Holiday In Cambodia
I’ve just been to Cambodia for a while where I saw (among many other things) bones and cloth rising up through the earth.
I saw the recent history of mass slaughter painted on the trees that bore the brunt of baby bludgeoning just before a time when I was born.
The Khmer Rouge intended to create a communist state by destroying the educated.
Look at your hands.
If they are soft then you would have been taken to a pit, had your throat slit and then been dumped in earth that for the last three decades has been slowly rejecting you.
The Khmer Rouge kept the world ignorant of this for what can most potently be described as too long.
I was visiting a friend of mine who is a journalist there and a topic we discussed (among many other things) was the crisis in the Congo.
“What crisis in the Congo?” he asked, my intelligent, sensitive, journalist friend.
And after words like genocide, rape, cannibalism, torture, corruption, united, nations, capitalism, four, million, dead, media, page, fourteen, saturday, guardian, accidental, stumble, no, press, impossible, how, depressing, money and why were shared between us I was left with one thought.
There?s some kind of horrific similarity here. Ignorance is only bliss for the ignorant.
Yes. The world seems strung together by horrific similarities. They stretch here to Guatemala too. Mass graves, genocide, silences, shame, the shadow of recent brutalities falling over life today, which goes on as normal, with buses, and icecreams and football matches everything else. It’s because people are the same the world over, and it only takes a set of similar conditions and similar catalysts to set the horrors in motion.
In Guatemala City last month twenty thousand rightwing paramilitaries demonstrated on the streets because the government hasn’t compensated them for the work they did fighting “communism” in the 1970s and 80s - by “communism” I mean farmers, peasants, indiginous women and children. Peace is extremely fragile because none of the wounds have been healed, only plastered over. Normal life goes on. But what’s beneath the surface of normal life - here, or anywhere else?