Category: Cambodia
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Silent witnesses
When I walked between the old Khmer monuments of a thousand years ago, the guardian deities with their introverted faces on the gopuras looking out over the land in the four directions, I couldn’t help seeing them as silent witnesses of the horror that had swept the country of Cambodia only a few decades ago.…
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New life, new hope
What does the boy in the picture see, what does he feel, what associations does he have while looking at the woman-statue? His apparent intensive look and the way he holds the woman by the arm, suggests she makes him think of his mother or another close family member. He seems particularly intrigued by her…
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Cambodia, and the trauma of a nation
With the defeat of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese in 1979, the survivors of four years of terror could slowly start picking up the bits and pieces of what was left of their lives. With a quarter of the population dead, almost every family had lost several of its loved ones.…
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Derailment of the mind
This is how I tend to look at people who are guided in their thinking and actions by extreme fanaticism. But one might as well say that the fanatic mind is not derailed; on the contrary, it perceives only one rail, only one track to a certain end which it follows with blinkers on, insensitive…
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Killing Fields
Chamkar Krauch 30 burial pits 450 bodies Me Chbar 1 prison burial pit 300 bodies Veal Batt Kang a rice field 500 bodies Tuol Roung Chrey 1 mass grave 400 bodies Banteay O Ta Krey 35 burial pits 4000 bodies Phlauv Meas 30 burial pits 200-250 bodies Wat Samdech Muny 6 mass graves …
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Democratic Kampuchea
or the invention of hell Angkar, the mysterious name (meaning “the organisation”) behind which the Khmer Rouge government of Pol Pot hid itself, had changed the name of Cambodia into Democratic Kampuchea. During their four years of totalitarian rule, the population was forcefully ‘re-educated’ and indoctrinated by Angkar’s radical communist ideology. A collection of slogans…
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Angkar, Angkor
Two similar images, two similar words, but referring to two very different memorable episodes in the history of Cambodia. Angkar (“the organisation”), being the name the Khmer Rouge used for its own leadership. Between 1975 and 1979, Angkar’s regime of terror caused the death of approximately one quarter of the total population of 8 million…
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And the guardian deity remains imperturbed
Are the tree roots going to destroy the Gopura or are they supporting the structure and preventing it from falling apart? I think they are doing both. The building can easily tolerate the slow advances of the tree, at first but after some time the roots start showing their destructive power. They loosen the coherence…
καιρός remembered 