“I want one of those, and one of those, and that!”

- Ajaan Bob’s imagining of Rama IV

On Sunday, Bob took me to a Royal Palace and the city and ruins of Ayutthaya.  This was possibly the most memorable day trip of the lot.  We started by taking the Bangkok subway, which uses these really cool one-trip token things.  They're plastic and have a computer chip inside that records where you are going and how much you paid and controls the gate that lets you in and out of the subway.  The tokens probably are not actually that interesting, but I thought they were cool. We rode the subway to the train station (sa-ta-nee rot fai), where we got 12 baht, 3rd class tickets to the palace.  

3rd class train is quite the experience, let me tell you. It’s basically open-air, because all of the windows were open before we left the station. Each set of benches is slightly smaller than a car’s backseat, but most of the time you cram three people onto them anyway.  I sat next to a mother with two kids, one about 4 the other not yet walking. Vendors push around all the bodies in the seats and in the isles, hawking everything from rice, juice, water to nylon hammocks.  Two of the men sitting by Bob, across the isle from me, bought four or five hammocks from the vendor.  They thought it was the sweetest deal ever.  The mother sharing my seat bought her four-year-old some rice.  And she promptly got train-sick while eating it. As the train began to fill, people ran out of seats and began crowing in the isles.  This did not deter the vendors traveling up and down the train. One man standing near me had a fish the size of someone’s face in a bag of water, as though it were a goldfish he were taking home from the petstore. When we were a station away from our stop Bob and I got up and made our way to the door of the car. This was necessary because none of the station stops were very long. I ended up standing in the space between two cars, watching the ground fly past below, thinking it wasn’t so different from riding the accordion of a two-car bus. 

The palace we went to see is located in the country about a two-hour train ride from Bangkok. It was built by Ramas IV and V in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  The idea behind the palace was to build one of everything that Rama IV saw on a European tour.  No joke.  They had a French palace, and English manor, a Chinese palace, gothic cathedral turned buddhist wat, among other buildings and parks. It was crazy.  All of the buildings had very vibrant colors as well - the french house was yellow, the english one was purple, chinese red, observatory yellow and red stripes... very interesting and rather strange to see them all crammed into the same place instead of hundreds of miles apart. 

Once we had exhausted the palace, Bob and I took a boat up the river (the traditional means of travel around Thailand, especially around Bangkok) to Ayutthaya.  

After the kingdom of Sukkhothai fell out of power, the kindom of Ayutthaya became dominant in Siam.  The capital city once held at least one million people and was a great center of trade between India, Europe, China and the rest of Southeast Asia. In 1776 it was ransacked and destroyed by the Burmese, who came in, burned everything they could, stole and melted all the Buddha images, and killed as many as they could - including monks.  This is especially strange to me, since the Burmese are Theravada Buddhists, as are the Thais/Siamese.  Seems you might kill different kinds of Buddhists, but your own sect?  I don't know. 

This destruction had a different result than the destruction of Sukkhothai.  Sukkhothai was destroyed and then left as ruins.  Other cities became important, diminishing new construction, so the ruins in Sukkhothai are all that is left in Sukkhothai.  Ayutthaya on the other hand, has been rebuilt around the ruins.  You have to drive thru a growing urban center to get from one ruined wat or palace to another.  Also, some of the ruined temples have rebuilt active wats inside them.  I'm not certain how I feel about this difference or exactly how it affected my experience viewing the ruins.  I didn't always feel that the ruins were as impressive as at Angkor or Sukkhothai, but at the same time, it was really interesting to see a ruined jedi at one end of a soccerfield, or a gleaming new white wat situated in the center of a walled-in group of ruins.

Fairytale, 2

So... The International Tribunal. Officially called the ECCC - Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia, this court has been years in the making. The international community and many Cambodian citizens have been trying to arrest, charge, and try KR officials since the regime fell in 1979. The head honcho, Pol Pot, died before any legal action could be taken.

