Cambodia – RAC Tullamarine
Posted on July 6, 2011 by rotaract9800PTD Street Family Centre – Battambang District, Cambodia
In January 2011, the Rotaract Club of Tullamarine sent 3 of its members over to Cambodia to continue our ongoing support for the PTD Centre on a more personal level. Our club president Caterina Scriva, the current District Rotaract Representative (DRR) Grant Godino and myself left our comfortable way of living here in Australia and braved ourselves for one of the most amazing and eye-opening experiences of our lives.
Cambodia, known as Kampuchae (pronounced Kam-pu-chia) by the local people is located between the borders of Thailand, Laos & Vietnam and is a country of wonderful beauty and an incredible history.
A communist group formed in Cambodia called the Khmer Rouge which is French for Red Khmer. Named for the fact that red is the colour of communism.
They began as a legal political party in the 1950’s, at the time named the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). The party was originally a branch of the Vietnamese Communist Party, however the Vietnamese actually came to find that the CPK were too extreme for them to associate with and so distanced themselves from the CPK when its members were looking to re-join with them.
The Khmer Rouge gained their power through the Vietnam War, which was very much taking place in Cambodia as well. Although you may not have heard much about this time from the Cambodians point of view, most will have heard about the many hundreds and thousands of active landmines still lying undiscovered in the country which is a result of the Vietnam War.
More and more troops were gained by the Khmer Rouge as more and more of their country was destroyed by the US Army in the pursuit of eradicating communism. Once the US finally withdrew from the region, the Khmer Rouge won the war with the Democratic Party of Cambodia, who had allied themselves with the US on their stand against communism by this stage.
Between 1975 to 1979 nearly 2 million Cambodians were killed in genocide by the Khmer Rouge in the name of being “…the first nation to create a completely Communist society without wasting time on intermediate steps.”
The politics involved at this time were quite complex, but the key people who were targeted were the intellectuals, businessmen, religious people (Buddhists and Hindus) and foreigners. These were the people who were seen or envisioned as putting up the most resistance to a communist society and so were simply exterminated.
Almost all of the educated people in Cambodia were wiped out, either by the Khmer Rouge themselves or through malnutrition or disease later on, along with countless peasants and farmers who were not educated but still targeted by the Khmer Rouge.
During this time horrible atrocities occurred. We were confronted with the evidence of such atrocities when we visited the famed Tuol Sleng Museum in Phnom Penh, formerly made famous as the high school turned S21 Prison Camp.
This was where civilians made prisoner were taken for further “interrogation”. When you walk through the doors of the main rooms of the museum today, you are faced with thousands of photos of all of the people who were forced to become a prisoner here. You then walk into a room that contains a cabinet stacked with human skulls on exhibit that were left in the compound once the Vietnamese troops drove out the Khmer Rouge from the prison. Nearly 20,000 people entered the S21 Prison Camp. Only seven prisoners came out of the compound alive.
Of these seven people, two of those were artists who were forced to create propaganda material for the Khmer Rouge. They now display their artwork at the museum, showing visitors the various torture methods that they and all others who walked through those doors had to endure.
Most of the guards and interrogators were male teenagers between the ages of 15 to 19 years old and generally from peasant backgrounds. They were chosen this young as they were more malleable to become self-righteous in the knowledge that what they were doing was right. These young men were always kept terrified of making mistakes in their work for fear of becoming one of the prisoners they were meant to guard or interrogate.
“Interrogation” entailed many different types of torture methods. Some of these included starving a prisoner then feeding them copious amounts of uncooked rice and forcing them to drink down a great deal of water, causing their stomachs to expand and become irreparably damaged. Others were forced into a long wooden box that shackled the prisoners’ hands and feet. This box was then filled with water until the prisoner was forced to almost drown. Some prisoners were shackled then had their fingernails ripped out while the interrogators poured alcohol over the wounds.
Men were given cells approximately 3 x 3m² to spend their days and nights in. These cells had no doors and they were able and allowed to stand at the entrance of their cells to view other prisoners in the room, however any form of talking was forbidden. A comforting thought if your son, father, brother or friend was also being held captive. Women, on the other hand, were given a cell approximately 1 x 2m² with locked doors and were only allowed out for further “interrogation” or to shower, which was more of a hose down before or after the interrogation took place.
