Floating Village of Siem Reap

Fifteen Kilometers away from Siem Reap city of Cambodia, the lives of more than 6000 people float on the muddy waters of the Tonle Sap lake. They live on the "floating houses" built on stilts, with an uncertain future looming large over them.

Their lives ebb and flow with the tide of Mekong river through which they reached Tonle Sap from Vietnam. Mekong river is one of the longest rivers which flows for 4000 kilometers and feeds the water to Tonle Sap. Tonle Sap is considered to be the largest lake in South East Asia. In a way, it is also seen as a river. The answer to the question whether Tonle Sap is a lake or a river itself is uncertain, like the the lives of the people who have a floating existence. 

It is one of the poorest communities of Cambodia. Their floating houses lack proper sanitation. Fishing is their main source of income.They utilze, consume, and exist on the water around them. Hundreds of people live, work, earn, get married, give birth to children, and die. Children play, get schooling, and grow. Everything takes place in their water world.

Who are these floating people?

Floating Homes

Home with a garden

 

They mostly belong to the Vietnamese community. Vietnam and Cambodia have a common border and the two countries share the history of frequent wars, within their own countries and also between them. Cambodians always viewed the Vietnamese living among them with contempt and suspicion. 

During the Khmer Rouge regime of  Pol Pot (1975-79), the Vietnamese were persecuted, tortured and many of them were killed and a large number of them (around 100,000) were deported and driven away to Vietnam as a part of the ethnic cleansing programme.
Unfortunately they had to live as refugees in Vietnam.

After the fall of Khmer Rouge regime many of them started coming back to Cambodia, their former home for many years. They returned by taking an illegal route by boats through the Mekong river and reached the Tonle Sap. In spite of the fact that most of them were originally living in Cambodia for several years. none of them had citizenship in Cambodia.
Even now, Vietnamese do not have legal rights to have citizenship in Cambodia. They cannot have right to hold properties and they never had been given Cambodian passports.

They are not allowed by the Cambodian authorities to come to the shore, since they do not have any permanent address, identification proof or passports to prove they were Cambodian citizens who were living in Cambodia for many years. At the same time the Vietnamese government did not permit them to return to Vietnam again.

Both the countries disowned them.

Church

Buddhist shrine

School

Community center

So they made a daring attempt to rehabilitate themselves by defying the authorities and had built makeshift homes on stilts and started living in their floating village in Tonle Sap. They succeeded in surviving till now and their settlement remains as the symbol of their perseverance and indomitable spirit against all odds in spite of the political insecurity
and continuing harassment by the authorities.

At present, this floating village has caught the attention of the world. Several international NGOs provide their support for the betterment of lives of these settlers. ADB, Japan and South Korea are doing their best to help the floating communities through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Floating village, now has basic health facility, a Vietnamese School, a Buddhist shrine, a church, a restaurant, a convenience store, etc.

Fishing

 

We had a two-hour cruise through the river to visit their village and observe the lives of the floating people.In spite of their toughest life and continuous struggle, they always have a happy smile and present a friendly demeanor to visitors like us.

The government, though legally ignores their presence and do not recognize their rights, has no qualms in exploiting their floating presence for making money through a kind of voyeuristic tourism!

Killing Fields of Red Khmers

On April 17, 1975, after five years of civil war, the red army of Khmer Rouge could capture Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. That marked the beginning of the rule of terror by Pol Pot, who called himself “Brother number one”, renamed the country as Democratic Kampuchea and designated the date as “Year Zero”.

Nobody in their wildest dreams would have thought that “year zero” meant that all that was part of the lives of Cambodians were to be destroyed. When the Khmer Rouge army marched through the streets of Phnom Penh, they were greeted by the unsuspecting civilians by cheering them.  The “Agrarian Socialist revolution” of Pol Pot had started on that day.  In less than four years more than two million Cambodians were killed.

 

Who was Pol Pot? “Brother number one” Pol Pot was the chief of the red army called “Khmer Rouge” from 1963. In Khmer language Rouge means Red. Khmer Rouge was fighting against the corrupt and inept Cambodian government under Lon Nol. His original name was Saloth Sar. He changed his name at least 12 times. Nobody understood the meaning of the name “Pol Pot”. While he was a university student in France, he came into contact with communist ideology. He returned to Cambodia with like-minded friends with a Utopian dream of creating a classless agrarian socialist society. The ideology was unsentimental and weirdly idealistic.

