"Cambodia
Report"
And so we begin Lent and appropriate stances for
entering into the forty days of Lent are sobriety,
introspection, humility. These are attitudes that make us
vulnerable to God reaching us. My recent ten-day
experience in Cambodia prepared me for this year's Lenten
journey because I returned from that small and sad
country with a sombre sense of self-examination. Everyone
requires some space and quiet afier experiencing
Cambodia.
The tourist perforce becomes a pilgrim and a penitent
when confronted by the terror which turned that pacific
people and beautiful place into the killing fields of
irrational horror. From 1975-79 about one fourth of the
population died because of the Khmer Rouge policy of
genocide toward everyone with any education. Tens of
thousands were systematically tortured to death, hundreds
of thousands had their brains beaten out, and at least a
half million died from the famine induced by the
lunacy.
An American visitor, like myself, comes out of
Cambodia newly humbled because we are reminded, and often
learn for the first time, the terrible contribution which
America's misguided policy in Vietnam made to
destabilising Cambodia and making it ripe for Marxist
fanaticism. The secret bombings under Nixon and Kissinger
in 1972 unhinged what little law and order the new nation
had achieved in its first decade of existence. The middle
could not hold and extremism took over.
Except for the fortunate few who escaped abroad, the
entire middle class was liquidated. All teachers, anyone
who had spent time abroad (which included some 15 young
Cambodian students whom I had known during two years as
chaplain at California State University at LA in
1964-66), all artists, all monks, priests and ministers
were rounded up and murdered. Just to have had a few
years of schooling made one a victim in the suspicious
eyes of the reactionary Khmer Rouge cadres who themselves
were mostly illiterate teenagers from the
countryside.
Nancy and I were attending the annual meeting of
pastors and their spouses from international
congregations in Asia. After one seminar with four
Cambodian pastors -all of whom are alive today only
because they escaped as teenagers to Thai or Malaysian
reftigee camps and eventually immigrated to the U.S. - we
visited the ghastly Tuoi Sieng Museum of Interrogation
and Torture, a high school in Phnom Peng, which the Pol
Pot security forces turned into a centre for
pre-execution torture.
The museum has been left much as the Vietnam Army
found it except that the last tortured victims, all
suspect officers of the Khmer Rouge, have been buried in
the front yard. Large photos of the final 12 victims are
above the torture racks upon which their bodies were
found. The various torture instruments remain with
graphic illustrations of their use. Several thousand
photos of the victims are on the walls, many of them
being only kids and even small children. In the ghastly
way of totalitarian regimes there are pre -torture and
post-execution photos of each victim.
I've also visited Auschwitz and Belsen Belsen, and
Tuoi Sieng Museum, though on a smaller scale than those
places of genocide, gives a more graphic view of what
went on inside. We also visited the provincial "killing
fields" a few miles outside the capital - each province
had its reserved execution site and several in our groups
walked through human bones and clothing still coming to
the surface after each rain.
The Cambodian people has resumed the inevitable
population growth of the poorest countries and now number
about 14,000,000. Every Cambodian we met was friendly and
welcoming, but there are as many children begging on the
urban streets as in India. And because of the landmines,
amputees everywhere. Cambodia is among the poorest of the
poor countries and it's major source of income are the
funded programs of the more than 400 private helping
organisations, many of them Christian sponsored, which
are engaged in rural and urban renewal programs. We
visited a half dozen programs helping orphans, amputees,
prostitutes, drug abusers, and simple farmers.
We attended Sunday evening worship at the
International Christian Fellowship whose large
congregation is made up almost entirely of the staff of
the helping groups. Around 1982 only two Cambodian
pastors were alive in the country, three Protestant
congregations were open, and there were no foreign
missionaries since the governments which succeeded Pol
Pot continued suspicious and restrictive of any foreign
religious presence. But Cambodians trained abroad have
returned as pastors and leaders and in just the last two
years or so the Church has experienced an extremely fast
expansion so there are over 700 Protestant congregations
now.
The Roman Catholic Church which was closely identified
with French occupation and the Vietnam minority, who were
the very first to be liquidated, has also re-established
itself. The result of this abrupt growth is as one of the
pastors told us that "The church is a mile wide but still
only an inch deep." Recently established Cambodian bible
schools are working hard to contextualize the faith and
produce a next generation of leaders.
I had been in Cambodia once before-in 1962 as a
student. Phnom Peng is ten times larger than it was then
though Sien Reap seemed about the same - a very sleepy
town on the Sapp River. There's a radically different
field of vision at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom because
they were ignored places seldom visited by tourists then
and the sites were profusely overgrown by the huge Banyan
and Silk Cottonwood trees. It was jungle exotica. The
spreading roots of the trees were destroying the sites
and now all those huge trees have been cut back. The
visitor can now appreciate the architectural detail much
of which is being restored by various expatriate and
local teams. Cambodia is struggling to rise again.
Pastor Gene Preston
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