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[René Volpi]

Shades (Part 2) A different kind of jungle

We are in Cambodia. Here, anything can happen. And everything did. I am suddenly surrounded by the impoverished souls of terminally broken people. These, little did they know it then, would turn out to be the future monsters of this lost and tragic nation. This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is The Khmer Rouge.

They came silently in the night, protected by their tattooed darkened faces and, of course, the brush. My first raw instinct --since I had become an almost accidental photo-journalist--was to announce myself as such, barely audible in a very shaky Khmer language, "Oh...Foreign Journalist!!...International Press!!!" (about seven vowels put together) hoping that would perhaps shield us from further danger, including straight out execution, a highly organized trait and preferred MO in the Cambodian jungles. They did raise their fully automatic AK's, which was to be expected, so we all did the only counter-maneuver possible and readily available: palms together to the forehead in a prayer gesture. We were all frozen with fear, our semblance pale and drawn, for an instant that lasted two lifetimes, maybe more.
Only when one of them broke into laughter I took the most difficult step forward of my uneasy life, not for a second deviating my eyes from the huge long barrel and the face that owned it. Hardly breathing, I managed to break a crooked smile as I continued to repeat the same words over and over, almost as if I had assumed they didn't hear me the first time nor the second. But I was a sorry excuse for a mantra-repeating terrified monk. Just as the moment came with a sense of a miracle in heaven, it dissipated just as fast. Not everybody was laughing, and just as the instant bore a promise, it immediately cloaked into another terrifying one.
He couldn't have been twenty years old, but his eyes were forever. And so he took a life forevermore, and didn't even change his expression...

The count stops roughly at 1.7 million murdered Cambodians. Even more died in the aftermath of it, due to complications of the torture and subsequent maladies of the longest 4 years of that country's existence, also known as the Magnificent Angkor.

I still have terrible trouble even trying to put these horrible events in ANY kind of perspective; therefore, I will stop attempting to do so, just like then, and just hope that it will not ever be forgotten or shuffled down in the annals of History. I do find, however, it abhorrent that we, the free people of the West, allowed that implacable Genocide to occur, even after we had made the now obscene claim of --Never Again--! And yet, it was allowed to happen. We let a monster named Pol Pot, himself a Cambodian, drive and push his own country towards one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th Century.

On April 17, 1975, Pot himself -the monstrous leader of the communist guerrilla organization--transformed Cambodia into a virtual prison without walls. This extreme form of radical communism annihilated religion, culture, currency, personal property, hospitals, schools, the banking system and every other vestige of modern urban life.

Nearly half the population of Cambodia died in the four years that followed, many in the “killing fields” such as Toul Sleng, the slaughterhouse in Phnom-Penh. Those who survived emerged forever scarred by the four year nightmare of forced labor camps, starvation, brutality and mass murder.

But now is December, 1990, and it's 15 years later, what has really changed? Khmer Rouge's still roaming the countryside with impunity. The Vietnamese that liberated the country from the iron fist of forced labor and human atrocities in '79 are now seemingly seeking revenge against none other than--and this is really unbelievable--Again, on the Cambodian People!!! It is just as bad as it was, and like some kind of Evil undead, Bad is meeting Worse.
My friend and colleague Thung Miep swears the country is cursed, I looked at him with an ironic stare, as I tell him, "Buddy, I could have told you that!"

(to be continued)

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Shades
We were all around the fire and outside a shack we had found entirely by luck. By the looks of it, seemed, was abandoned, or at least not really cared for by any people in quite a long while. As is usually done, and by the stimulus of spirits--of the alcohol type--conversations were abundant and crisp. Just like any other time, it took no time for all of us to get truly blasted and as one would imagine, the tales we all told were successfully colored and even dramatic at times, all depending on the creative form of the speaker himself. Not far away there was a swamp-like medium-sized lagoon where that night's moon looked as if it was alive and dancing by the means of its own reflection. It was indeed a sight to behold, and I began to experience a dream-like epiphany, as the voices suddenly changed tone and rhythm and at the same time sounding elongated and far, the laughter deep and spacey. I felt as if my presence was there, and yet my mind wasn't. I went with the moon that by now was dancing in the dark waters of the pond. The wood from the fire marked the moment, cracking loudly, speaking its language like conversing to the breeze that understood, as the leaves provided an ever so subtle chorus of many, lingering there in an absolute perfect cacophony of sounds. The nightly hours felt timeless, and in essence everything seemed as in sync with the moon that at one point looked like it couldn't get any bigger, like it couldn't dance anymore...
But the night was far from over and by no means the fire pit would end anytime soon. This night was a night that no one would ever forget. It was a time of uncontrollable, relentless fear. What started as a cozy evening by the fire, by forces beyond our control or comprehension, ended up being a time of desperation and despair. The events that took place that night would make a mark in our psyche that literally ended up scarring the deepest fibers of our beings. But before that, we would have to fight for our lives to a degree none of us thought possible. Not in a million years. And yet we did. Some of us did meet tomorrow. Too many of us did not.
(to be continued)