The Dark Side of Cambodia

I often feel like I am not doing anything worthwhile with my life. I feel most of my pursuits are self-indulgent, and at the end of it all while I will have some nice images passing before my eyes as I head to the great beyond, what sort of legacy will I leave? The more I travel the more I am increasingly at odds with the wicked ways of the world. There is so much beauty, but there is also so much misery, and much of it is only visible if it is directly threatening Western interests. I don't ignore it, but even here I just talk about it and actually do precious little.
 
The Holocaust was a terrible thing. It is also a well-known, and well documented universal suffering. The motto that has encapsulated that time since is Never Again. I wonder though how much heed has been paid to those words. I wonder how long this event will be used as justification for further unspeakable cruelties. I wonder if because the vast majority of people who suffered these atrocities were white that this is part of the reason it is still so well documented, and the victims so martyrized. I think at least in part the answer has to be yes. I do not mean to devalue the suffering of so many millions of people, it should be remembered and the people should be remembered. It should be taught in schools, and what happened and how it happened should be common knowledge. But what about the rest? If the Holocaust was to teach the world Never Again, why is it still happening? Why is the world still largely ignorant to the plight of people who have suffered in areas not directly in the scope of Western interests? The world is now watching with rapt attention to Trump vs. Clinton, though really whoever wins will have very little impact on the day to day affairs of the average citizen of the world. We are drawn too with morbid fascination to terror in Syria, and the threat of ISIS worldwide. Racial inequality in the US is front and centre as the #blacklivesmatter takes centre stage. This is just what the media chooses to tell us, and we get bombarded over and over again with the same stories, and what difference does it make? Has anything changed? What else is going on that is worthy of our attention? Whose plight is being ignored? Why did we not care about Rwanda? Sudan? Why do we support nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia, while denouncing Iran, Venezuela, Cuba? What difference is there between them all really?

I want to share two stories to which I was vaguely aware of, but now have a stronger understanding of. I am realising already that this post is misguided and rambly, and hopefully by the time I am done it will have some sort of semblance. It goes back to the Never Again theme which I tried to establish. Since the Holocaust, at least as many, probably more people have died in a genocidal fashion and the world remains largely ignorant of this fact. The reason being is that these atrocities have taken place in areas that either do not serve Western economic interest, or their politics are wrong and therefore the people affected do not matter to western governments.

The second story is related to human trafficking. A problem that receives very little media attention, but is every bit as horrendous as the plight of refugees in the Middle East, or African Americans in the United States. As the father of three daughters, this is particularly troublesome to me.

I am presently visiting Cambodia. I was aware that there was a genocide here, and that it was recent, but I knew little else. Not the cause nor the scope. Now knowing both I am shocked and disturbed, not only by what happened, but the reaction of the world. Politic is a cruel mistress. In the late 1970’s The Khmer Rouge came to power led by Pol Pot, the communist dictator. In three years the Cambodian population of 8 million was reduced to 5. More than 1 in four Cambodians were murdered during this time, and the world was silent. The world perhaps did not really know it was happening. But when the Communist Vietnamese government became aware, they intervened and established a government in Cambodia that the West refused to recognise. Therefore Pol Pot and his henchmen were granted amnesty. The West had lost the ideological war in SE Asia, and no amount of human suffering could counteract incorrect non-capitalist governance. Here was a genocide that defied the lessons of the Holocaust, and it was not the first nor the last such instance.
​
On this trip to Cambodia I visited the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh (anyone who comes here should). I have also visited Dachau previously. The sights and stories of the former far outstrip anything I witnessed at the latter. 3 million people were not worked to breaking point and then gassed. They were tortured, and then hacked down with machetes, bamboo, garden instruments, rope, rocks – whatever was available. If you were young enough to be held in one hand, you were bashed into trees. If one member of your family was guilty of an alleged crime you were guilty by association.

The second story is related to human trafficking. During our stay in Cambodia we were very fortunate to stay in two places that did much to advance the lives of people affected by human trafficking, especially Daughters of Cambodia in Phnom Penh. The people employed by this organisation are all victims of human trafficking. They are given jobs by the hotel, and create charming handiwork that is for sale in the gift shop. Staying here was perhaps the best decision we made on our trip. We learned through our stay here that 1 in 40 girls in Cambodia are trafficked at some stage in their lives. Knowing this, and knowing that the girls serving us breakfast, making our rooms up, and answering our questions, were all victims put a very immediate human face to suffering in a way that no gas chamber, or holocaust museum ever could. This was a response to history still being made. I was faced with a crisis as well regarding my three girls. Nothing I could say would make them able to comprehend what these women had been through, how could they understand if I could not? I opted to tell Aurora and Brynn only that these women who were helping us had had some very unfortunate things happen to them in their lives, and that their jobs here were helping them to do that. Aurora said that was very sad, and that she would draw them a picture because they had been very nice to us. And to think, one day this innocent mind will one day be destroyed by the truth of what has happened here.

I apologise for the nature of this post, but I wanted to tell some of this story because I feel it is an important one. It is not a happy one, but if you were to travel to Cambodia one day I want to assure you that there is still happiness here despite everything that has happened. You should come, it is a beautiful country one of my favourites, but you should not come naïve to the history. If you have made it this far I promise in the next post, I will speak of the more traditional tourist fare and family experiences we had in Cambodia’s north.