Torture Prison - Tuol Sleng

Torture Prison - Tuol Sleng, originally uploaded by Christiane B.

Amazingly now I understand what everyone arond me said when the Berlin wall fell: what it would change the world. As a matter of fact, so much has changed that it took me a good while to even remember and piece together the geopolitical strategies that used to dominate this region and that have helped create the amazing cockup of the Kemer Rouge revolution.

The UN supported the Kemer Rouge's seat in its midst until 1990. The somewhat legitimate and certainly less murderous, yet Vietnam backed, government was shoved aside from the 1979 invasion until that date. Even until now there is no closure, there are no trials and only slowly are details of personal misfortunes coming to light. All in all there are 2 million corpses and relatives of those victims are still living in the same villages as the perpetrators while the former glorious kingdom that brought us Angkor Wat is returned to the Stone Age. A population decimated and missing the brightest and most educated in its ranks, a country that is collectively suffering from PTSD and mistrust. A country that is slam packed with phat SUVs driven by NGO workers, UN personal and the kids of those guys who bought their way back into power, who once in a blue moon seem to take fancy to crashing those vehicles into ancient ruins. The foreign correspondence is jam packed with NGO ladies drinking lychee martinis and guys in polo shirts trying to give the impression they were the ones who shot some cutting edge footage back in 1978. All this in a country that brought us Angkor Wat a thousand years ago. Corruption is the name of the game and there is a tension oozing out from under the laughs that are used to cover up anything from shame to a feeling of having gotten caught to general unhappiness. It seems the giggles, the unexplicible giggles that followed us from a hotel concierge not understanding to the rickshaw man overcharging to the prison guard in the Kemer Rouge video re-telling how he used to club prisoners but never, ever was the one cutting their throats. There is a denial as powerful as I have ever seen it, a smile the way to cover any feeling that is not a smile.

Coming from a country with a history that is generous to those craving a feeling of guilt and equally generous to the printing of text books, novels and biographies retelling and working through the horrors of the holocaust, I am perplexed at the complete absence of remorse and guilt let alone reconciliation and punishment of perpetrators of the Kemer Rouge years. The only people in the museums and holding virgil next to the killing fields are foreigners. Land mine victims linger in the parking lot to milk a bit of our guilt, but other than that, no Cambodian in sight.