Phnom Penh has a young, cool vibe. Till you enter that part of the city which bears the scars of the ravaging wrought by the Khmer Rouge leaders
My first glimpse of Cambodia was as I had imagined: A panoramic expanse of verdant paddy fields dotted with houses-on-stilts and conical pagoda roofs, it’s oddly picturesque and comforting to city-bred eyes. Step out of the airport, though, and there’s an urban vibe. SIM kiosks that promise connectivity at dirt-cheap rates, the growling traffic, vendors hawking wares on the streets—tell-tale signs of a capital city. But none of the hustle-bustle that generally wear metros down. Phnom Penh moves at its own mellow pace. Its true character is reflected not in the aerobics sessions that break out on the riverfront but in the people who choose, instead, to leisurely watch the world go by.
Modern Phnom Penh is a relatively young city which flourished under French colonial rulers in the 1860s. Once dubbed the prettiest address in Indochina, it was ravaged by the Khmer Rouge (Red Khmers in French; the name given to the black-clad cadres carrying red scarves of the Communist Party of Kampuchea), when their leader Pol Pot forcibly evacuated the city in 1975 and banished the citizens to the countryside. But Phnom Penh has been steadily getting back on its feet. Its French ancestry, which can be traced in the colonial era villas and tree-lined boulevards, co-exists with Chinese shophouses and Art Deco buildings. The city is typically low-slung, but occasional under-construction highrises reach at the sky on the eastern bank of river Tonlé Sap.At the crossroads of Streets 113 and 350, my tuk-tuk driver Rin dropped me in front of a rather unassuming gate. Beside it, kids are milling around a man selling icicles. I can hear utensils clanking in the kitchen in the apartment on the other side of the road. A few blocks away, a lady is peering over the terrace ledge to see if her clothes have dried. Amidst such daily humdrum, the guard at the gate stands with his starched uniform and stiff demeanour.
Two’s a crowd in the aisle. But even that seems like a luxury when you step inside. Once the wooden door is shut, you feel a tightness, almost as if the air supply has been cut. In these dingy and musty cells, no wider than a few feet, prisoners were dumped to bleed after interrogation. A few months later, they were quietly shipped out in trucks to be executed and buried in the 300-odd killing fields across the country.
Bordering Choueng Ek are trees from where loudspeakers were said to have been hung. Songs of the revolution blared from them and diesel generators growled to drown the cries of those killed. The corpses were buried in pits and DDT scattered over them to eliminate stench and kill off those buried alive. Over 80 mass graves have been unearthed at the site. Several others were left untouched to allow victims the peace that eluded them in their lifetime. Despite its current peace and quiet, Pol Pot’s favourite refrain reverberates across the killing fields: “[It is] better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake.”
(This story appears in the May-June 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)