Initially the public was supposed to apply for passes/clearance to visit the court, so we went on Tuesday after we taught English over the lunch hour, with no expectation of actually getting in to the building or compound. As we arrived the trial chamber was going on a 20 or 30 minute break, and Ajaan John asked if we could go in when the court restarted - AND THEY SAID YES! We were so excited. And a mite uncomfortable, because we were dressed for Cambodian heat and bumming around... not actually sitting in the trial chamber. I definitely went to the ECCC in a peasant skirt and beater-style tank top... :/ Jenna had to borrow Catherine's scarf to get in, because they wouldn't allow in shorts. Maybe we should have dreamed a little bigger.

All embarrassment aside, this was an amazing experience. We were witnessing the first day of trial proceedings in the first case to make it all the way to trial at the ECCC. Whoa.

(Before each case actually makes it to trial, there is a pre-trial period where the judges, defense, prosecution, and civil party attorneys attempt to hash out all of the nitty gritty rules and procedures for the actual trial. Some things are the same as trial - the defense likes to question the detention of the accused in both chambers, and the civil party attorneys don't really get to do anything ever being two examples - but the pre-trial is where Cambodian and international law get smushed together and a procedure and rules are agreed upon, and trial is where things really get adversarial and guilt needs to be proven and sentences handed down. Of the five cases currently active at the ECCC, four are in the pre-trial stage and one - the one we saw - has proceeded to trial chambers.)

The case before the trial chamber currently is prosecuting Kaing Guek Eav, or Duch (pronounced Doy-ik, we think) the man who ran Tuol Sleng/S-21 Prison during the Khmer Rouge. On Tuesday we missed the first Prosecution and Defense opening statements (they each gave 2) and we just missed Duch addressing the court, coming in as the second Defense attorney gave his opening statement. After the opening statements finished, the trial for the day ended with discussion of some logistical problems that had crept up along with some civil party attorney discontent being expressed due to their lack of opening statement.

We decided to go back to take in a full day of court in small groups. I was drawn for the second day of Duch's trial on Wednesday. We arrived at the ECCC at about 8:45 on Wednesday morning excited to hear the outcome of some of the previous day's debates, since the Justices wanted the time to confer, and to see what would happen next. In summary, the Court denied the Civil Parties' request for opening statements and requested that the Defense put forth the challenges they had alluded to the day before in their first opening statement. At first they didn't want to and tried to write everything off as a misunderstanding, but when asked a second time, the attorneys finally spit out their request to have the court release Duch to house arrest, since he had been in jail for 10 years - 2 years without being charged with anything, 7.5 in the custody of the Cambodian Military, and the final 2.5 in the custody of the ECCC (the .5s are approximate). There is apparently a Cambodian statute that says people charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes or related charges cannot be held for longer than three years, that supplied the basis of the Defense's request. The Prosecution countered, but didn't really put forward overly convincing arguments (at least, not as convincing as the defense was, in my view). One of the Civil Party attorneys made the best argument for retaining custody of Duch. She said that the ECCC has until July before their three years of custody are up, so this is a non-issue that should maybe be discussed in July, if ever. She is one smart lawyer lady. And she had badass hair. The justices decided to break for lunch and conferencing.

After lunch, the Justices came back and said they were gonna take the weekend to discuss release, but that they had decided the next order of business should be to read into the court record the "agreed upon facts" from the indictment. Basically, what happened was the pre-trial chamber came up with this indictment, listing the crimes Duch committed. The Prosecution then broke the indictment down into individual pieces of factual evidence and submitted these to both the court and to the Defense. The Defense was then supposed to go through the facts and designate whether they "agreed" with a fact, "agreed in part", "disagreed" or "did not contest" the fact. The facts that are agreed to or not contested are then considered not up for debate or discussion during the trial; that part of the indictment is fact, true. The Justices, on the recommendation of the Civil Parties, decided that it would be best for everyone's understanding of the case and proceedings if the agreed or not contested facts be read aloud. In the first of three parts, there were some 240 agreed or not contested facts that the prosecutor read aloud in the trial chamber. They ranged from the location of S-21 and M-13 (another prison Duch ran for a time), to the number of prisoners held and killed at S-21, to the methods of torture and the genesis of torture training manuals (:Duch. He produced three volumes of torture techniques and rules of interrogation for the prison... oy). I started the reading trying to write down each fact. About 60 in I switched to writing numbers to keep track of the total and jotting down the facts I found particularly compelling. At 200, I quit writing all together and just marked tallies. I have a full page and a half or two pages of notes that are almost entirely number sequences. I felt a little dazed by the time we left the courtroom, especially when I remembered there were still 100 or so facts to be read from the second section of the indictment (the defense had chosen to not respond to the third part, since it spoke about Duch's character or personality or something, and they felt it resembled self-incrimination, so they didn't look at those facts).