Almost all women prisoners were raped during their time at the S21 Prison Camp. A lot of these women escaped further torment by simply hurling themselves from the third story window before they were forced back into their cells. Poisonous insects and spiders were used to torture the women into revealing information they simply didn’t have. This would happen after the raping took place.
Many other methods of torture were utilised to gain a confession of defecting from communism, however, most confessions were false confessions, spoken and recorded just to stop the torture. This was usually the point where the prisoner was then sent to the Killing Field.
What was once a large orchard turned into mass graves, the Killing Field was used to dispose of prisoners once the old high schools’ grounds quickly became too full to do so. Prisoners were brought here by the truck load. Each one was forced to kneel by the pit and the guard would follow this with a swift hit to the neck with either a machete type weapon if they were lucky or the spiked, strong leaves of the nearby palm trees. The neck was not required to be decapitated, just enough to snap and cause eventual death. Babies and young children were forced to suffer a very different fate. Near one of the mass graves you will find the Killing Tree where children were held by their ankles and smashed against. They were then unceremoniously thrown into the large pits of bodies.
The civil war may technically be over, but the consequences are very much present today. Only 15% of the population is over the age of 30 because of the genocide. The country was crippled economically and left with very few educated people to pick up the pieces. Because of this, Cambodia is an incredibly poor country and is still struggling to find its feet.
To this day the Cambodian people will not willingly speak of the Khmer Rouge as they see this as dwelling on the past when they only wish to look towards the future. However, this is actually a big problem for the country as they rarely look to the past to evaluate what went wrong and how they could then fix this for the future.
Families are left to starve and beg on the streets as they have few skills because there is little education for the poor. Unfortunately, many of the teachers in the education system are corrupt and tell the children and their parents that if they are not given at least US$1 a week then the child will not pass and continue into the next year of their education. This comes about despite the fact that the average daily income for Cambodian families is only 50 US cents a day with most families having more than 1 child.
These are the reasons that we at the Rotaract Club of Tullamarine have decided to give as much help as we can to the people of Cambodia.
We arrived at Battambang on Tuesday the 18th of January to stay for 5 days, greeted with warm smiles and open hearts by everyone at the Ptea Tuek Dong (pronounced Pet-ay-ah Took Dong) Street Family Centre.
The centre although currently named a “street family centre” is looking to re-name itself the PTD Crisis Centre as they no longer only cater to families. They will find someone in need, whether it be a family begging on the streets, a young man who is abused at home or a women who has been raped and is left pregnant with no other support, and they will provide them with a roof over their head, food and education. All they are requested to do in return is learn some new skills while they are there, such as working in the rice fields, learning how to weave and sew to create clothing and bags and learning how to cook among other things. The centre has the capacity to help up to 120 people at a time, however low funds mean that they are only able to help out a total of 24 at the moment.
Our main objective during our stay here was to help with the construction of the rain water tanks that we raised over $8,000 to provide. We spent our days helping to dig the trenches and creating the foundations for both tanks as well as going out to the rice fields to help with the harvesting. We were also shown the new shop that they have opened to sell the clothing and bags that they create. Our advice was sort on how to attract more Westerners to their shop in terms of new signage.
We were also given the wonderful opportunity to meet some of the families who were integrated back into the community after their time at the PTD Centre. Each family is given a piece of land to farm with and are built a home to live in once they leave the centre. One of the families we met had opened up their own salon underneath their house and kindly offered to fix up our hair after the hectic Tuk-Tuk drive.
More help is always needed at the centre. They are currently looking into creating a computer room to provide the children and adults with some computer literacy. They are also looking for volunteers to teach English to the children that have been integrated back into the community with their family as they do not have the money or the vehicular access to attend school. Our next big project for the centre is to hopefully build a new playground for the children. The current one is falling apart and is quite dangerous. We will also be holding a Book Drive within the next Rotary year to update the small library that they currently have.
This trip was most definitely not for the faint hearted. A lot of back breaking work was involved without the use of modernised Western technology, as well as the emotional pain of knowing that you can’t help everyone while you’re there. It’s incredibly hard to not give money to begging children and their parents, unfortunately this instils in the populace that begging is a positive thing to be done and as I mentioned before, you simply can’t help everyone. Having said that, it is most assuredly something we would all do again because we gained so much by simply giving, providing us with an experience none of us are likely to ever regret or forget.
Written by Tanayah Lippiatt – Secretary - Tullamarine Rotaract Club.
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