Phnom Penh

We reached Phnom Penh from Siem Reap by flight. The first thing I noticed was the improvement made in the airport complex. It was just a small hall during my last visit. Now it has two floors with an ethinic frontage of sloped tiled roof. I just could not help comparing with our sad airport at bangalore.
The capital city is just any other dirty, over crowded city with lot of unruly traffic and haphazard development. I could see lot of new bunglow type houses with big gates and barbed wire fencing. I just remembered what our Bengali friend once commented seeing the private houses in Jullundar in the late seventies. 'vulgur display of wealth'.
Our guide here was much quieter compared to our earlier guide. We could make out that both our guides were quite concerned about their country as the new government has many people who were part of the old regime of polpot.
Pol pot regime was a reign of terror. He took over the Govt. around 1975. He was a communist supported by china. He made all the educated people doctor, teachers, engineers and so on to leave the capital and asked them to till the lands. He believed that all should be farmers and no body should be educated at all! One whole generation did not receive any education at all. Many of the educated were killed simply because they were educated and many families were killed, even if one member was suspected to be a supporter of old regime. No body suspected the horror which was to come and it all came suddenly, out of the blue and almost one third population was killed by him.
People were asked to move to country side and were told they can return in a week or so but they did not know they were never to return to their homes. Many died in the hardships of the community farming and also starvation as all the produce went to the govt.
After his reign ended around late seventies or early eighties, by the support of vietnam, (they tried to exploit them is entirely a different story) it took years for the normalcy to return to the country.
We could make out , that guilty have been just allowed to go scot free. Now there is a tribunal formed but the witnesses are few and far and the govt. is not wanting to give any support to bring the guilty to the international court.
Pol pot hid in the jungles and died a natural death in 1998 and was never brought to trial for the atrocities he committed on his own people
We were taken to Toul Sleng genocidal museum , a high school turned to a torture and interrogation centre during the regime. This I had seen earlier also. Here they have kept the rooms and other things as it was , and we could see lot of devices used to torture the people. Each one brought to this centre was photographed after they were brought here. As the photographs were not destroyed it has been displayed. We can see small children and old people also and we can make out that they were not aware of the fate which was awaiting them.
Some snaps as to the condition of the prisoners when the vietnamese came here also has been taken by them and it is pathetic to see the condition of the prisoners to say the least.
Only six people survived in this centre.
Last time I saw a place where they had found mass grave and the skulls of the victims were kept in a glass 'stupa' like structure. There was a book written about this mass killings 'killing field'.(I am not sure of the title) A movie also was taken based on this book.
Now people are worried that this part of their history is being brushed under the carpet and they very much want the next generation to know what had happened to the people.
Now the country is ruled by a coalation govt. The country had a king by name 'Naroddham' and he fled the country when polpot took over. He has retired now and his son is in politics and part of the coalation govt and another son has taken over as King who is just a figure head.
We saw the king's palace and museum. The palace was very much like the Bangkok palace in Thailand but I remembered Satya emphasising again and again that the culture was transferred from Khemer to Thai and not vice versa.
We visited a museum and a Buddhist temple and also a market where we had to bargain but they never got upset but kept smiling and if the price was very low they refused to sell.
While leaving for the airport there was a traffic jam and some diversion which left us worried about our reaching the airport on time.
At last we reached the airport.
The impression I got after seeing and hearing about the horrors, is that Human beings as a Species can go to the zenith of glory and also to the other extreme of reaching the nadir. We feel the universe was created for us and we tend to exploit nature, other species and even our own species.
I hope Combodia which has such abundant natural resources, big rivers which look almost like sea and fertile land , recreates its past glory and develops into a lovely nation.