The next day Nathan, Patricia and Catherine went to the court, while the rest of us bummed and taught English. Thursday was part of the pre-trial chamber proceedings for Ieng Sary, the foreign minister for the KR. The man who tricked the entire world to allowing them to hold and keep their UN seat while committing crimes against humanity, if not genocide, even after they had been forced from power. He makes my blood boil. On the docket for Thursday was an appeal put forward by the Defense, requesting that Ieng Sary be released from jail due to poor health, if not cancelling his trial completely, since he was suffering from "near fatal old age" or something like that. The appeal was (obviously) shot down, but according to N, P, and C, the whole lot of that court (minus perhaps the Prosecutor) made themselves look like a complete joke before the justices gave their decision. The attorney's arguing skills were apparently far below those of Duch's trial chamber. Sary also liked to make the justices angry by moving to sit with his attorneys, without permission, instead of his assigned place in the middle of the room, which is just a hilarious image in my head, especially since he's too feeble to "run across the border to Thailand" (a direct quote from the defense) due to the fact that he's suffering "terminal old age" (a summary of the defense). Ridiculous.

I need to peace out for the day, before I spend all of my baht on internet. Yeah, that's right! We're back in Thailand! Woo!

Oh - and here are some links if you are looking for more info on the ECCC and the trials:
ECCC Website
Phnom Penh Post - Enlish-language daily newspaper
and... Supposedly the Cambodia Daily has a website... somewhere on the web. But I can't find it. It's another English-language newspaper and I had lunch with three of their reporters on Wednesday.

"I don't care for your fairytale."

- Sara Barellis, "Fairytale"

I've been searching for the proper words to convey the Kingdom of Cambodia, its present and its past as Democratic Kampuchea, and mostly just failing at finding any that seem to successfully capture what I have witnessed here.

Our second or third day in Phnom Penh, we visited Tuol Sleng, formerly known as S-21, a Khmer Rouge prison. They estimate that up to 20,000 people came through Tuol Sleng between 1975 and 1979 and that no more than 14 are lived past the end of the KR's rule. (The lowest estimate of prisoners is the 12,000-some they have records for, and is the number being used in the international tribunal I will tell about later. The lowest estimate of those who survived: 7. Everyone else was killed.) Tuol Sleng is now a "genocide museum" and a crumbling one at that.

14 S-21 inmates, political prisoners, were killed as the KR left the facility just ahead of the Vietnamese army. When the Vietnamese arrived they found these 14 people dead in their cells in the A building of the prison. While these rooms have been cleaned, they have all of the items in them - bed, manacles, sometimes a broom or bed pan, that were there when the prison was vacated. Each of these 14 rooms also has a photo of the individual killed in the room - a photo of their corpse as it was found, and - if they could find it - a photo of the individual from when they entered Tuol Sleng or from before the KR takeover. They are now buried in the courtyard.

The second building - B - was filled with communal cells, similar to those we saw at the Hanoi Hilton. In these cells, prisoners are all shackled or manacled (or sometimes both) to the same pole in the middle of the room. They share sleeping space, bathroom space, dining space. Guards usually keep them from talking. Along with showing one or two of these communal cell rooms, this building also held huge displays of the photos taken of each prisoner when they entered S-21, and showed the chair they sat on for these pictures. It reminded me of the chair you sit in at the eye doctor's... except it held your neck in the correct place, rather than your forehead, and looked like a torture device. They also had paintings of the most common torture techniques used by the KR, and had some of the implements in various corners of the rooms. In one room there was also a display of skulls, bones and clothing recovered from the S-21 Killing Fields - Choung Ek, which I will again, tell more about later.

