(Another Travelogue)
Cambodia is one of those countries where the unspeakable, the unimaginable, the most despicable of acts of genocide since WWII were perpetrated against a peaceful and spiritual community, and where Australia now pays to case manage our so-called illegal boat people.
Politics is a dirty business and the dirty business goes on more than two decades after a few million people disappeared off the face of the earth. Everywhere you go in Cambodia you are faced with grinding poverty, entrenched corruption, continually changing political allegiances, and a Royal family that despite being descendants of a long line of apolitical ancestors has managed to lurch conveniently from the extreme left where the concept of royalty or class doesn’t exist to the extreme right where royalty determines every persons life in their very vertically structured class system. Cambodia is still ruled by a chain-smoking puppet of Vietnam, it has never known in the last half decade any leader but a foreigner brought in to continue with a virtual one-party state controlled from Hanoi.
For those of us who are Monty Python followers people of power, and subsequently the ones with all the money, are easily recognised on the streets of Pnom Penn, ‘ they are the only ones not covered in shit’
Pol Pot wiped out the value of the currency by simply burning it all, wiped out any evidence of ownership by burning it all, destroyed as much as he could of the religious institutions as well as their temples, imprisoned anyone who could read and murdered anyone who could write as well. Impossible rules were put in place whereby anything but ‘Yes’ meant a death sentence. You are a reactionary? Yes! You like this government? Yes! You love being tortured? Yes! The Killing Fields are highly productive and lucrative? Yes!
The only things that appear to have remained untouched were Ankor Wat because it was so huge they couldn’t blow it up, the Golden Pagoda because it would upset the King, and Royal Cambodja Airlines because flying was the only way the Khmer Rouge could travel around the country.
Even when I visited more than 25 years after the genocide and Pol Pot was languishing in Hell, driving down a suburban street could be done no faster than 5Km an hour so that one didn’t end up with whiplash from the jazz-beat jolting in and out of the potholes. In fact the only way shopkeepers could get customers was to constantly be running out and filling the potholes with little rocks to smooth out the road in front of their business.
Half the foreign aid going into Cambodia goes straight into the pockets of the ruling elite, politicians and military leaders. This of course includes anything we pay to them to take these bloody boat people.
The dilemma faced by foreign aid workers is to either allow this situation to continue or stop the aid and see most of the population starve to death. The ruling elite seem also to be the only ones that have a house, when those who were still alive returned to the cities it was first in first served and anything that still had a roof was closely guarded by armed soldiers reserving it for the next up in rank.
Pol Pot’s concept of returning Cambodia to its rural roots and thus to its glorious past was a reasonable concept, to rid the country of everything that was decadent as a means of introducing social equality, strip the country of its shameful colonial past and its capitalist future, in effect to start all over again with ‘Year Zero’, may have been philosophically palatable but totally destructive. It was the way in which he plunged the country back into the Stone Age where bumping off anyone who didn’t belong to your tribe or religion was considered an acceptable, practical and honourable thing to do. Very cleansing and remarkably similar to what the Islamic fundamentalists are trying to do to each other today.
To get to the real point of the story. How are we going to solve the social problems without the radical practice of the moral genocide of our young people? Half the government funding into welfare goes straight into the pockets of the ruling bureaucrats and the social services elite both in non-government and private agencies.
The dilemma faced by dedicated and useful welfare workers is to either allow this situation to continue or stop the money and see most of the population of unemployable young people drug themselves to death. The ruling elite hand down unrealistic dictates according to this theorist or that child psychologist which chew up resources, like the robber barons of the faux-employment training industry.
When we are working with young people who we feel are totally out of wack with normal behaviour, whose practices are socially unacceptable we can’t use the ‘Year Zero’ approach of going back and rebuilding their life from scratch. The damage has already been done. The Buddhist concept of the Willow bending with the wind until the storm passes and then continuing to grow is perhaps a lesson that we might all need to learn.
Can we not accept drug use, prostitution and violence as being part of many an adolescent psyche instead of obstinately sticking to our guns and our own out-dated moral values. Perhaps bending with the whirlwind created by damaged youth and hang in until the storm passes and their energy is sapped before quietly and patiently redirecting their energy into more productive outcomes may be the better option for the community as a whole.
In Cambodia you have a choice of right and left hand drive cars depending on what neighbouring country they were imported from. Should we not have a similar right and left hand concept of working with young people depending from where they have come from?
Do we wipe out their currency, the means by which they survive? Should we burn all their baggage and pretend it didn’t exist in an effort to begin rebuilding again. The Year Zero concept is to expunge them from our thoughts, to not deal with their problems until they become more compliant to our case management principles.
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