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cambodia-a forgetten past
Our Entertainment Editor FRANK GREANEY, who also likes to travel, visits Cambodia ,where he looks at the legacy of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, and its effect on everyday life there.
The haggard bus that has just taken me over eight hours of pot holes finally screeches to a welcomed halt on a dusty Cambodian street. We have arrived.
The sound of the engines roar is replaced by the distant din of invading motos. The sides of the bus are thumped and locals frantically wave banners bearing the names of various guesthouses at a group of wary passengers.
I decide to take my chances with ‘The Happy Cambodian Guesthouse’. It proves to be an appropriate choice of name given the relaxed atmosphere and picturesque location of the guesthouse. An ironic choice given the dark and devastating history of this wonderful, war ravaged country.
POL POT AND THE KHMER ROUGE
Less than forty years ago, you would have had extreme difficulty in finding a “happy” Cambodian. From 1975 to 1979, Cambodia was ruled by The Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge was a communist party and their regime is responsible for the deaths of almost two million people. Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot was the ruler of the Khmer Rouge during their reign of terror and he was also Prime Minister of Cambodia from 1976 to 1979. During his time in power Pol Pot instigated an aggressive policy of relocating people to the countryside in an attempt to purify the Cambodian people as a step towards a classless, completely self reliant, communist society.
The extermination of an estimated two million people was deemed necessary to achieve this goal by Pol Pot and his cadres. Pol Pot believed that Cambodia was becoming far too westernised and too welcoming of ethnic communities. He adopted a policy of evacuating urban areas to the countryside. He considered city people to be a disease that needed to be contained so that his dream of turning Cambodia into the communist state that he envisaged could be realised. In the wake of this warped fantasy lay an agrarian concentration camp, two million wasted lives and a nation in ruins.
PHNOM PENH
Phnom Penh is considered the “Black Pearl of South East Asia” and it is easy to see why it is labelled with such affection. Smiling faces greet you every which way you turn in Phnom Penh. One would be justified in feeling uneasy with the over enthusiasm and friendliness of the inhabitants given the treacherous past that these people have had to endure and the extreme poverty with which they find themselves battling as a result. My suspicions of these beautiful smiling faces are quashed with another startling observation and that is the almost complete lack of an elderly population.
Upon quizzing a local merchant, I am informed that the Pol Pot regime deemed the elderly as too set in their ways to adopt his new way of thinking. Nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times was viewed as a threat to his plans and the punishment for entertaining such notions was a swift execution. It was also party policy to separate entire family units. All postal and telephone services were abolished. Family members were put to death for even attempting to communicate with their loved ones. As a result, the majority of modern days Cambodians all share a lost sense of identity and a willingness to forget about the past and start afresh.
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