Building C had the individual cells. One sign told about living conditions in these cells. Prisoners were not able to talk to each other, leave their cells, have exercise or yard time, may or may not have been able to relieve themselves in a pail, and showers consisted of a guard spraying down the cell with a hose once a week. The sign continued that the purpose of this "shower" was not to allow the prisoner to bathe, but rather to clean the cell, which tended to stink too much if this procedure was not performed. Some of the individual cells were made of brick, some of wood. Tuol Sleng at one point had been a high school, so these walls separating cells had been added later by the KR. As a result, some prisoners had no light or ventilation in their cells, except for the small amount able to filter in from the six inches or so left between the walls and the ceiling.  The floor above the cells had two museum exhibits.  One told the history of the Khmer Rouge, from Pre-Takeover to the body counts as of 2005.  The second had some stories of how various KR underlings went from leading a village or small group or a province to being held in Tuol Sleng.  These stories were all told by surviving relatives and the "biographies" they were forced to write as part of their confessions and torture in the prison. They had such high ideals; thought they were fighting for something good and noble.  I can only imagine the horror and disappointment they must have felt. 

The last building - D - had three floors.  The top floor was a viewing room for a documentary about S-21.  To be honest, I was too busy trying to not pass out from heat and stuffiness to remember much of the movie. The bottom floor had a photo exhibit put together by the museum and a Dutch (? - Western European anyway) journalist who visited Cambodia during the KR - one of the few Westerners allowed into the country after the takeover.  He said he put together this exhibit as a way to show what he and his colleagues had seen, what they had wanted to see, and what he now believed about what they were shown.  This group of journalists became western members of the Khmer Rouge's "propaganda machine" after this visit.  The one interviewed for this project said they were all Marxists and members of the local Socialist party.  They went into the visit with the idea that the KR represented a more perfect Maoist revolution.  And that was what they saw.  Everything that should have raised questions - where are the "new people", how much of this is staged, why are so many children working in factories, etc. - became a short-term imperfection that the KR planned to correct once the economy rebounded. The exhibit was bookended with comments from the journalist, which expressed his deep sorrow and disillusionment that have entered his life as a result of this visit and the truth of the KR.  I didn't visit the second floor.  I had had enough prison. 

The next week we all took a day or two to visit the International Tribunal that is currently prosecuting or conducting pre-trial chambers for five of the former KR leaders.  The first two days (the two I went to) were the beginning of the trial for the man who ran the S-21 prison - Duch.  Being at the tribunal was fascinating.  There was so much procedural hoopla that went on.  

... I'm going to need to finish this another day.  The hotel here in Siem Reap (where Angkor Wat is located!! Stoked!) seems to be wanting to shut down the internet and lobby for the night. 

To be continued...

"Go a-way! Go a-way!"

- Ajaan Rien, paraphrasing the first King of Siam

Two weekends ago, we packed up all of our belongings, tried really hard to make them all fit back into our suitcases (mostly everyone failed), and moved to the hostel located on CMU's campus - Uniserv. This move was necessitated by the lack of air-conditioning and over 95 degree weather that started a week or so before we left and should continue to rise until after we leave in April.

As soon as our luggage was safely in Uniserv storage, we headed out (all 12 of us from Coe and a group of five A-jaans from CMU) in two vans to survey the sites of Sukhothai and other ancient cities. The Dean of the Humanities - Ajaan Rien - was a tour guide before landing his cushy job at Maw-Chaw, so he was able to tell us all of these amazing (and sometimes not so amazing stories) about the places we were visiting. Some of the basics:

Before Thailand became Thailand, back in the 12th century or so (Europe's middle ages, he reminded us), the first Kingdom of Siam was founded, with it's capital in Sukhothai. Other related kingdoms include Ayudaya and Lanna. Both Ayudaya and Lanna were founded after Sukothai, and eventually Ayudaya became dominant. But Sukhothai was first, so it still maintains a lot of prestige (unlike Lanna, which is important to the Northern Thais and some Lao, but not really anyone else, apparently). While most of Sukhothai and its satellite cities - S... something and Pitsanulok, which I'm sure I misspelled, was burned down by the invading Burmese army during the Ayudaya period, the temples still remain. Why the temples you ask? Well - in Sukhothai, there were three classes of building - those for normal people, those for royalty, and the temples - and each of these classes were made with differing building materials. The Palace was built with teak wood, and normal buildings were made from bamboo and thatch, so they either were burned down by the Burmese, or decayed over time. The Temples on the other hand are special and were made of stone, dug from the ground - natalite... or latelite... something like that, so they're still standing.

