justice in cambodia

Tuol Sleng Prisoners (S21)

I am in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge trials are currently on.  Sponsored by the international community.  Three million people is the upper estimate of people killed from April 1975 to January 1979 under the Khmer Rouge.  Lower estimates still place the number of deaths over 1.1 million.

 

Death, like life is not a simple concept to understand.  What does it mean to kill 3 million people?  There is a legal response, an international state sovereignty response, an international self interest response.  What are the geo-political interests the justified this? I could name a few, communism for one. But it can hardly be said with any sort of satisfaction can it.

 

And what can you do, when 30 years down the track collective guilt takes hold and you want to be seen to be doing something good.  We are afterall the good guys aren’t way?  I’m white, middle class, male and from the west.  We promote freedom and democracy and justice.  Well we couldn’t deliver on the first two in Cambodia, although we were complicit in freeing many people from a life they may have otherwise had.  And the UN run elections in 1993 have eventually resulted in a quasi-democracy.  Well, a one man system of governance overseen by Hun Sen.  With USAIDS slogan “From the American People” in my mind, I wonder what these trials mean to the people.  Pol Pot gave the Cambodian people Comrade Duch to oversee Tuol Sleng prison.  A former high school that was a place of tortue and death in Phenom Penh, with over 17,000 people taken from here to the killing fields.  Twelve people survived. And guiltily for me it is the 79 foreigners, including from America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand that impact the most.

 

Comrade Duch is now appearing in the court.  And we the international community are taking the moral lead in prosecuting him.  If you want to, give the Cambodian people a Kangaroo Court – but don’t let it absolve you from any guilt – an illusory act at abdicating responsibility.

 

Death like life is complex.  Can death lead to justice?  There is a true story that during the holocaust, in a concentration camp in Germany occupied Europe, the Jewish population held a trial.  They charged God with murder – or complicity in it.  How could there be a God watching and caring when 6 million of his followers were being systematically slaughtered?  Following official proceedings the verdict was made.  Guilty. Then they made their prayers and went back to their daily rituals.  God had not died. But justice was a process – not an outcome.  One owned by the people.

 

Who owns the Cambodia trials?

A Typhoon in Manila

I work for a regional organization based out of Bangkok.  We supply policy advice to twenty five countries between Iran and Fiji.  Realistically, I work in less than ten in Asia.  I travelled to Manila for a week – the last week I was 30 in fact.  I was sandwiched in between two typhoons.  The first one was Ketsana that had devastated the city 3 days earlier.  Ironically I was working on water governance.  Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. But it was more than water that makes this trip stand out.  It is food.

 

Even the transport brings images of food to my mind. The wheels on the buses go round and round as I pass them on our way from the airport in a canary yellow, Asia Development Bank priced taxi-ride.  The busses are something like a sardine can on wheels.  Decked out of course.  A glammed up KISS version sponsored by Rio-Tinto’s latest tin mine in the Northern Gobi.

 

It’s an important metaphor for the country, the wheels revolving, one revolution at a time.  What does Filipino society revolve around?  Food.  Give me guts, innards and bone marrow. Meetings, conferences are organized by meal times.  They are merely an excuse to meet and talk over and about food.

 

I had a meeting after breakfast.  Eating breakfast and talking (not about work) was the number one priority.  I had a meeting after lunch.  Instead of meeting after lunch we all met up for lunch and shared an array of food from around the Philippines.  This particular organization operates out of a house in the NGO district of Manila, not far from the University.  Each day one of the staff cooks everyone else lunch and they share.  We had fried squid, deep fried pork belly, a sea-food curry, a sea-food and bitter melon stirfry.  I wouldn’t recommend you eat bitter melon as you would an apple – but it’s an amazing full flavour that sucks your cheeks away.  It dominates briefly but then falls into a complementary role like a good introduction to a song. Each dish is served with a separate sauce. A long wooden table to share food flanked by long benches to share company. A typical Philippines set up I am told.

 

Then you have malls.  One in particular stands out, where stores have been seemingly put in as an afterthought.  But if you want a hamburger, a hot dog, some fried chicken or any other tiny piece of America’s input into Filipino cuisine knock yourself and your arteries out.  One of the few stores you are able to visit might sell a basketball to help bounce a bit of burger out.  But there is also a plethora of other options.  I have never seen Mongolian cuisine promoted anywhere in the world apart from Mongolia.  And now a mall in Manila.  Even a colleague in Manila (best described as a jolly man who enjoys slightly larger than average portions, and organizes meetings at a certain hotel where he has a credit line so he does not have to carry cash and can enjoy a conveyor belt of food) thought that when he spent two weeks in Mongolia there was too much lamb and mutton – even for him! In short it is not a cuisine that has captured the imagination of the world – which is a shame because for what they have (and keep in mind the capital Ulaanbaator has an average temperature of zero degrees) they do well.

 

But Manila is more than celebrating other cultures food.  It seems to be about celebrating food and friendships generally.

 

Establishing links – with food and friends. Sometimes you have to break the links – with negative experiences. It’s time to move on. It’s time to change.  Other times its time to keep them – or find new ones and incorporate them into your lives. This spirit of sharing and enjoying company and food is one of those.

Following Herodotus

Herodotus of Halicarnassus (Greek: Ἡρόδοτος Ἁλικαρνᾱσσεύς Hēródotos Halikarnāsseús) was a Greek historian who lived in the 5th century BC (c. 484 BC – c. 425 BC) and is regarded as the “Father of History” in Western culture. He was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a well-constructed and vivid narrative.^[1] He is almost exclusively known for writing The Histories, a record of his “inquiries” (or ἱστορίαι, a word that passed into Latin and took on its modern meaning of history) into the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars which occurred in 490 and 480-479 BC—especially since he includes a narrative account of that period, which would otherwise be poorly documented; and many long digressions concerning the various places and peoples he encountered during wide-ranging travels around the lands of the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Although some of his stories were not completely accurate, he claimed that he was reporting only what had been told to him (sourced from wikipedia).

 

I, like Polish author Ryszard Kapuscinski (see Travels with Herodotus), am reflecting on my travels, histories if you will, as I move through the world for pleasure and work.  I am starting in South East Asia, based in Thailand. Hopefully my wide ranging travels will be a narrative of the time in which I travel and places I travel to.  They will be as accurate as far as they are my impressions.  I was in the last week of my thirtieth year when I started.