Weekend 3: a long report

Friday at 5:30 p.m. a van carrying 11 interns, myself included, turned into Phnom Penh rush hour traffic (changed my mind—makes L.A.’s look tame) toward Sihanoukville, Cambodia’s 2nd largest city. Sihanoukville is about 3 and a half hours southwest of Phnom Penh, on the coast of the Gulf of Thailand. It was dark by the time we really left Phnom Penh’s outer limits, so the drive consisted mostly of endless games of categories and finite amounts of beer.

We stayed in a collection of bungalows on a hill overlooking one of Sihanoukville’s many beaches. It was lush and green, and the bungalows were beautiful, despite the fact that the AC in mine was broken and ants had invaded my bed—a problem remedied the next night by some Raid and sacrificed brain cells.

Caroline and Jessica on their deck overlooking Serendipity Beach.

Sihanoukville is an interesting place. When I imagined Cambodia’s 2nd largest city, I pictured something the size of Berkeley. But what I saw of Sihanoukville—the nicer, gentrified center—was more like a Seaside beach (reference for Oregonians only). I understand that the city sprawls outward, into slums and a thriving child sex industry. The juxtaposition of wealth and luxury and poverty and exploitation never ceases to take my breath away.

Seven of us spent most of Saturday at the beach, moving umbrellas up and down to ward off rain (oh, monsoon season). It was worth it. I’d been craving fresh air and open spaces more than I’d realized. So much so, in fact, that I broke into a barefoot run on the beach that did not end until a sharp pain gripped my foot and I limped back to our lounge chairs. Three days of swollen discoloration, and two nagging fears that I’d either sprained my foot or suffered a nasty insect bite later, I learned Tuesday that I most likely fractured a tiny bone on the top of my foot. Nothing too bad—I can walk fine—but no more barefoot running for me in the future.


The beach that prompted my injured foot

I sat in the front seat on the drive back on Sunday, meaning I was perfectly situated next to the most powerful speaker. This enable me to best appreciate the driver’s “English love songs” CD. After two times through the 17 tracks of Celine Dion, Usher, Enrique Iglesias, and some other super-talented singers I could not identify, I think my brain actually rewired. (Or maybe that was the after-effects of the Raid inhalation).

I was glad I got to see the countryside during the daylight that day, even if my perception was slightly altered by Enrique singing “I can be your hero, baby.” For a U.S. semi-city girl born and raised, these huge expanses of rural countryside without electricity or running water have not yet become expected. Shirtless children herd skinny cattle and water buffalo across the highway, men and women tend to flooded rice paddies barefoot, and the porches that look ready to collapse are filled with laughing, joyous families.
Indeed,

I am continually amazed by the love that shines from the faces of so many Cambodians, every day, regardless of social status or economic prosperity. They are such a gentle, considerate people, and the genocide that happened here is so fundamentally opposed to what I see and hear that I cannot begin to wrap my mind around it. Not only the question of how any human being could enact that much pain and death onto other human beings, but how he could do it to Cambodians in particular.

The more research I do about the post-genocide justice process, the more angry I become. I consider myself a generally fair, judicious person—I try to think through situations that involve other people thoroughly before I react. But I lack that control and that level-headedness completely in the case of the Khmer Rouge: a normal reaction to genocide, I know. The research I am doing, however, requires me to read through summaries and headlines of legal arguments that defend as well as prosecute the living perpetrators of the 1975-1979 mass torture and killing. My fists clench as I read Ieng Sary deny he knew what was going on. I am totally captivated by Nuon Chea’s claims of innocence. My heart speeds up as I read that Ieng Thirith’s defense sought to exclude records of the “confessions” from torture-prisons, which would prove the defendants’ compliance in the tactics used to obtain them, on the very grounds that they were torture tainted and thereby inadmissible. It’s like rubbing salt in the biggest, deepest wound we cannot imagine. It is insult to the gravest injury committed.

I have the deepest respect for the lawyers who are defending these men and woman, for “true” justice, whatever that is, will only occur if the trial is seen as legitimate. But the how’s and the why’s and the guttural feelings that their arguments incite are not easily processed.