villages with simple huts - just some impressions that give a different view from what I saw in Thailand. From what I've read around 40% of the population live below the poverty line.
Cambodia has suffered much during five years of civil war followed by the rule of the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979. The revolution was aimed at reshaping the country according to Marxist-Leninist principles - within weeks people were forced out of the cities to work in the fields, money was abolished, schools closed and religious activity banned. During those four years one in five died as a result of the regime, the majority died from malnutrition, overwork or mistreated diseases, thousands were executed for allegedly opposing the regime (some were killed just because they wore glasses). At least 14000 were killed in a secret prison called S-21 in Phnom Penh.

Walking around in Angkor Wat we were reminded of this dark era in Cambodia's recent history when seeing scenes of torture and killing on one of the reliefs covering the walls surrounding the temple complex. We've read about Cambodia's history in David Chandler's "Voices from S-21" - he quotes one of the tourguides linking those pictures with the cruel practice of the Khmer Rouge. It is frightening how over thousands of years not much seems to have changed. The horrors people are capable of doing are still the same...
So we walked around the vast area surrounding the main temple and found many thoughtful faces...
Reading about the Khmer Rouge has touched me, especially because David Chandler doesn't just stop at giving an analysis of what happened at S-21 - he compares it with the Holocaust and similar incidents. He tries to answer the question how these things can happen again and again with half the world watching from a safe distance. He quotes a british journalist writing about the Holocaust and writes "to achieve the murders at Treblinka, the Nazis could count on the spiritual deadness of the world at large". He continues:

"I suggest, we allowed S-21 to happen because most of us are indifferent to phenomena of this kind happening far away to other people. Evil, we like to think, occurs elsewhere."

Far away to other people... At the time of the massacre between Hutu and Tutsi in Ruanda I was 14, at the time of the killing of 8000 people at Srebrenica I was 15 years old. The same age many of the victims and perpetrators had. And today?
It's challenging to have all this information...



The next border we'll cross will be when returning to Germany. I wonder how that will feel like...