woody's sojournals

After I eventually found the Vietnamese embassy and attained my visa for the comming weeks, I sought out a driver, explained my destination (at least i thought i did), then climbed aboard the back of a moto. Unfortunately the driver had a woman's sense of direction (oooooo, controversial, but true) and i got a tour of nohm pehn as well as Chom Chao (around 15kms out of Nohm pehn), as the driver asked seven different people for directions. Over an hour passed and we were on the right path (!), a path which at one point may have been the path of cendemned Cambodians being transported to where they will suffer and rest during the atrociaties and sheer black hearted-ness of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979.

Cambodia, a neighbouring casualty of the vietnam war, fell victim to a Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975 following five years of fierce civil fighting and constant millitary carpet bombing against communist regiem. Under Pol Pot's leadership, the Khmer Rouge took Nohm Pehn and cast the country's history into a darkness shrouded with tears, bloodshed, fear, torture and savage, cold murder. After declaring "Year Zero", Pol Pot, a student of marxism and revolutionary socialism, endeavoured to 'purify' his nation of any foriegn influence such as capitalism, culture and religion, in a plight to become an untianted, self-sufficient Maoist agrarian state, turning Cambodia into a country of disconnection, with even embassies closed and newspapers abolished - the country became Deomcratic Kampuchea. The educated, Buddist monks, those with western contacts, the crippled and even those who simply wore glasses were taken to be executed. Thousands of people were killed, and their bodies left inmass graves in what is now known as the Choeung Ek killing fields.

You enter the grand looking cream and green walls into a small parking area and are confronted with a smiling land mine victim, missing a leg and holding out his hat for a buck. The poverty of asia and the deformaties of war have really plucked at my heart's strings this time and with this sight my heart felt the heavy 'plonk' of incredualous-ness human nautre can, sometimes dissmissively, generate.

The first thing you approach as you pass through the entry gate with your ticket (a fee that disgusts and angers victim's relatives due to the government's sell-out to a faceless Japanese company) is a three story high, two and a half meter squared monument containing, literally, thousands of human skulls. Darkened, dirty and brittle with age, some still bare the cracks, holes and marks of being clubbed to death with bamboo, tree branches and garden hoes. My soul was aghast as i quietly walked less that a foot away wondering how all decency dissappeared the way it did here....only thirty years ago. A saddend tear spilt out.

Walking around the site of around eighty mass graves i found slightly harrowing. Flooded, most bore no explaination, but some did; "200 bodies, headless." "100 bodies, women and children"; "tree where children where beaten". Clothes and the odd human bone littered the paths and mother earth seemed to weep a deep sympathy of melancholy after the violation she endured. Tourists gently edge around with a definate sense of shock and respect, saying nothing - instead opting for pointing and sharing expressions. The odd butterfly flutters by and the only sounds heard are palm trees rustling, birds chriping and the quiet information from tour guides shared. I had a lump in my throat and at one point i felt very sick. An emotional morning, capped off with, in my opinion, an ironic journey along boulevade Mao Tse Tung......the name of another communist slaughterer.

The day found the spiritual, emotional and physical corners of my being shattered, splintered and coursing man's actions, wondering why the presence of such evil is beneficial. The place has left a definate mark on me.

Told you it wasn't a happy one.
woody xxx