Living and dying in Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh is a city in black and white. Some shades of grey seem like colours at first. In the evening, however, I am sure that there aren’t even any shades of grey. Why? I have seen poverty. It’s worse here. Slums are guarded by rubbish belts. The millionaires’ mansions a block away are guarded by barbed wire and CTV. I’ve seen despair. Here it has only one eye. I’ve heard of genocide. Here the murderers ended up killing each other. I have heard of forgiveness. Here there is only forgetting.

Phnom Penh is black and white. Old Khmer Rouge sit in parliament. The elite help themselves to everything the people lack. The people lack everything and they shout at me all day long: give me your money!

15 kilometres south of Phnom Penh are the Killing Fields, the Khmer Rouge’s largest execution camp. An estimated 500,000 people were murdered in Choeung Ek between 1975 and 1979. Men, women, children. Babies. Several thousand skulls that were unearthed in 1980 are displayed in a stupa. Macabre? Nothing could be more macabre here.

There are a few plaques that tell us in broken English what used to be here. Everything is gone. A few depressions in the earth. Mass grave of 165 people without heads. Mass grave of 100 naked women and children. Mass grave. Mass grave. Mass grave. A sign hangs at the entrance: No laughing. That’s the only funny thing today.

Before people turned Choeung Ek into hell on earth, it was simply a paradisiacal grove of old trees. You can see this a few metres further on. Bees buzz in the trees, chickens scratch underneath. Tuis chirp, butterflies fly from flower to flower. A little girl runs after me behind the barbed wire fence. She sings “some money…some money…”.

My driver Chai takes me back to Phnom Penh. Apparently the Khmer Rouge almost had a sense of humour. A gruesome kind of humour. Tuol Sleng, the largest torture prison, used to be a school. First teach, then empty, as cruelly as possible. Out of 10,000 inmates, seven survived. That makes even the German goal ratio pale in comparison.

Bats hang under the roof. Nobody pays for the upkeep of the museum any more. The government has stopped funding it completely. No wonder. The old cadres are the new cadres. There has never been an official indictment. I don’t think there ever will be. And if there is, it will end in acquittals – or death sentences post mortem.

Thousands of photographs hang on white boards. The green palm trees in front of the windows are reflected in their faces. Some women know that they will soon die. Other men show only hatred. Then I come to a panel with the faces of children and freeze. They are all dead. Because they weren’t farmers, or didn’t dare to think. They knew another foreign language or could heal people.

The Khmer Rouge wanted a nation of peasants. They tripled the target production of rice. They deported half a nation and murdered almost two million people. Some of the old torture masters justify themselves on wall plaques: “We would have been killed if we had not obeyed.”. Nobody did what they wanted and nobody is to blame.

In the end, there was no one left for the Khmer Rouge to kill. So they killed each other. Human beings are creatures of habit, and old traditions should not be broken. There are only two things that are infinite. Human cruelty and the universe.

I want to see that today. Refuse 182 motorbike offers and walk almost 10km through Phnom Penh. Cambodians drive like Vietnamese. You have to forgive them for their unwavering belief in their immortality. They have more reason to do so than the Vietnamese. Turn off? Perpendicularly into the three lanes of oncoming traffic and never blink or look as if you still have one eye open.

The markets are lively. That’s very good today. Then another one-legged beggar comes along and says he fought against Vietnam. No, you won’t get anything for it. Does that make me cruel?

Jörg recommended Seeing Hands to me a few weeks ago. Massage by blind people. Does a good job and I also have the prejudice that blind people need to see – or rather feel – more. I can’t find the studio, 10 Cambodians can’t help me despite speaking English.

I finally find a massage studio for the blind in the city centre. I treat my back to half an hour. Treat it? The best remedy against prejudice is experience. I learn that blind people don’t feel anything either. They can neither see the blood splashes on the wall nor hear my cries of pain. 45kg blind Khmer Rouge presses his thumb with 50kg into my back. Miracle of physics…