One for the Road: Rouge and Empire

This week I’ve been in Cambodia, a country that, though focused on the future, is trying to redress the balance between two distinct sides of its history: an ancient past that it is proud of and a recent one that it is haunted by.

When you say you’re visiting South East Asia, generally people are excited for you.

“That’ll be some experience,” they say with a congratulatory slap on the back, before jauntily reminding you to watch out for drink-spikers, card-skimmers and men dressed up like women.

But tell them you’re thinking of spending a few weeks in Cambodia, and the reaction is very different.

“Really?” they ask, looking confused and afraid. “As in Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge, Killing Fields Cambodia?”

Before I left home I was running a colleague over our route. He was listening attentively the whole way, then when I got to Cambodia his face went all weird and in a growling voice he started singing, “It’s a holiday in Cambodia/ Where people are dressed in black/ A holiday in Cambodia/ Where you’ll kiss… Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot.”

More recently, in Thailand a fella told us to stay on the Thai side of the eastern border unless Niamh wanted to be trafficked and I, he said, looking my torso up and down, fancied having my organs harvested.

I didn’t know whether to be horrified or flattered.

Of course, all this reluctance, nervousness and hysteria around travelling to Cambodia is not hard to understand. It is one of the many ripples of the genocide that during the second half of the 1970s seen the country’s population ruthlessly reduced by almost a quarter.

Historical recap: In 1975 the Khmer Rouge (Khmer being the name for native Cambodians, rouge meaning red as in communist) seized control of the country. Under the leadership of Pol Pot they set about establishing a rural utopia, first abolishing money (which destroyed the currency so thoroughly that today the big cities still prefer US dollars to Cambodian Riel), before completely clearing the cities and moving everybody into the countryside. To realise their vision of an entire population of rice farmers, the pursuit of which ironically caused thousands to starve, the regime killed around two million people in just four bloody years, making it one of the most murderous episodes of the 20th century.

The other day, while visiting the vast planes of rice paddies where all the citizens of the country’s third largest city, Battambang, were forcibly relocated, our guide, who first fought and then fled during the Khmer Rouge years, took us to what is known locally as ‘the killing cave’, where bones of victims still lie scattered around.

“Here they killed 3,000 people. People with a good education or government job, foreigners, ethnic minorities, anybody they saw as a potential opponent. They made Muslims eat pork and sent Buddhist monks to work in the fields. My auntie was thrown to her death here for filling her pocket with rice to help feed her family. They killed people with glasses because they thought spectacles were a sign of intelligence.”

The stories he told us were dreadful and dystopian, similar to the stuff you’ve heard in interviews with Holocaust survivors. Relating these awful memories, he did that macabre thing people who have lived through a real-life horror story sometimes do, laughing at the absurdity of the cruelty he witnessed.

“My family was lucky. My aunt, not so lucky,” he said, creasing up.

Today, in villages across the country, he explained, victims and perpetrators live side-by-side.

“Many people were forced to join the Khmer Rogue. Some leaders were put in prison in Phnom Penh, but many soldiers and members joined the new government or went back to their old jobs,” he said. “Cambodia history, very sad. But we have to go forward,” he smiled.

Feeling pretty depressed, the next day we went to the ‘eighth wonder of the world’ to try to see another side of the country. And we did. It was something else.

When Angkor Wat, the world’s largest Hindu temple, was built 900 years ago, it took almost 40 years, 300,000 men, a few thousand elephants, five million tonnes of stone and zero tea-breaks to complete.

Even through the blinding sweat, it was an incredible thing to behold. Huge in both scale and detail, every design was drawn by Khmer architects, every angle calculated by Khmer astronomers, every column engraved by Khmer craftsmen, every stone cut and laid, without any binding agent like concrete, by Khmer builders.

In its prime, from about the 9th to 14th centuries, explained our guide, Rith, Angkor Wat sat at the heart of Angkor City, capital of the Khmer Empire.

While London and Paris had populations of well-below 50,000 people, Angkor, with an estimated citizenry of around one million, was one of the largest pre-industrial cities in the world.

“Pol Pot hated religion, but he loved Angkor Wat. But now he is gone and the temple is still here,” said Rith proudly, looking up at highest pyramid as it split the big sun behind it.