Travelling also means visiting history. Not everyone talks about glory and victory, that's Cambodia
Phnom Penh, Cambodia. A city teeming with people, noisy tuk-tuks, temples, street markets, a river.
There are many things to visit. Museums, palaces, a night market, an extermination camp, a museum of genocidal crimes. Killing Field and Camp S21.
The Killing Field are mass graves. Camp S21 is a former high school turned into a prison where the “enemies” of the revolution were sent. We visit these places to learn about Cambodia’s history.
These pits, still overflowing with bones, and this prison tell an ancient, inhuman human story….
In 1975, on 17 April to be precise, the Khmer Rouge make their little revolution in Cambodia.
Four years of murderous madness follow.
It is the year zero, l’année zero.
A quarter of the population will die of starvation, exhaustion or murder.
Two million people.
Men, women, children.
A genocide of an entire people, by its own people.
A Shoa, a Rwanda.
Wearing glasses, knowing how to think, could send you straight to the mass grave, if possible through the torture chamber, tucked into an electrified bed
In this ideal society, men and women didn’t seek each other out to marry; chance assigned couples who instantly bonded with strangers by the dozen.
Very important also for the Khmer Rouge: confiscate all bicycles, you never know when a dissident will manage to turn his bicycle into a bazooka. We also had to cut down all the fruit trees, as the birds were considered crop looters who also had to be exterminated!
More intellectuals, more engineers, more thinking heads, more birds and more fruit trees: the reign of the Khmer Rouge also destroyed the spirit, the intelligence
It always begins for good and it always ends badly. A government run by pure morons, murdering scholars, doctors, intellectuals at any cost are well known stories of the human kingdom
The men and women who suffered this tyranny probably died without understanding that a man or a woman who is given power over another man or woman can do that
This was Cambodia in 1975. It was just over forty years ago
It’s always the same story.
Nothing new, nothing insurmountable.
Nothing we can’t fight.
Everything is possible in horror. Anything and everything.
The sun always ends up rising on the darkness.
No tyrant can prevent this.
Even the worst stops one day.
The tree on which the babies were smashed shelters the singing of the birds in its proud antlers.
The sun also sets beautifully on the small lake of the extermination camp, which was filled to the brim with corpses… as if nothing had happened.
But it is not, because I am learning history.
I walk around it, slowly, listening to the witnesses of the past.
The sky turns pink, then red…
I am here today, listening to your story.
I’m here, and because I’m here, coming from so far away, the story will have a happy ending.
The children will grow up again, they will learn to do their best.
We will see to that.
Traveling is also about listening, learning and understanding
Traveling also means meeting people. Far from Europe, children are everywhere: in the streets, markets, festivals, in villages …