Ajaan Rien told us how the French - the first Farang in Thailand - didn't believe the Thais when they said they dug the stone from the ground. It looks a lot like volcanic rock, and Thailand is mountainous, so the French said "No, you got that stone from the volcano." To which the Thais said "Silly farang. There are no volcanos in Thailand." Rather the stone is found 2-3 meters below the ground soil. When it is in the ground, it is somewhat clay like and a little pliable, allowing blocks to be cut out. Once above ground they bake and harden in the sun and then are solid as other rocks and used to build temples.

There is a lot of Khmer (Cambodian) and Chinese influence in the architecture of the time. These two groups both worked to influence, and in the case of the Khmer, control the area. As an act of defiance against the Khmer, the later buildings are almost all in a pseudo-Chinese style, called Sukhothai style. This creativity in architecture and decoration was meant to show that the Thai kingdom was separate and independent from the Khmer kingdom, similar to the Declaration of Independence, but minus the Revolutionary War. Apparently the Khmer didn't care about North/Central Thailand that much.

In Sukhothai we saw what is supposed to be the most beautiful image of the walking Buddha. It was pretty nice; huge too. But as we biked around the park containing all the Sukhothai ruins, Patrica, Emily, Holly and I found one that we decided was more beautiful. It was smaller, much more graceful and actually caught the movement of "walking," unlike the big one, which just looked like Buddha standing. The four of us also sneaked off the beaten path to a quiet corner, found an empty pedestal (you'd be surprised how easy that was!) and formed the group of us into our own huge "subduing Mara" (evil, the devil) Buddha. Then P, E, and H posed as the Holy Family, to ensure we were equal-opportunity blasphemers.

Just outside the old city of Sukhothai, we saw the biggest Buddha image in Thailand (maybe anywhere?). If I had been standing on its pedestal, Buddha's knee (as he sits crosslegged, lotus-style) would have hit right around my upper arm or shoulder. We're talking gi-normous Buddha. Gi-normous Buddha is known in Thai as the Talking Buddha, and not because his pose is of Buddha giving a sermon or anything. No, Buddha's just doing his usual thing - Subduing Mara. The story of the talking Buddha is my favorite from the trip, and goes a little something like this:
One day, the Burmese army comes invading - as the Burmese army is wont to do according to Thai history. (I'm pretty sure if they taught history in Burma/Myanmar, they would say the same about the Thais, but since they don't (which is another post entirely), who can say?) And the King (I believe it is the king of Ayudaya at this point, but don't quote that), he's having none of this "invading, burning everything down and taking all your land" business, so he runs ahead of his troops and tries to cut the Burmese army off before they can burn down Sukhothai. The King thinks to himself, "Hey, the Burmese army isn't going to listen to my plea, so how else can I get them to leave us alone?" Then he finds himself at the gi-normous Buddha, and decided that perhaps the Burmese would listen to an order from Lord Buddha himself. So, the industrious King scrambles behind the gi-normous Buddha (supposedly seconds before the Burmese would have seen him, if Ajaan Rien's retelling is to be believed), and starts bellowing "Go a-way! Go a-way! Leave! Leave!" The Burmese army is reluctant to attack in the face of a giant, "talking" Buddha telling them to scat, so they peace out and live to pillage another day.

Isn't that great?! I love it.

Another fun moment was when Ajaan Rien was explaining why the windows in the temple were so small and narrow - "We Thai people were not so good at maths" was the inital response. When that warranted blank looks, he explained more thoroughly, that they hadn't discovered how to build larger windows and hold the roof up at the same time - much like medieval castles in Europe. The phenomenon had never been put to us in that fashion before, and it caught us off-guard.

When not touring ancient ruins, we ate a lot of Northern Thai food, drove a lot, and spent a ton of time in hotel swimming pools (usually playing chicken). The weather that weekend was wicked hot (forecasted over 110) and you would drip just from being outside, so the pool was really the only place to be.

Returning to Chiang Mai and Uniserv we discovered the main drawback to moving - less internet, which is why the posting has fallen completely off the band wagon. One project for the week - Get caught up before we leave for Vietnam. :)