Cambodia Journal I: Siem Reap

Photo: Mary Ellen Mark

It’s disconcerting to arrive at the site of one of the world’s greatest atrocities and find a sparkling clean environment in which Route I American style greets you as you drive in from the airport. It’s as if modern American consumerism had provided the whitewash. Not that anyone is trying to hide anything, but there’s a thriving tourist industry which fills the Vietnam Airlines planes flying into Siem Reap and one has the impression that at least some of the arriving tourists have never heard of Pol Pot or the dreaded Duch who ran the notorious S-21 prison that seeded the notorious “killing fields.” Many Americans first leaned about  “the killing fields” in a book written by the New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg about the Cambodian he worked with as he was covering the fall of Phnom Penh, The Death and Life of Dith Pran. Now of course Duch is on trial, but what has replaced the professionals and intelligentsia the Khmer Rouge murdered in order to fulfill the millenarian dream of a totally class free society? Over two million Cambodians died in the four year period in between l975-9 when the Khmer Rouge ruled. China had its Cultural Revolution in which this same elements of society were sent to re-education camps, which, however brutal, didn’t decimate a demographic of lawyers, doctors, educators, writers and artists who were eventually allowed to return to their homes. You look for clues about the past in the cheerful faces of drivers, desk clerks and tour guides who will lead you to the great temples of the past, yet find no answer to yesterday. It’s a little like one of those murder mysteries with the disappearing corpse.