But, once in power, while trying to implement his ideology, everything went horribly wrong.

Khmer Rouge government introduced a radically extreme policy of agrarian communism. Under this policy, all religions were banned, all schools were closed, and books were burned. All hospitals and factories were closed. Financial institutions, banking operations and currency system were abolished. Entire economic activities had come to a standstill. With the abolition of the use of “money”, it was chaos everywhere.

Teachers, merchants, artistes, and all intellectuals were murdered. All leading movie stars, writers and singers were killed. “Family” as an institution was banned. Family relationships needed state’s approval. Husband and wife could meet each other only on a limited basis. Any kind of “privacy” is not permitted. Even “eating” food had to be done as a communal activity.

All those who were living in cities and educated people were deemed guilty as saboteurs of new agrarian system. All the cities were depopulated. People were asked to evacuate from their homes and those who resisted were killed immediately. The evacuees were sent on long marches to the countryside to join the agricultural communes. The rigours of the march itself killed many sick and old people. Many children also were died in the process.

Those who were forced to relocate to rural farms had to undergo forced labour for at least 12 hours a day. If anybody could not withstand hard work, they were considered to be weak people and misfit in the agrarian utopia and were killed.

Pol Pot started his ruthless campaign against several different groups whom he believed to be enemies of the state and the new system, and took steps to eliminate all of them. They included members of the former government, educated intellectuals, university students, teachers, Buddhist monks, Muslims, Christians and those who belonged to ethnicities other than Khmers. (The Roman Catholic Church and several places of worship in Phnom Penh were completely razed to ground). 

                                                 

                                                     (All photographs are by the author)

There were a number of “killing fields” where large numbers of people were tortured, killed and buried. According to an analysis done by the Yale University, there are more than 20,000 mass graves in Cambodia. The “Killing Fields” in Phnom Penh is now kept as a memorial of the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge regime. I had visited the “Killing Fields” in a place called Choeung Ek seventeen kilometers away from Phnom Penh. It was a shocking and depressing experience.

After the end of Pol Pot rule in 1979, the dark secrets of the killing fields came into light. Nearly 10,000 bodies of men, women and children, many of them in a mutilated state, were discovered. It is believed that many more bodies may be still lying there buried in the field. It was decided not to disturb the dead any more. Nearly 17,000 people were brought to that killing field during the four years of Khmer Rouge rule and nobody was believed to have escaped from there.

There is a stupa built in the model of a Buddhist temple in memory of the dead and more than 5000 skulls are stacked in a shelf-like structure inside. I could see that many of the skulls were shattered and broken, showing how the people had suffered before getting killed. Even now, human bones could occasionally be seen littered on the mass grave site.

The execution of people in the mass killing fields, were carried out using many crude and cruel methods. They used spades, knives, sharpened bamboo sticks etc. Luckier ones were killed by poison. Several children and infants were killed by having their heads hit against the trunk of a Chankiri tree (killing tree). They were held by their heels and swung against the tree smashing their sculls.  

UNICEF estimated that in addition to Khmer rouge killings, the total number of deaths including that due to starvation and sickness, may even go up to 3.0 million, which was nearly a quarter of the total population of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge rule under Pol Pot had come to an end with the invasion of Vietnam in January 1979.

Khmer Rouge Tribunal for the trial of crimes of Khmer Rouge against humanity was established only in 1997. Later a Genocide Tribunal was also set up with Cambodian and United Nations judges for the trial of surviving leaders of Khmer Rouge.

“Brother Number 1”, Pol Pot died of natural causes in 1998. One week ago, on March 14, 2013, “Brother Number 3”, Ieng Sary died in the ripe old age of 87 after a very comfortable life in Phnom Penh. “Brother Number 2”, Nuon Chea, the last of the three top leaders is still awaiting trial. He is in his eighties. Khieu Samphan, “Brother Number 4”, was arrested only in 2007 for undergoing trial.

 All of them belonged to very affluent families. They were highly educated and went to France, in their twenties for higher studies, with scholarship. They were attracted by the French Communist movement and returned to Cambodia as hard core communists. But they had a different extreme version of communism, which they called Agrarian Socialism and formed Khmer Rouge (Red Khmers).

The irony is that the main perpetrators of this heinous crime against humanity had never received punishment they deserved. There are undeniable political reasons behind this.