Okay, Chicago’s Ice Hockey Team won the Stanley Cup Final. Yay Blackhawks.

Now…onto soccer (football), the most popular sport in the world. Some say it is the most popular because anyone, anywhere can play – all you need is a ball.

Anytime, Anywhere Soccer
Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The 2010 FIFA World Cup (the big finals tournament held every four years) begins this week in South Africa, this first African nation to be hosting the event.

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Phnomh Penh was a dusty and extremely hot city with the same Southeast Asian mix of tuk tuk and motorbike drivers competing for my rear end. The city has come a long way since Pol Pot and had a lovely riverfront lined with many European alfresco cafes where you could sit under a refreshing fan and sip an iced latte.

But the primary tourist stop on most travelers’ agendas in Cambodia is Siem Reap, home to some of the world’s most amazing and best preserved temples some that are nearly one thousand years old.

The granddaddy of them all is Angkor Wat (‘wat’ means temple). One of the man made wonders of the world (vote now for your 7 wonders!), Angkor Wat was a temple built for King Suryavarman II in the early 12th century as his state temple and capital city. It is the only temple here to have remained a significant religious center — first Hindu, then Buddhist — since its foundation. The temple has become a symbol of Cambodia, appearing on its national flag, and it is the country’s prime attraction for visitors.

Although Angkor Wat was breathtaking and obviously grand, my favorite temple was Ta Prohm. The Ta Prohm temple is the only one where the forest and trees are being allowed to grow freely in and around the structure. Snarly roots wind around stone pillars and doorways adding to the beauty and eerie ‘ancient-ness’ of it all.

The site was home to more than 12,500 people (including 18 high priests and 615 dancers), with 80,000 in surrounding villages helping to supply the institution. After the fall of the Khmer empire, the temple fell into neglect for centuries. When the effort to conserve and restore the temples of Angkor began in the early 20th century, Ta Prohm was chosen to be left largely as it was found.

You may recognize the temple by it’s new nickname–the ‘Angelina Jolie Temple’ thanks to her not exactly Oscar-worthy film, “Tomb Raider.” Parts of the movie were shot around this temple in the jungle where nature and man mix together in beautiful harmony. Incidentally, Angelina has since adopted a child (cute and often Mohawk-haired, Maddux) from Siem Reap.

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Today, the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, has a population of about two million, but only thirty years ago the city was an empty ghost town. All the people were driven out of the city by the ultra communist Pol Pot (a student of Mao Tse Tung and Hitler) and his evil Khmer Rouge regime in an attempt to form a Communist peasant farming society which eventually resulted in the death of 25 percent of the country’s population from starvation, overwork and executions. After the Vietnam War, on April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over the city and the people cheered in the streets thinking that good things were finally to come for them. But just three hours later their cheers turned into tears as they were told they must leave the city at once and literally walk to the countryside to become peasants. The Khmer declared it “Year Zero” and said that society was about to be “purified.” Capitalism, Western culture, city life, religion, and all foreign influences were to be extinguished in favor of an extreme form of peasant Communism.

All foreigners were thus expelled, embassies closed, and any foreign economic or medical assistance was refused. The use of foreign languages was banned. Newspapers and television stations were shut down, radios and bicycles confiscated, and mail and telephone usage curtailed. Money was forbidden. All businesses were shuttered, religion banned, education halted, health care eliminated, and parental authority revoked. Cambodia was sealed off from the outside world. Whole families were split up and many older people and hospital patients who were forced to walk from the city to the country died on the way. During this horrific regime nearly three million people died—two million were killed and another million died from starvation.

The vast majority of those killed were people who were educated. Pol Pot’s regime feared they would band together and start an uprising. He wanted only uneducated peasants that would work the land. Our tour group visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Ironically, this former school was turned into an evil prison in 1975 and became the largest center of detention and torture in the country. Classrooms were converted into prison cells where people were shackled and beaten. Thousands of black and white photos were taken of all prisoners and are now on display here. It is an eerie and disturbing sight and it is utterly hard to comprehend such madness. But sadly, we have seen senseless killing like this before with the Holocaust, the genocide in the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and several African nations like Rwanda.

Prisoners were interrogated about their education and line of work. The soldiers had three simple ways of finding out a person’s education:

1. If they wore glasses they must be educated and need them to read.
2. If they had smooth hands, they must be educated because if they worked in the fields, their hands would be rough.
3. If they had light skin, they must be educated because if they worked outdoors, it would be darker.

The Khmer Regime theory was to “destroy weeds from the roots” and they would find and kill all family members of any educated person. As the insanity increased, children at the camp were brainwashed into hating others and even their own families. Soldiers would tell them that they ‘had seen their parents and they didn’t want them back.’ Eventually the children became angry and bitter and blindly became part of the regime. They were turned into prison guards and soldiers, torturing and killing their own.

Our tour guide for the day survived this awful time. His father and five siblings were killed by the Khmer Rouge. He was sent to work in a farm and would work sun up to sun down with only one meal break.

Between 1975 and 1978 more than 17,000 people held at this prison were taken to the extermination camp at Choeung Ek known as the “Killing Fields.” Ironically, it was the Vietnamese who liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Pol Pot retreated into Thailand with the remnants of his Khmer Rouge army and began a guerrilla war against a succession of Cambodian governments lasting over the next 17 years. After a series of internal power struggles in the 1990s, he finally lost control of the Khmer Rouge. In April 1998, 73-year-old Pol Pot died of an apparent heart attack following his arrest, before he could be brought to trial by an international tribunal for the events of 1975-79 leaving the people of Cambodia to never really get the justice they so rightly deserve.

The night after our tour of the Killing Fields we were invited into the home of our local guide. He nobly runs a small school in the first floor of his home tutoring local children in English. He lives above the classroom with his wife’s extended family (of forty-five people) in the customary Cambodian tradition. We sat on mats on the floor and had a wonderfully filling meal of fish, chicken curry, spring rolls and noodles with beef. This sweet and soft-spoken man told us more about the evils of the Khmer Rouge and how most were never really persecuted for their horrible actions. Several former Khmer Rouge leaders astonishingly remain a part of the current Cambodian government today, known as the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). In fact, the current Prime Minister, Hun Sen, was a former Khmer Rouge captain. And so are several members of his cabinet—the Minister of Finance, the Head of the Senate and others. We are told it is undoubtedly one of the most corrupt governments in the world where the number one goal is always self interest rather than the interests of the people. Our guides told us stories of the corruption despite the fact that although they are no longer ‘communist, incidents still happen to those who speak out against the government—mysterious car crashes and deaths. Some examples of the corruption: If a tourist gets robbed and goes to the police to fill out a report they most likely not really help except to ask for money knowing the tourist has insurance and will need to report. Also, we are told that the medicine and drugs at pharmacies in the country is typically not safe and in many cases are fake or expired pills. Nearly all the temples we visited are not supported by or restored by the Cambodian government, but were sold off to other countries instead like Japan, Switzerland, and India. Even the “Killing Fields” were sold off by the Cambodian government to a private Japanese company. The dusty, pot-holed main route from Siem Reap to Bangkok is still not paved. Our guide explained that Bangkok Airways has a “deal” with the Cambodian government. The airline pays Cambodia fifty million dollars a year to not pave the road so tourists continue to buy the airline ticket between the cities instead of driving the bumpy ten hour drive. Our tour, of course, took the road less paved and drove instead of flying. It was the bumpiest, sports-bra requiring, four hour drive I’d encountered since the start of my trip in Costa Rica.

There are many human rights watch groups with their eye on the Cambodian Government, but unfortunately for now, the people’s unofficial slogan is: “Free, but never fair.”

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